Remember the Milk

Finally, the Web has come up with something I’ve been wishing for: a good online manager of to-do tasks.

Planning your fast-food meals

I found an online version of the nutrition charts that you can get from fast-food outlets. I looked at the Tim Horton’s coffee shop site for warm meals - various soups, baked beans, or chili. If you want to plan your meals, you can select the healthiest two or three for your purposes. I also threw in one of the new “breakfast sandwiches”–the sausage patty & bacon on a tea biscuit.

The first thing I noticed was that all of them are pretty salty. But you can see that if you want to diet, the vegetable soup is has the fewest Calories; if you want a substantial meal without too much cholesterol, the baked beans are good, but they’re also the saltiest and by far the sweetest. The broccoli soup is rich and has almost 50% saturated fat. The split pea with ham seems like a good compromise, with less fat, less sugar, and more fibre.

One thing that’s not explained is the breakdown between “carbohydrate” and sugar: sugar is a carbohydrate, so is it included in “carbohydrates” or does the chart read “carbohydrate” when it means starch? UPDATE: Sugar is included: to find starches, subtract sugar.

I like the breakfast sausage because it’s hours before I’m hungry again; and from this chart I can see why: it contains about 1/4 of the calories and over half the fat I should eat in a day.

These are the Canadian values. The nutrition levels for U.S. stores are slightly different and seem to indicate a slightly larger serving of meat. Also, the U.S. nutrition charts give the calories from fat, which is useful: no more than 20 - 30% of calories should come from fat. And here’s a warning: the charts can be as much as 20% off in their nutrition analysis, which means that the calories, fat and sugar might be higher and the fibre, protein, and so on might be lower.

The interactive nutrion guides have a selection of the more popular foods; the PDF versions have more complete charts.

Roy Zimmerman sings

It seems as if Roy Zimmerman has taken the role sadly abandoned by Tom Lehrer.

Listen to “Let’s Go After the Buddhists.”

Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula.

Clear Language and Design

The Clear Language and Design, or CLAD, Web site is a plain language resource and the gateway to a plain-language editing service. Plain language provides clear, simple language that makes technical content or Web sites accessible to the average reader. It’s an important goal.

The Web site includes a very useful readability evaluation tool.

The consultants on the CLAD team contribute most of their fees to support Toronto’s East End Literacy project.

Serving sizes

They do vary a little from one authority to another.

First of all, here’s a serving size game — guess what’s counts as a serving of different foods.

This is what approximately what I was told about serving sizes.

If we’re going by volume, why not just use 1/2 cup or 125 ml instead of ping-pong balls, light bulbs, bars of soap, dice, fists, balls, CDs, cup-cake wrappers!? (the latter being measures of diameter). All of those things (except CDs) commonly vary. And if volume isn’t reliable, how about weight? Here’s a PDF version of a serving-size quick reference card with some of those ridiculous measurements. To go along with it, here are dietary guidelines for healthy Americans (PDF). Here are further dietary guidelines aimed at educators.