This Might Make You Think Twice

Wow!  A meal that is high in saturated fat can affect your arteries within hours!

An article on “Xtreme Eating” in The Nutrition Action Newsletter alarmingly gave stats on some of the highest-calorie restaurant dishes in the US, meals they called “nutritional trainwrecks.”

Picking up on that, ABC News did an experiment on what one of these types of meals would do to someone’s arteries.

What They Ate

A young reporter and her producer had their blood vessels tested before and after eating some of the food mentioned in Nutrition Action’s article.

For lunch they each had the deep-fried macaroni and cheese appetizer from The Cheesecake Factory, followed by a bacon cheeseburger wrapped in a quesadilla from Applebee’s, followed by Uno Chicago Grill’s giant cookie smothered in ice cream..

All  told:  6190 calories and 187 grams of saturated fat, more than 3 times the daily calories and 10 times the saturated fat recommended by the government.

What Happened After The Calorie And Fat Overload

In the lab two hours after their monster meals, repeat testing was done.  The results showed that the producer’s blood had turned into cloudy, yellowish, pus–like fluid – “you could literally see the fat that was now flooding the system,” according to one of the doctors.  The reporter’s arteries had narrowed so much that the ultrasound showed that her heart was pounding and working much, much harder to pump blood through her arteries.

Some Words To The Wise

Bottom Line: According to the lab Director at the University of Maryland Medical Center where the testing was done, each and every meal affects your arteries.

Pritikin Longevity Center’s nutritionist Dr. Jay Kenney says, “Just as each cigarette you smoke damages your lungs, so does each high–fat meal damage the inside “skin,” or endothelium, of your arteries. And while the crippling effects [lung cancer or cardiovascular disease] from each cigarette or fatty meal may not be apparent for many years, the daily assaults to our lungs and blood vessels can be measured – and last for several hours – every time we light up or eat a fatty meal.”

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