Something’s gotta give with this low-cal and alleged no-cal artificial food.
Usually, it’s our bowels.
Sometimes it’s just the obv fact about their non-fact advertising.
I mean, while stuff like this may hold true…
… it still took me a bit to realize the duh factor about the lie of zero calorie claims.
And make my own dietary annotations to info I was told:
For example, I lived on “no calorie” crap like Coke zero for a good while in college – a fantastic supplement once my Stacker tolerance began kicking in. I’m not sure why I kept punishing myself with a life punctuated by frequent restroom trips. It was like colon clockwork, that stuff. Every lecture, I’d end up suffering a plight like the comeuppance of a villainous soon-to-be-ex boyfriend in every other romcom (see: Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, The Other Woman) and hafta leave class.
TMI? Fantastic. Then we’re off to an epic start for Monday.
Less epic, looking back, was that later life-realization that my weight loss efforts were in vain. Not the good kinda vain that makes you leave the house looking like a young Kim Novak, either. I mean the kind of vain where not only are you vomiting out of the wrong end – and it’s to NO end because they lie when they say “zero” calorie on this tooth-staining crap. And legally they’re allowed to. Indeed, mislabeling something as zero is okay if it has no more than five calories. At first it kind of made me want to get gussied up in my Stepford best, hold a meeting with whoever made this rule, and ask:
“What’s the difference between zero and five …
…stab wounds?”
But as I furthered my biology career, I started to have that “should’ve known better” mentality creep over me. It was that old familiar embarrassment about having been duped by ads just as badly with coke as I’d been with cosmetics all my life.
And advertising isn’t solely to blame for this misconception.
Some are just old wives tales you’ll here from friends in high school that stick with you your whole life despite that part of your brain constantly saying, “That can’t be right… can it?” Take, for instance, the “negative calorie” myth about celery. Is it low calorie? Yes. Is it good as fckk for you? Absolutely. Does your body burn more calories processing it than it retains?
No.
No.It.Does.Not.
Even the healthy green guys get us – they don’t just melt into the watery body abyss.
(Dude, I had to look up and see if Wicked Witch and Mommy Dearest were the same person)
‘cause it’s still a net of about 5 cals per stick or stalk or whatever the hell they’re called.
But that just makes them “wicked” good – especially celery – because it’s high in fiber. Now there’s something – fiber – that doesn’t have calories in it in and of itself. But that’s only because we don’t really digest it. When it magic school buses into your system, it’s with the goal of playing pied piper to your cow pies till they reach the final destination of a drowny porcelain death. (Or a pile of detritus, mayhaps, if you’re Mick Dodge style livin’ it up in the woods). I’m too lazy to review what happens with the rats at the end of the fairy tale. But in your human happily-ever-after, the fiber piper dies along with his colonic cult. ‘cause your body doesn’t digest it – just whatever was around it.
And, I probably could have used a bit more of that fibrous celery in my Coke zero days (although with my then diet, I’d probably have just gotten excited because I would have mistaken it for the longitudinal cross section of an oversized Starbucks straw that meant they were now selling bubble tea).
But, to be fair, I can see how Coca Cola gets away with their mislabeling.
Ya see, I call it the “poophole loophole”.
For one, that “zero” could technically be read as more of a “T minus 0” second warning – the precise time you have to reach the loo before being blasted off into oblivion by your own fecal fuel eruption. Secondly – the calorie count could be more of a “net” thing. Like, mayhaps it wasn’t calorie free going in. But it definitely does a negative dip when you shiz that fizzy drink out.
Along with yesterday’s breakfast.
And your entire intact skeleton.
Sooo glad I prepare f’real food now with good cals so I’ve got actual energy to use ‘em, not avoid ‘em.
…most of the time.