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Sunday diversion / Mr. Silver doubles down on nutrition

Sandy MattinglyPosted on Posted in caution no real estate content — No Comments ↓

a healthy dose of fact-checking + analysis
Anyone who read my April 13 post, Mr. Silver does NY real estate / NY Magazine basks in the glow, knows that I am a big Nate Silver fan. His metier is politics, of course, but I look forward to seeing if he does any more Manhattan real estate analysis.

In the meantime, he recently picked up another thread going through the cultural zeitgeist on the inter-tubes: as he said on April 19,

KFC’s Double Down Sandwich, an in-your-face collection of bacon, cheese and something called Colonel’s Sauce betwixt two fried chicken "buns", is making waves for its unapologetic gluttony….

This is what he does best: assesses whether some general ‘truths’ being circulated are supported by data, and tries to make sense of the general situation through useful comparisons. In this case, he creates

an index based on the amount of fat, sodium and cholesterol that the Double Down and a variety of comparable sandwiches contain as a portion of the USDA daily allowance. (In the fat category, saturated fats are counted double and trans-fats are counted triple.) The index is scaled such that the Original Recipe version of the sandwich receives a score of 1.00, a measure of gluttony that will hereafter be known as The Double Down (DD).

Then he ranks about 35 fast-food items on this gluttony scale.

His index leads him to refine his analysis:

All of those products, however, contain more — often substantially more — calories than does the Double Down. They have lots (and lots and lots) of bad stuff, but some good stuff like protein, iron and fiber as well. Their calories aren’t quite so empty, and they damned well ought to leave you full.

So suppose instead that we re-calibrate our metric by dividing by the number of calories that each sandwich contains. This alternate measure, which we’ll call Double Downs per Calorie (DDPC), gets at the idea of how bad each product is for you on a bite-by-bite basis.

All that wonkery might not be to your taste (sorry), but leads him to a well-supported conclusion. Take this is as the current last word on his original question:

So, is the Double Down the most gluttonous fast food sandwich ever created? It depends on how you measure it. At the margins, consuming one Double Down almost certainly isn’t as bad for you as a Triple Baconator, a Thickburger, or even a fully-loaded Chipotle burrito. But while those products should, in theory, fill you up for at least half the day, the Double Down might leave you hankering for seconds. It’s a high bar to clear, but it’s the closest thing to pure junk food of any "sandwich" being marketed today.

In the categories on his blog, this entry rates as "food, off topic". I will rate this Manhattan Loft Guy post as "Caution: no real estate content" and secondarily as "general weird stuff". Are you now tempted to read FiveThirtyEight.com? Or, are you tempted to try a Double Down at KFC?

Enjoy!
 

© Sandy Mattingly 2010

 

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