In any case, even if a calorie were a real thing, what kind of calorie we’re talking about in a food kind of matters. A hundred calories of sugar does something very different to me than a hundred calories of butter would. Sugar spikes my insulin and butter doesn’t. Insulin locks my energy inside my fat cells and if it stays elevated, doesn’t let that energy back out for me to use. So I get fat, and I’m malnourished as well.

I wouldn’t have taken the muffin *or* the donut, personally, and it’s not about being virtuous, but just about not wanting to commit slow suicide. I’ve had my decades-long carb binge, thank you, and I was lucky to get off light with only a bit over a hundred extra pounds on my 5’6″ frame. My mom’s much worse off even when you take into account the three or four extra inches in height. I feel like a goose walked over my grave. She’s diabetic, too.

No way would I eat a Subway veggie sub without some kind of oil or fat on it. You can’t get maximum nutritional benefit from the carotenes in plants if you don’t eat fat to help you assimilate them. The cheese would be an easy source of calcium, which while I don’t know that we need as much calcium as the experts say, I do know we need some in our diet. I think that even in the case of muffin vs. donut, presuming the muffin had real blueberries in it, I think I still would have picked it even with the higher calories. Why? Blueberries, chica. Blueberries versus the empty calories of donut and cream filling. The chocolate may have had some nutrition to it, but it wouldn’t have had much.

Which is not quite the same as saying Fruit Roll-Ups are healthy. You don’t grind blueberries up and strip them of their nutritive value to put them into muffins, you just throw them in whole. But yeah, I look at carb content and micronutrient content and compare foods that way. I’d rather get more nutrition in fewer servings as well as keeping my insulin down.

Changed my link slightly, it’s a post I wrote last night. It might interest you.

Great suggestion, Ruth! A good one to remember!

Heavens to Betsy.

The wonderful thing about Krispy Kreme is that some of them are OPEN 24 HRS! And there’s the little red flashing light that lets you know there’s a fresh batch coming!!!

(Can you tell I had my first Krispy Kreme at about 2 AM during a college study binge?)

I have to admit I like DD’s coffee better, though. FAB-U-LOUS.

CONSERVATIVE estimate of that recipe is 10,600 calories and 400 grams of fat. Even if we assume that one portion is 1/24 of this pudding (based on one doughnut per serving) – that is 440 calories and 17 grams of fat! And my gues it that M-i-L thinks that 1/12 is a better serving size!!!

Seriously.

A big mac is roughly 650 calories

Your basic muffin is roughly 700

wtf?

For almost a year I had a DD coffeecake muffin for breakfast when what I really wanted was sausage, egg, and cheese on an english. And you guessed it… I could have had the cholesterol special for fewer calories and just a couple more grams of fat. They do make low-fat blueberry muffins, btw. (When you can find them…)