Is it just me, or did Covid make it far too easy to order takeaway? With almost every restaurant available on Deliveroo or Just-Eat, along with those who already have their own fleet of delivery motor scooters, we now see almost every type of food available at our fingertips, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, groceries, booze. You name it, and it can be at your door in 30-60 minutes!
Feeling tired? Stressed? Or just lazy after a hard day at work? Dial a steak! Or fish and chips! Or a delicious Indian takeaway. Or order booze to take the edge off!
Pre-Covid, I might eat out at a restaurant once a month, and order takeaway maybe once every month or two. It used to be a rare treat for me. But during Covid and since my use of Just-Eat has become a regular occurrence. And I can’t help but think there is a correlation, if not causation, between this and my current Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and high blood pressure (hypertension) joint diagnoses.
Now – before I dive into this just a disclaimer. I don’t usually count calories / nutritional content – but since the above diagnoses, I know there are certain guidelines I should think about. While I’ve already cut out alcohol and radically reduced my caffeine intake, for T2D both carbs and sugar also need to be managed. For hypertension, salt is the biggest issue.
So I’ve started using MyFitnessPal again. I don’t intend to use it for the long term – it’s really just to give me an idea over the first few weeks of what foods/meals that I regularly prepare for myself are “safe” and to ensure that nothing I’m eating regularly is taking me way over the limit in terms of daily carbs/sugars/salt.
So what sparked this post? Well, I’d been doing reasonably well last week with fasting/diet, and then I got to Saturday and really felt like I missed having a takeaway. Even though I’d ordered Chinese takeaway just over a week before as I had a friend visiting! So I decided to “treat” myself. This is a really bad mentality that I need to get away from. “Treating” myself should not mean “killing myself”. And that’s what I feel like I’ve done with a meal like this.
I have never really tracked nutritional values from restaurant meals – mainly because it’s hard to get accurate figures. While the law changed in the UK not long ago to demand that all restaurants over a certain size / income provide a menu with calories, this is hardly comprehensive – it doesn’t require them to publish any other nutritional values. And many restaurants have side-stepped this by maintaining two menus – one with calories and one without. Some default to presenting the one with calories, some present the one without and leave it to diners to ask.
Still – as I say – it does not help me with my ideal which would be to see carbs, sugar and salt as well as calories. MyFitnessPal does help however, as there is a large and ever-growing database of values that members of the site have added themselves. While of course, these may not be accurate, at least you can get some indicative values. I found it quite hard to put together values for my particular meal on Saturday so this is at best an indication. It could easily be much worse than this, which is worrying.
I had papadoms with a mixed selection of pickles. I had no idea that lime pickle could be so high in salt! But after a little research, it’s clear that ALL pickles are very high in salt! A single pickle – e.g. a pickled gherkin – can have as much as 1200mg of sodium!
You should definitely manage your intake of pickles of any kind if you are concerned about your blood pressure!
I could find nothing close to one of my dishes which was tamarind lamb with jalapeno so I just had to make up some values based on raw ingredients – fried lamb, and tamarind sauce. The reality once again may well be much worse.
But the end result is pretty awful. Firstly I should say that the “daily goal” for sodium shown above – 2,300 mg – is wrong. This is the recommended maximum for most people – but for those over 50, at risk of cardiovascular disease, and certainly those suffering from hypertension the target should actually be 1,500mg. My sodium intake for the day was more than double what it should have been! Just from that one single meal. For someone with severe hypertension OR diabetes that much salt is a big no-no!
Note that guidance says going any lower than 1,500mg actually offers no additional benefit – your body needs a certain amount of sodium as it’s an essential electrolyte.
But had I known going in that this was going to be so bad I would for sure have made different choices. Simply cutting out the lime pickle would have been a good start – I know never to add that to my Indian meal again! It’s definitely not something that I’d even miss! But maybe I should cut out the poppadoms entirely – given that three popadoms equate to almost 1/3 of my daily salt intake! Have you seen how little there is to a poppadom? That’s a crazy amount of salt for such a flimsy food item!
Carbs were also almost double what they should have been.
And I went 1,000 calories over my daily allowance. On the plus side – the calorie intake is not as bad as it looks, in that while it’s not going to be low enough to make me lose weight, it is basically at my maintenance calorie level – ie it’s around my BMR, the calories I need to maintain weight – so in principle it should not result in weight gain.
So there is a lesson to be learned here – firstly – cut back on the takeouts/restaurant meals. There is often no way to accurately assess the nutritional impact of restaurant prepared meals. Of course you CAN ask for low-salt / low sugar alternatives but there is no guarantee.
If you do eat out / order in as an occasional treat – try to plan ahead. Maybe use an app like MyFitnessPal to look at the options on their menu and try and minimise the damage. You may not be aware of something as simple as pickles in a burger massively raising the sodium content of your special treat meal.
Of course, if you don’t have hypertension maybe you don’t care about salt – but arguably it’s the act of not caring about salt that leads to hypertension in the first place – so perhaps you should?
I for one will be thinking twice about what I order from now. OK, sure the odd cheat meal every now and then that goes over isn’t going to kill me if my habits are good day to day. I do still believe the 80/20 rule is the most sensible approach in the long run – be good 80% of the time, and if you go off the reservation 20% of the time it shouldn’t do any lasting harm.
Definitely food for thought.
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