What's for lunch 4/11/13

Souvlaki Plate

Marinated Chicken with Sweet Peppers & Onions on a Warm Whole Wheat Pita Tzatziki Sauce

Greek Salad

 Fresh Fruit 

GF when taken without pita

I am not quite sure of the ingredients in the dish but I know it is a hit at the MS.  The chicken is Tyson  .  The chicken is some kind of frozen Tyson product. I believe it is supposed to be Tyson's "dark meat strips with grill marks" which have 7g of fat and 340mg of sodium, Ingredients are: Boneless, skinless chicken leg meat, water, seasoning (dextrose, salt, brown sugar, chicken stock, maltodextrin, flavors, yeast extract, molasses, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate), soy protein concentrate, modified food starch, sodium phosphates.BUT we have also gotten diced chicken breast for both Tyson and a company called Pierce before. AND we have also gotten a  USDA commodity chicken from Tyson and described as "fully cooked boneless skinless chicken dark meat chicken fajita strips -smoke flavor added." Here are the ingredients: "Chicken dark meat, water, seasoning [salt, spices, dehydrated garlic, dehydrated onion, sugar, chili powder (chili pepper, cumin, oregano, salt, garlic powder), lemon juice powder (corn syrup solids, lemon juice, lemon oil), modified corn starch, natural mesquite smoke flavor (maltodextrin, natural smoke flavor), natural flavor (from partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil)], modified food starch and sodium phosphates."  The "partially hydrogenated" oil is a source of trans fat.  Chicken has 7g of fat (2 of which are saturated) and 490 mg of sodium.  Read more about farm animals raised by industrial giants like Tyson, antibiotics and hormones. 

The peppers and onions are fresh but not organic. The tzatziki sauce is home made. The greek salad is fresh. I believe the pita is whole wheat. GF if taken without the pita. 

On another note, did anyone read the long article in the NY Times magazine "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food " ? It was pretty long but very informative. Read the synopsis below. 

Why You Can't Stop Eating Cheetos

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine delves into the science of junk-food craving.By Emily Elert

Posted 02.26.2013 at 11:30 am5 Comments

Betcha Can't Eat Just One Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, food scientist Steven Witherly describes Cheetos as "one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure."

The cheese puffs' greatest quality, Witherly says in the article, is its ability to melt in your mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density...If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it...you can just keep eating it forever.”

This deception, writer Michael Moss tells us, isn't accidental: snack food companies do a lot of research in order to design foods that fool your mind and bewitch your taste buds into a constant state of craving--a state industry insiders call "the bliss point." To achieve this "bliss point," Moss writes, food designers pay close attention to something called “sensory-specific satiety.”

"In lay terms," Moss says, sensory-specific satiety "is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more." To avoid this, successful junk food products like Coca-Cola and Doritos consist of "complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating."

The problem, of course, is that eating a lot of junk food has consequences. The act of eating Cheetos may be purely pleasurable, but the feeling you get when you realize you've just eaten an entire bag of cheesy orange puffs is less so.

And that's just the short-short-term: though Moss doesn't say how much the junk food industry may contribute to obesity today, it's clear that America has an obesity problem, and that problem has grown with the rise of the industry: Over the last three decades, obesity rates among American adults have more than doubled, from 15 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2010. During the same period, rates of obesity among elementary-school-age kids and teenagers have risen even more sharply, from about 5 percent to 6 percent to more than 18 percent.

A long-term study of the weight and eating habits of 120,877 men and women in 2011 found that the biggest weight-inducing food was the potato chip:

The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food.