Food Misconceptions

So this weekend past I was on military duty. It was a great weekend of camaraderie and soldier development, I really did enjoy it thoroughly. Saturday morning some of the leadership came in with two large sacks, one filled with beautiful glazed doughnuts, the other with bagels and schmere.

I wasn’t particularly hungry but we all descended on the bags like hyenas on the hunt. While standing in the gaggle, grabbing at the food, several of my compatriots made a series of interesting statments, all of which boiled down to: Avoid the doughnuts, take a bagel, lets be healthy. This got me thinking:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/baked-products/4818/2

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/foods-from-krispy-kreme/6689/2

http://nutritiondata.self.com/tools/compare/comparison-analysis

The above links are from an absolutely awesome site called “nutritiondata”. They breakdown foods into they micro categories and give you information you would never, ever really need, but its nice to have. The third link is a side by side comparison of bagels to doughnuts.

So I looked up “plain bagel” and “glazed doughnut”. There were obviously dozens of varieties, but I aimed to be as generic as possible. My results were… humorous to me. Fact of the matter is, depending on of course what you define as “healthy” and what your particular vices and such are, there is FAR less difference between a bagel and a doughnut than you would assume.

Please don’t think I’m saying the two are the same. They arent. Doughnuts have more fat. Bagels have WAY more carbs. Calorically speaking they are pretty similar. Fullness factor, glycemic index, all fairly similar. Bagels have more protein, yet doughnuts have more amino acids… Take a look at the charts. Explore the website. Check out what you are actually eating… it might be different than you think.