Chipotle Is Making You Fat
If you're not fat already, you could soon wind up fat because of Chipotle. Data published by the New York Times shows that we're all eating a shit-ton of delicious and reasonably priced calories and salt in the form of organic carnitas and guacamole. Great! Just great!
I wish I hadn't read this article. You should probably also not read it, because it's going to make you reluctant to eat at Chipotle next time everyone says Hey gang, how about Chipotle for lunch today? because it's better than Chop't and Panera.
But here we are. Let's swallow the bitter truth along with our burrito bol:
The typical order at Chipotle has about 1,070 calories. That's more than half of the calories that most adults are supposed to eat in an entire day. The recommended range for most adults is between 1,600 and 2,400.
That means the average Chipotle order has the calories of two Big Macs. That's just the average—the Times article has all kinds of horrifying charts that show how many of us are ordering burritos and tacos with far more than a thousand calories. But calories are only the beginning of your semi-Mexican nutritional meltdown:
The distributions of two other metrics of a meal's health—salt and saturated fat, shown in the charts below—are just as revealing. Most orders at Chipotle give you a close to a full day's worth of salt (2,400 milligrams) and 75 percent of a full day's worth of saturated fat.
So you're probably OK if you eat literally only once per day and that one thing is Chipotle. Otherwise, you're pushing yourself way over the day's allotted salt and fat limit with a single burrito. And it's not just the burritos—pretty much all of this delectable shit is horrible for you! Look at this!
The tortilla alone gets you to 300 calories.
The fresh tomato salsa, for example, has just 20 calories, but it has 210 milligrams of sodium – more salt than a 1 oz. bag of Lay's potato chips.
Even smaller orders, like bowls or tacos, easily reach the threshold with a side of chips, which deliver 570 calories.
Tomatoes are worse for you than a bag of chips? What a world. We probably shouldn't be surprised that a football-sized meal is pushing your daily intake limits, but it's also so easy to assume that a big ol' sack of beans and tomatoes and rice can't be that bad for you, right? Wrong. The only healthy Chipotle option is to wrap a tortilla around a block of ice and just suck on it for awhile.
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