Is Tropical Smoothie Healthy?

I noticed recently that my gym had a brochure holder that was filled with flyers from the Tropical Smoothie Café place right next door. I had never eaten at one and the tagline “Eat Better, Feel Better” made the place give off a seriously healthy vibe so I decided to check it out after I finished my workout.

After looking over the menu and seeing the suspiciously generous portions in front of the other customers I decided to check out the nutritional information online first – you know, to answer the question “Is it actually healthy to eat there?”

Hey, I relish bad-for-you food just as much as the next guy (probably more) but that’s when I know for a fact that what I am eating is unhealthy. I mean, Pizza Hut is not the one posting flyers next to the elliptical machines - kinda-sorta-but-not-quite implying that eating a whole Meat Lover’s Pizza has practically the same benefits as, say, doing fifty sit-ups.

Like most things, as tedious and nearly defeating as it seems, “healthy” is a fuzzy, hard-to-define term. It turns out that “fat content”, “recommended daily allowances”, and “serving sizes” are also phrases that are hugely open to (mis)interpretation. It is very difficult, even using the dot-gov sites out there, to get a black-or-white, one-or-zero, yes-or-no answer to many health-related questions because, after all, every person is a uniquely beautiful freaking snowflake.

For example, if you are an adult you need between 25% and 35% (a HUGE window) of your daily intake to be “fat”. Too much and you start poisoning yourself, and too little and you risk not getting enough stuff like Vitamin E in your system. Oh, hey, but it can just be any old fat – trans fats are right out, and the remainder can be further divided and subdivided into “good” and “bad” (depending on context, body type, age, etc.) until there is really no such thing as either category anymore.

Any sort of global analysis into what is good for you or what is bad for you can be flipped upside-down tomorrow by the next big “discovery”: “STRAWBERRIES CAUSE AUTISM, CURE PROSTATE CANCER IN OBESE MICE”. Joanne Graduate Student gets her Master’s in “Super-Scientific Marginally-Useful But Important-Sounding Biological Hoo-ha and Funding Hustling”, the New York Times gets its headline for its Health section, and you get more confused than ever.

Well, screw it. The first stake has to be driven into the ground somewhere. Here are my assumptions, constraints, and definitions for this “study”.

1. You are forced to grab a sandwich (or equivalent) from one of the following places: Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy’s, or Tropical Smoothie Café. I chose these specifically because I drive by them every day, making them my “fast food options”.
2. You can only order one thing off the menu – no drinks or sides.
3. The 25% to 35% fat thing is too fuzzy because it implies “Well, maybe 40% or 41% isn’t so bad…” and down the slippery slope you go. I am using the USDA implied 30% as my baseline. Above that line is “bad” and below it is “good”.
4. Lower calorie food is better than higher calorie food, and lower fat food is better than higher fat food. The closer you are to “zero calories, zero fat” the better. I know it would be fatal to follow that “guideline” – it is just a convenient metric. If it bothers you, consider using the titles “Guilty Calories” and “Guilty Fat”, the goal being to reduce how bad you should feel indulging in a fast food item.
5. Expanding on Number 4, since we are interested in how far away we are from “zero calories, zero fat” there are some instances where a fattier choice might actually be “healthier” for you because it has less calories, and vice versa. It’s a math thing.
6. The USDA recommends 2,000 calories a day for an average adult. I won’t get into rolling my eyes over that right now, but that implies that 670 calories or so makes a “meal”, assuming “three squares a day” is a good thing.
7. A gram of fat is nine calories. At least, that’s what “the Google” thinks. The various nutritional information guides from the fast-food places seem to vary by up to 20% on that value…
8. I am not trying to measure “deliciousness” or “fullness” here. Some menu items might be the perfect amalgam of “tasty” and “deadly” while some others might be as satisfying to eat as a shot glass full of shredded cardboard.
9. I am using data from the online nutritional information that each of these places puts on their websites. Any mistakes or typos are my own, probably. If you see one, let me know and I will fix it if possible, although I doubt that the general trend will be disturbed.

Enough chit-chat. Here’s the graph. Click to enlarge.

Each fast-food place had about twenty items that could be considered a “wrap” or a “sandwich” that were in their main menus (no kids items were used). Only the “best” items (closest to the origin) and “worst” items (furthest from origin) are labeled. We are looking for general trends, here, not trying to promote or indict a specific menu item. You can find all the nutritional data online (or send me an email and I will eventually send you the raw data).

One green shaded area highlights all foods that are lower than 30% fat and the other highlights things that are under one meal’s worth of calories. The red area highlights the choices that are above both of these limits. All fast food places had at least one item in this “Rectangle of Shame”, but only Burger King had no choices at all in the dark green area of the graph. McDonald’s, whose name is typically used as a pejorative when describing stuff that is the prime standard for bad food, is, surprisingly, not all that horrible.

The ellipses enclose all of the choices available in as small of an area as possible (free-hand), giving you an idea of the variability in the menu items. Furthermore, the locations of the diamonds represent the averages of each of the corresponding fast food places where the size of the diamond is proportional to how the menu items cluster around that average (the standard deviation for you math types). Basically, the smaller the ellipse and the smaller the diamond, the tighter the menu items conform to the company standard.

Getting back to the original question “Is Tropical Smoothie healthy?” we see that the average sandwich or wrap from them has about 560 calories and is 30% fat. Shockingly, this is a higher calorie content than the average of all the menu items of all four places. In case you are wondering, their Ultimate Club represents this average the best, coming in at 560 calories and 28% fat. About half of their menu items fall in the dark green rectangle we are calling “healthy” and only one item falls in the red area you are probably better off avoiding altogether.

So the answer seems to be “Yes”. I would have a much higher probability of randomly choosing something off their main sandwich menu that is healthier than any of the other fast-food choices. Cool.

Of course, with my choice of a Cranberry Walnut Chicken Salad Bistro Sandwich with cheddar and honey mustard dressing, a Peanut Paradise smoothie to drink, a bag of chips for a side and a cookie for dessert, I could easily blow through all of my government allotted calories in a single meal…

Say, that sounds delicious... I'll do an additional five miles on the treadmill tomorrow to make up for it, I swear.