Oh, Dear Lord!
Stopped by the local Goodwill this afternoon, and found, of all things, a bunch of Nutrisystem meals. Nutrisystem commercials have been all over television around here, boasting about how delicious their food is, how easy and effective their program is, how you never have to go hungry, etc, etc, etc. So I was understandably curious to take a look at the meals they were offering.
I don't know if these were typical, but there was something of a variety: Macaroni and Cheese with Beef, minestrone, apple cinnamon oatmeal, black beans and rice, cheesy mashed potatoes, cheese ravioli. I looked at the package sizes, I read the labels. I was appalled.
Nutrisystem makes much of having "unlocked the secret of the glycemic index." What nonsense. Most of the dishes rely on cheap, highly processed starch -- refined white flour, instant white rice, mashed potato flakes. Even their oatmeal is of the instant variety. None of this has a low glycemic index, and much of it is stratospheric. To make matters worse, the stuff is liberally laced with high fructose corn syrup and other sugars. To complete the bad nutrition trifecta, hydrogenated vegetable oil showed up in several dishes.
I saw not a single dish, even a dinner entree, that contained more than 16 grams of protein -- about as much as you'd find in three slices of deli turkey or ham. Breakfast and lunch were even more miserly.
The portion sizes were quite small. Many of them were the sort of thing you get in a small paper cup, and just add boiling water. I suppose that has the advantage of limiting the quantity of junk carbs they can cram in there, but combined with those carbs and so little protein it means that this girl, at any rate, would be ravenous by 90 minutes after lunch. I can think of few diet-busters more powerful than sheer biological hunger.
Finally, the stuff just looked nasty. Keep in mind that all of it has to be shipped to your door; nothing that will spoil allowed. Highly processed dried junk with tons of chemicals, reconstituted with water and eaten out of a paper cup, ain't my idea of food.
Oh, and the ads always like to boast about how you "can even eat chocolate!" Since I eat sugar-free dark chocolate every day on my low carb diet, this does not impress me. What impresses me even less is "Microwaveable chocolate cake." My skin crawls at the very thought.
Truly, there is nothing, I mean nothing special about this stuff, no magic formula, no scientific advantage. If what you wanted was portion-controlled low calorie meals, you could do far better in your grocer's freezer case, just buying Lean Cuisine, South Beach, and other frozen dinners. Not that I'm advocating that, either; I'm not. But it couldn't be worse and might well be better than this stuff.
