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.

La Nova Wings Delivery

I blew off going to the gym after work today to see if my La Nova wings made it here safely from their trip from Buffalo.  The box on the porch appeared undamaged and was very cold to the touch, so all signs were pointing to "YES".  Sweet.

Here is the shipping box containing my five pounds of wings.

My new DayGlo yellow/green t-shirt, guaranteed to violate the living hell out of the dress code of absolutely anywhere at all.  It is very comfortable, but my wife won't let me even wear it around the house.  What a gyp.

One of the two bags that came in the shipping cooler, along with a whole mess of...

...dry ice!  Huge chunks of it were left over from the overnight shipping process.  Awesome!  I played around with the leftover frozen CO2 while I waited for my wings to heat up in the freezer (you read that right) before I could cook them.

So far I have had 15 of the wings -the rest need to be saved for the nearly-twenty people that are stopping by for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day meals.  They are very, very good.  Not bland, not too spicy, and, as far as I can remember, better than anything I have ever had in this area  Good sized pieces and good distribution of wings and legs.  They heat up well in the microwave, too.

Well, so far in my quest to re-capture a taste of home, I have gotten Mighty Taco burritos, sponge candy, Vernor's Ginger Ale, and now La Nova wings.  Now I need to figure out a way to have shipped a milkshake from Reid's and a fish fry dinner from the UAW hall (both in Lockport) and I may never actually need to visit the area ever again.

Until the afternoon of April 8th, 2024, that is.  See you then.

Whatcha Doooin'?

The hall bathroom is complete and is ready for our Christmas visitors - man, I am glad that is over.  This will be known to me as "The Project That Broke All My Tools".  In the pic on the left you see all the tools that gave their lives to make the new bathroom happen. My Craftsman Radial Arm Saw (broken table adjustment knob), Skil Angle Grinder (broken on/off switch), Industrial power drill (old, frayed, dangerous cord), and even my Roomba Dirtdog (broken internal gears) are all going to live on a farm with a kindly old couple after Christmas, I am told.

I finished all of the Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and final challenges in Kinect Adventures.  While playing these games, I swear I heard the ghosts of a hundred billion badly abused Marios and Sonics chuckling mirthlessly as I tried and failed to hop cliffs or dodge things: "Not so easy to jump the 200 foot ravine, is it?   Ohhh.... Poor baby... Did you miss the cloud jewels again? Boo freaking hoo. Come talk to me when you get dipped in lava after some kid forces you to misjudge the leap over the spinny fireball things for the 50th time..."

Finished Griftopia by Matt Taibbi.  Although I loved the well-thought-out anger and outrage, it was pretty obvious about halfway through the book the author was not going to present any sort of suggestions or solutions to the perceived mess the USA is in, which made the ranting a little tedious – after a while I was like “Jeez, dude, pick up your own pitchfork, I'm busy.” The writing style is overall solid, he doesn't appear to "pick sides" in the traditional political sense, and Chapter 2 gets my vote for "Most Awesomely Named Chapter Ever in a Non-fiction Book".  Look it up.

Some random closer info:

I bought some Stride Mega Mystery Gum.  First off, Stride, did you really need to trademark the term "Mega Mystery"?  Just calm down, for crissakes.  Second, my guess on the mystery flavor is "grapefruit with a hint of pinecone".

Placed my order with La Nova to get some wings shipped here from Buffalo - they should be here Wednesday.  The Mighty Taco burritos were pricey-but-totally-worth-it, sure, as was (is? were?) the three pounds of sponge candy.  The Vernors Ginger Ale was another taste of home I was glad to find.  Will the five pounds of La Nova Wings be worth $1.38 apiece?  Stay tuned!

Rumor has it that we will be getting Dance Central for Christmas. My wife was horrified that I did so much better than her in the demo when I am, at best, a pathetic embarrassment on the dance floor. What she forgets is that my career path since high school has more than adequately prepared me to instantly follow ridiculous orders from a wide variety of two-dimensional masters so this game is pretty much business as usual for me. Since she cherishes her “dignity” and “independent thought”, being commanded to break into “the Running Man” (or whatever) at the spur of the moment causes her enough pause to drop points. Victory is sort of mine!

200 Years

 I recently watched a video that sums up the past 200 years of worldwide socio-economic changes in about five minutes.  Sounds like a real snoozefest, right?  Wrong.  Check it out for yourself below.

I was completely blown away by the elegance of the presentation, and, in any case, I am a real sucker for long-term metrics like this.

Speaking of which, Google has come out with something called Google n-Grams which graphs trends in the written frequency of words or combinations of words over the past 200 years.  You can get a sense for how important a topic is/was (to the literate folks who were fortunate/rich/powerful enough to get published, anyway) by searching the database for keywords.  Some of my searches are below:

The Eternal Struggle

It looks like "good" has been on the decline for the past couple of centuries, but is still way ahead of "evil". Similar trends pop up with "angel vs. demon" and "God vs. Satan" with similar upswings for the good guys in the 1980s after a long drop.

Science vs. Religion - Fight!

It looks like science reached parity with religion somewhere around 1920 and has been in the lead ever since.  Go science!  I knew the invention of the tommy-gun would push us over the top!

Meek, Schmeek!

More interesting than the fact that "eye for an eye" has consistently been ahead of "turn the other cheek" are the weird spikes every 70 or 80 years.  We should be due any minute now...

You can also do more than two comparisons at a time like in the examples below:

The Chumbawamba Index

The New York Index

Here is what the search for "Y2K" looks like.  Notice the bump in the 1950s and 1980s.  Weird.

Unless... Kind of suspicious that the bumps somewhat line up, eh, Doc Brown?

I look forward to wasting huge swaths of time looking for meaningless correlations in the future.  Enjoy!

Random Post Redux

Not enough happening to write a big ol' post about. Here's a bunch of mini topics for you, though.  Enjoy!

An inch and a half of snow slash rain fell on the area today, shutting down where I work and shutting my son's daycare. My wife and I had the foresight to carpool this morning so we all came home around noon seeing many, many wrecked vehicles and even one upside-down truck along the way.

After I shoveled and salted, we fired up the wood-burning stove, got out the Christmas gifts, and, while the boy napped, we wrapped.

We ate about one-half a pound of the three pounds of sponge candy we had imported from Western New York.  You can go to http://www.spongecandy.com/ to get your own delivered right to your doorstep from an awesome little candy shop in Buffalo.

The bathroom renovation is nearly done - only the detail work is left.  Yep, nothing like a room renovation to angry up the blood and engender utter hate toward the lazy %$#@ that lived in the house before you.  No five-cent drywall anchor?  You just glued the shower curtain holder to the wall, then?  Well done...

I guess I'll end this one with a hint for one of the unsolved puzzles...  Let's make it for the Pallet Table:

Hint 2 (Posted 12/16/10): Gur jbeq "gernfher" vf va gur fbyhgvba.

Just shift the letters in the hint by 13 to decipher the clue or copy and paste the hint here.  You can go to the Secret Puzzle Hints Page to see all the hints for the Unsolved Puzzles.  Good Luck!

Answers Some Questions, Begs Way More

Maybe putting the Nativity scene in the playroom was not as well thought out an idea as it looked on paper...

Well, I Guess I'll Go Get Some Coffee...

Man, this is gonna take almost as long to copy as my text file listing all the reasons I hate my Prius...

Wow! A Big, Round Number!

I saw this sign when I was filling up my tank and thought “700 million gallons a year, eh? Sounds like a big deal. I wonder if it really is.”

Let’s do a few “back of the envelope” calculations and see what we get.

First off, let’s try to get a feel for how much “stuff” 700 million gallons of gas is. It would fill more than 2 Houston Astrodomes, 42 Spaceship Earths at the Epcot Center, or an average twelve-mile stretch of the Erie Barge Canal.

700,000,000 gallons would weigh as much as nearly six Empire State Buildings, it would take a full 15 minutes to flow all of this fuel over Niagara Falls, and It would cost about two billion dollars to buy this much gas at an average gas station (assuming you had the 190 years it would take to “fill ‘er up” at an average pump).

[Insert impressed whistle here] Sure does sound like whole big bunches… Let’s look at some more numbers, though.

WolframAlpha (always with the WolframAlpha, this guy… :)) says that there are 254.4 million registered vehicles out there.

The USDOT and other sources say that these cars drove about three trillion miles altogether last year, so everyone seems to drive about 11,800 miles annually. Meh, sounds low. 12k-15k seems to be the range using various sources out there, but it is in the ballpark.

Assuming everyone’s tires are equally deflated (so everyone shares blame) each car wastes 2.75 gallons per year. Since the average fuel efficiency for these vehicles is around 25 miles per gallon, these cars “lose” 68.8 miles of driving potential each year. I can only assume people unconsciously budget for more gas to cover this loss rather than shrug their shoulders and stay home or hoof it for the rest of the year when their tank goes dry on December 28th or so…

68.8 miles is about 0.6% of the distance the average person drives (or, in other words, is the hit their fuel economy takes) each year. According to the fueleconomy.gov website “Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.3 percent for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires”. Ok. This implies that everyone’s tires are, on average, two pounds low, or about seven percent.

Hmmm. This is sounding less and less like a big deal, but, I am a worrier so let’s see if maybe there is something I can do about this apparent epidemic that needed to be brought to my attention in bright yellow 100-point font.

Let me whip out my tire gauge and just… Wait. How accurate is this thing, anyway? If I am going to be able to help save gas I need a reasonably precise measurement of how much air is in my tires. According to this Edmunds site, the very best you can realistically expect from your average (mechanical) pressure gauge is +/- 2 pounds from true, which totally swamps the estimated underinflation you are looking for.

But it gets better. The temperature in an average American city typically fluctuates about 20F degrees over the course of a day. According to tiretrack, a good rule of thumb is that tire pressure will vary about 1 pound per 10F degrees, so that’s another two-pound delta right there.

Of course, the temperature of your tires (and, therefore, the pressure) increases as the rolling friction from driving heats them up. The temperature of the road you are driving on and whether it is wet or dry matters, too.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a hyper-accurate pressure gauge and you are measuring your tire pressure in your hermetically sealed, temperature controlled garage just before you drive the car anywhere. How often should you measure your tires to save money?

Well, as of the writing of this post, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline is $2.88, meaning that you waste about eight dollars per year due to your shameful, shameful negligence of your tire pressure. Let’s say that your name is Joe Q. Pitcrew and it takes you three minutes to check and correct all four tires on your car. If you check it every day, you will have spent 18.25 hours over the course of a year fiddling around like this.

Since we are playing with averages, here, the mean wage for a worker in the USA is $43,460 per year, making the average person’s time “worth” $20.89 per hour. Checking your tires every day, then, could be seen as costing you $381.24 (in time) per year! To break even, assuming your tire gauge and air compressor usage are both free, the most often you should check your tires (assuming the very act of checking magically puts them in stasis until the next time you check) is about 7 or 8 times a year, or about every month and a half.

Seven or eight times a year seems reasonable – high, but not excessive. To tell you the truth, though, I am probably just going to continue with my time-tested method of “sometimes-noticing-that-one-of-my-tires-seems-low-if-I-happen-to-be-approaching-the-car-from-that-direction-and-I-am-not-distracted-by-anything-else”.

To be clear, I am not advocating driving around on your rims all grindy and sparky and stuff. I am just saying that ExxonMobil probably should have taken the money they spent on advertising just how much they care about my tires (and, by extension, Planet Earth, I guess) and donated it to charity or lowered the price of gas a smidge or something.

Just sayin'.

What is This?

This is a screen shot from an old-school arcade game I remember from decades ago. 

Can you guess what it is?

Bathroom Project (Part III)

(Continued from Part II)

For those of you who don’t like long posts, you are in luck! The other two I posted today are relatively short – just a few paragraphs and located conveniently just below and just above this one. If the sight of lots of words, though, makes you sad but you are still curious about what this article is about here’s the summary: I painted the bathroom. It is blue. Now you can go – the squirrels aren’t going to chase themselves, after all. Oh, wait. They do… Well, I’m sure you will make yourself useful somehow…

Still on the fence whether you should read on or not? Here’s a little more: The walls were painted three times this week. Call me Mr. “Princess and the Pea”, but I actually feel a little claustrophobic walking into the room now that the already small bathroom is now six paint layers narrower…

Enough summaries. Just read.

My wife is getting herself a gift for Christmas: a court order preventing me from ever again picking colors for the walls of our house. I suppose I could complain but she is totally right. It’s really for my own good and the good of society.

As part of the Bathroom Renovation Project the walls needed to be painted. We were not looking for a drastic change – just something to freshen up the vertical surfaces a bit. That’s all.

I took a piece of old trim that had some of the old color on it to Lowe’s to match it with the Valspar paint cards. Drunk with the power of actually being allowed to make a decision that affects the building where I sleep and store my stuff, I picked a “blue” that was not too different from the paint drip on the trim piece.

I have often read that human eyes are non-linear light sensors and that colors are perceived slightly differently based on biology and sociology. It would be awesome if either of those facts could give me the slightest bit of comfort rather than just take up brain space that could be otherwise used to, say, store a useful skill like matching two colors, just to pick something randomly out of thin air…

The dried paint dot on the can lid perfectly matched the sample card which matched my (in retrospect delusional) preconceptions of how the color should look on the wall. Awesome. Time to go home and paint.

Now would be a good time to interject that anything I say should not be seen as an indictment of Valspar, their paints, or their unexpectedly involved public relations officers. Anyone still hanging in there after eight or so paragraphs should know that any and all negative descriptors used in this article reflect solely on me and my painting skills. The cans of interior latex house paint and the company that makes them are completely innocent.

“Hmm… that sure is… blue…” I thought, opening the can. “Maybe it will look a lot different on the wall after it dries and darkens a bit.”

Umm, no. Not really. I mean, it’s good quality paint, but it is not, like, magical or anything. There are probably places that this shade of blue looks good in but my hall bathroom is not one of them.

How to describe the color… Hmm… Well, although the hue did not match any of the other blue accents in the room like the shower curtain or the picture frames, it perfectly matched the extruded plastic insert in my son’s port-a-potty. The color reminded me of the startling blue arc flash you briefly see when the filament in an incandescent light bulb suddenly pops. I suppose if a bunch of bank robbers ran in, taped up and tarped the bathroom really carefully, then simultaneously opened their loot bags with the explosive blue dye canisters in them, you would get an idea of what it looked like.

My wife called it “Carnival Blue” – a phrase that somehow boils the above paragraph down into just two words without minimizing the off-putting nature of how it felt to be surrounded by the color.

As much as I didn’t want to redo the room, the color had to go.

So, rather than entering the bathroom in the little-known Better Homes and Gardens contest for “Least Relaxing Place in Which to Evacuate Your Bowels” I decided to repaint it. Obviously, I wasn’t allowed to pick the paint by myself this time - my wife took my hand and gently led me to the color cards that did not induce vomiting or retinal bleeding.

But I stood up for myself and I got to pick the texture. Victory, thy name is Eggshell…

It took two coats of “Kinda North Carolina Tar Heels” blue to cover the “Chinese Knockoff Duke Blue Devils” blue, but it is done. The lights, paintings, switch covers and mirror are all back up. All that remains now is reconditioning and installation the baseboards, adding trim and moulding, installing the new shower head, cutting and re-mounting the closet door, changing out the towel racks, changing doorknobs and hinges, re-painting the heater vent, and adding stone tiles above the tub.

Pfft. It’s practically like I’m on vacation!

(To be continued…)