Survey participants were asked to grade fast food burger restaurants on eight criteria. This is how each restaurant ranked. Read More
Category Archives: Fast food
French fry power rankings
Lucas Kwan Peterson for the Los Angeles Times ranked fast food french fries. That is all.
Tags: fast food, french fries, Los Angeles Times
Posted by in Fast food, french fries, Infographics, Los Angeles Times
James Bond, alcoholic
Merry Christmas to everyone. As usual for this blog at this time of year, for your Christmas reading we will take a look at a particular aspect of human consumption, in this case alcohol.
James Bond was created in 1953 by Ian Fleming (who also created Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, The Magical Car), and over a 14-year period there was a series of 12 novels and two short-story collections. The rights to the character were purchased for the film world in the 1960s, so that over the past 50 years we have had a franchise of 24 official films, plus two other licensed ones (Casino Royale in 1967, and Never Say Never Again in 1983).
Actually, the first licensed Bond film was a long-forgotten one made for CBS TV in 1954. This was a 1-hour version of Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson as Bond, Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre, and Linda Christian as a renamed Vesper Lynd (see Barry Nelson - den bortglömde Bond).
This movie infographic (excluding the 2015 film, and the unofficial films) is from The Economist.
The Bond character
James Bond has been portrayed in films officially by six different actors, but the character remains essentially the same, although somewhat different from the one depicted in the books.
In early 1997, the monthly magazine Men's Health published an article in which doctors and psychologists commented on the life and lifestyle of the Bond character, the world's most un-secret secret agent (see Sprit, kvinnor och cigarretter tog livet av James Bond). The results were not good — Bond was either dead or close to it, as he was a paranoid, impotent alcoholic.
Bond's psychological profile was that of an emotionally stunted psychopath of type A who suffers from post-traumatic stress. According to Fleming's books, Bond was orphaned at age 11 (his parents died in a mountaineering accident), he lost his virginity in a brothel in Paris at 16, and killed his first mistress the following year. An ideal man to be a licensed assassin.
His massive daily alcohol consumption (all carefully documented in both the books and films) makes him a category 3 alcoholic. This means that he couldn't possibly have done his actual job competently; and it should also have led to violent temper outbursts (which may explain the government-sanctioned killing sprees). The liquor should also have led to a shrinking of his genitals, and have damaged his liver to the extent that it could no longer break down estrogen, so that he started to develop breasts and become impotent. His well-documented sexual excesses would also make him a prime candidate for sexually transmitted diseases. On top of this, the books (but not the films) also document a comprehensive smoking habit.
Bond was, of course, a form of wish-fulfillment for his creator, Ian Fleming, who was also a heavy drinker and smoker. He died of a heart attack at age 56, an age that Bond himself could not possibly have out-lived. Bond was more in danger from his own lifestyle than from SMERSH, or anyone else bent on world domination.
Bond is thus more a collection of memes than an actual character. This infographic is from the GBShowPlates website, and summarizes Bond's lifestyle.
The Bond drinks
Just about every aspect of Bond's career has been analyzed, and ranked, from the music to the cars to the watches, and most especially the women (the so-called "Bond girls"). However, much of the interest seems to lie in the booze, which is what we will look at here.
Along with coffee (and, once, tea), Bond has consumed copious amounts of alcohol, which he tends to drink alone, or in private settings. He is also what is known as a "label drinker", in that the brand is at least as important as the bottle's contents. This is a gift for the liquor industry, who, along with the car industry, are perpetually looking for opportunities for "brand placement" in films and sporting events. Fleming was chastised for introducing this into his books, but he simply replied that it was an attempt to round-out the character.
As far as the novels are concerned, they have received special medical attention by Graham Johnson, Indra Neil Guha, Patrick Davies (2013. Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor? British Medical Journal 347: f7255). They recorded every drink consumed in every book, calculated the number of alcohol units involved, and then converted that to daily intake (since the books are quite clear about their time span).
Their results are summarized in this infographic, from their article.
Basically, the medical results were as before:
Across 12 of the 14 books, 123.5 days were described, though Bond was unable to consume alcohol for 36 days because of external pressures (admission to hospital, incarceration, rehabilitation). During this time he was documented as consuming 1150.15 units of alcohol. Taking into account days when he was unable to drink, his average alcohol consumption was 92 units a week (1150 units over 87.5 days). Inclusion of the days incarcerated brings his consumption down to 65.2 units a week. His maximum daily consumption was 49.8 units (From Russia with Love day 3). He had 12.5 alcohol free days out of the 87.5 days on which he was able to drink.
Furthermore, when we plotted Bond's alcohol consumption over time, his intake dropped in the middle of his career but gradually increased towards the end. This consistent but variable lifetime drinking pattern has been reported in patients with alcoholic liver disease.
UK NHS [National Health Service] recommendations for alcohol consumption state that an adult male should drink no more than 21 units a week, with no more than 4 units on any one day, and at least two alcohol free days a week. James Bond's drinking habits are well in excess of each of these three parameters. This level of consumption makes him a category 3 drinker (>60 g alcohol / day) and therefore in the highest risk group for malignancies, depression, hypertension, and cirrhosis. He is also at high risk of suffering from sexual dysfunction, which would considerably affect his womanising.Analyzing the films is more difficult. A number of people have tackled this task, including Nerdist, The Grocer, and Atomic Martinis (now defunct, but repeated on the website of the world's only James Bond Museum, in Sweden), and David Leigh. The basic problem seems to be whether the alcohol is "spotted either in hand, glass or in the background". Also, "The major problem is 007’s frequent enjoyment of multiple bottles of champagne, or portions of bottles of liquor ... it is often impossible to determine exactly how many separate drinks came from a given bottle."
The following infographic (not including the 2015 movie or the unofficial films) is derived from one produced at Buddy Loans. However, some of the people at Reddit were not happy with the original, so it was redesigned, as shown here.
The people at Nerdist took the data from this film infographic, converted it from units of alcohol to grams of alcohol, and then used this to estimate Bond’s total alcohol content. This yields a Blood Alcohol Content of 3.7%. "While some humans have survived a BAC of past 1%, it generally holds that anything past 0.5% will either kill you or leave you seriously poisoned. Therefore ... Bond’s tipsy tally is enough to put a man past a safe limit seven times over."
At The Grocer, they have also pointed out the relative booziness of the various Bond incarnations, by calculating the average intake per film by each actor, in units of alcohol:
| Sean Connery George Lazenby Roger Moore Timothy Dalton Pierce Brosnan Daniel Craig | 11 9 11 4.5 12 20 |
The books are shown in red, and the early films starring Connery and Lazenby are shown in blue (including Connery's later Never Say Never Again). These books and films are almost all at the top and right of the network, indicating that they have a distinct collection of drink types compared to the later films. I suspect that this reflects increasing use of "product placements" in the films. The only book plus movie combination that has similar drinks is You Only Live Twice. Interestingly, the Skyfall movie (from 2012) seems to return to the drinks genre of the earlier works, even though the alcohol consumption is much higher. The most unusual works were the Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service books, where a number of drink styles were consumed that appeared nowhere else in the canon.
As noted by Johnson et al. (quoted above):
Despite his alcohol consumption, [Bond] is still described as being able to carry out highly complicated tasks and function at an extraordinarily high level. This is likely to be pure fiction.
Posted by in Bordeaux, Fast food, Restaurants, Splits graph
Fast Food Menu of Calories
How does the distribution of calories vary by fast food restaurant? Here's a chart that shows all the menu items for ten of the biggest national fast food chains. Read More
Posted by in calories, Data Underload, Fast food
Fast food studies
Season's greetings.
For your Christmas reading, this blog usually provides a seasonally appropriate post on fast food, including to date posts about: nutrition (McDonald's fast-food), geography (Fast-food maps) and diet (Fast food and diet). This year, we will update some of the geographical and diet information about the effects of fast food on people worldwide.
First, there seems to be a general perception that access to fast food is continuing to increase in the modern world, even though that increase started more than half a century ago. Such a perception is easy to verify in the USA, as shown in a previous post (Fast-food maps). However, this trend also appears globally.
For example, in 2013 the Guardian newspaper produced a dataset (called the McMap of the World) illustrating the recent growth in the number of McDonald's restaurants worldwide (McDonald's 34,492 restaurants: where are they?). This first graph shows the relative number of restaurants in 2007 and 2012, with each dot representing a single country. Almost all of the 116 countries showed an increase during the five years (ie. their dots are above the pink line). The only country with a major decrease in McDonald's restaurants was Greece (to the right of the pink line), due, no doubt, to its ongoing financial problems. The country with the largest number of restaurants is, of course, the USA, with Japan a clear second.
There is also a perception that fast-food restaurants compete for customers against other restaurants, so that suburbs can have one or the other but not both. This can be checked using the data in the Food Environment Atlas 2014 (produced by the USDA Economic Research Service), which show the number of both Fast-food and Full-service restaurants / 1,000 popele in 2012 for each of the more than 3,100 counties in the USA. This is illustrated in the next graph, where each dot represents a single county.
For most counties, full-service restaurants actually out-number fast-food restaurants, per capita. There are even a few counties that have no fast-food places at all, but also a few with no full-service restaurants. There are even a few with neither restaurant type, notably in AK (2 counties), KY and ND. Interestingly, 3 out of the 4 counties with the largest density of full-service restaurants are in CO (including one not shown because it is off the top of the graph).
Nevertheless, you can't go far in the USA without encountering a fast-food place. As shown in a previous post (Fast-food maps), Subway has the largest number of establishments, not McDonald's. The Flowing Data blog has recently compiled a couple of maps showing the dominance of Subway in the sandwich business (Where Subway dominates its sandwich place competition, basically everywhere). This map shows the subway dominance — each dot is an area with a 10-mile radius, colored by the brand of the nearest sandwich chain.
There have been many studies over the years, based on different methods and with different study criteria. These have been summarized (from different perspectives) by SE Fleischhacker, KR Evenson, DA Rodriguez, AS Ammerman (2010. A systematic review of fast food access studies. Obesity Reviews 12: e460) and LK Fraser, KL Edwards, J Cade, GP Clarke (2010. The geography of fast food outlets: a review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 7: 2290-2308).
Their conclusions from their worldwide literature reviews include:
- most studies indicated fast-food restaurants were more prevalent in low-income areas compared with middle- to higher-income areas (ie. there is a positive association between availability of fast-food outlets and increasing socio-economic deprivation);
- most studies found that fast food restaurants were more prevalent in areas with higher concentrations of ethnic minority groups;
- those studies that included overweight or obesity data (usually measured as the body mass index) showed conflicting results between obesity / overweight and fast-food outlet availability — most studies found that higher body mass index was associated with living in areas with increased exposure to fast food, but the remaining studies did not find any such association;
- there is some evidence that fast food availability is associated with lower fruit and vegetable intake.
These patterns have continued over the five years since the reviews appeared, with published studies both pro (eg. J Currie, S DellaVigna, E Moretti, V Pathania. 2010. The effect of fast food restaurants on obesity and weight gain. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2: 32-63) and con (AS Richardson, J Boone-Heinonen, BM Popkin, P Gordon-Larsen. 2011. Neighborhood fast food restaurants and fast food consumption: a national study. BMC Public Health 11: 543) the association between fast food availability and health. To them has been added the issue of Type II diabetes and fast-food consumption (see DH Bodicoat et al. 2014. Is the number of fast-food outlets in the neighbourhood related to screen-detected type 2 diabetes mellitus and associated risk factors? Public Health Nutrition 18 : 1698-1705).
Moving on, people have also considered how the role of restaurants might define the identity of American cities. For example, Zachary Paul Neal has considered whether US cities can be classified on the basis of the local prevalence of specific types of restaurants (2006. Culinary deserts, gastronomic oases: a classification of US cities. Urban Studies 43: 1-21). He counted the numbers of several different types of restaurants in 243 of the most populous cities in the USA, and ended up classifying them into four distinct city types: Urbane oases (where one finds an abundance of restaurants of all sorts), McCulture oases (which have larger than normal concentrations of "highly standardised eating places designed for mass consumption"), Urbane deserts and McCulture deserts (both of which have fewer restaurants than their respective oasis counterpart).
Unfortunately, this sort of classification approach is self-fulfilling, because any mathematical grouping algorithm will form groups, by definition, even if there are no groups in the data. I have shown this a number of times in this blog (eg. Network analysis of scotch whiskies; Single-malt scotch whiskies — a network). These culinary data are thus crying out for a network analysis, and I would normally present one at this point in the blog post. However, I do not have a copy of Neal's dataset.
So, instead, I will finish by analyzing some data on the salt content of fast food (E Dunford et al. 2012. The variability of reported salt levels in fast foods across six countries: opportunities for salt reduction. Canadian Medical Association Journal 184: 1023-1028).
The authors collected data on the salt content of products served by six fast food chains that operate in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Subway. The product categories included: savoury breakfast items, burgers, chicken products, french fries, pizza, salads, and sandwiches. Data were collated for all of the products provided by all of the companies that fitted into these categories (137-523 products per country). Mean salt contents and their ranges were calculated, and compared within and between countries and companies.
We can use a phylogenetic network to visualize these data. As usual, I have used the manhattan distance and a neighbor-net network. The result is shown in the next figure. Countries that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their fast-food salt content, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.
You will note that the North American countries are on one side of the network, with the highest salt content, while the European countries are on the other, with the lowest salt content (on average 85% of the American salt content). This difference was reflected even between the same products in different countries — for example, McDonald's Chicken McNuggets contained 0.6 g of salt per 100 g in the UK but 1.6 g of salt per 100 g in the USA). As the authors note: "the marked differences in salt content of very similar products suggest that technical reasons are not a primary explanation."
Fast food studies
Season's greetings.
For your Christmas reading, this blog usually provides a seasonally appropriate post on fast food, including to date posts about: nutrition (McDonald's fast-food), geography (Fast-food maps) and diet (Fast food and diet). This year, we will update some of the geographical and diet information about the effects of fast food on people worldwide.
First, there seems to be a general perception that access to fast food is continuing to increase in the modern world, even though that increase started more than half a century ago. Such a perception is easy to verify in the USA, as shown in a previous post (Fast-food maps). However, this trend also appears globally.
For example, in 2013 the Guardian newspaper produced a dataset (called the McMap of the World) illustrating the recent growth in the number of McDonald's restaurants worldwide (McDonald's 34,492 restaurants: where are they?). This first graph shows the relative number of restaurants in 2007 and 2012, with each dot representing a single country. Almost all of the 116 countries showed an increase during the five years (ie. their dots are above the pink line). The only country with a major decrease in McDonald's restaurants was Greece (to the right of the pink line), due, no doubt, to its ongoing financial problems. The country with the largest number of restaurants is, of course, the USA, with Japan a clear second.
There is also a perception that fast-food restaurants compete for customers against other restaurants, so that suburbs can have one or the other but not both. This can be checked using the data in the Food Environment Atlas 2014 (produced by the USDA Economic Research Service), which show the number of both Fast-food and Full-service restaurants / 1,000 popele in 2012 for each of the more than 3,100 counties in the USA. This is illustrated in the next graph, where each dot represents a single county.
For most counties, full-service restaurants actually out-number fast-food restaurants, per capita. There are even a few counties that have no fast-food places at all, but also a few with no full-service restaurants. There are even a few with neither restaurant type, notably in AK (2 counties), KY and ND. Interestingly, 3 out of the 4 counties with the largest density of full-service restaurants are in CO (including one not shown because it is off the top of the graph).
Nevertheless, you can't go far in the USA without encountering a fast-food place. As shown in a previous post (Fast-food maps), Subway has the largest number of establishments, not McDonald's. The Flowing Data blog has recently compiled a couple of maps showing the dominance of Subway in the sandwich business (Where Subway dominates its sandwich place competition, basically everywhere). This map shows the subway dominance — each dot is an area with a 10-mile radius, colored by the brand of the nearest sandwich chain.
There have been many studies over the years, based on different methods and with different study criteria. These have been summarized (from different perspectives) by SE Fleischhacker, KR Evenson, DA Rodriguez, AS Ammerman (2010. A systematic review of fast food access studies. Obesity Reviews 12: e460) and LK Fraser, KL Edwards, J Cade, GP Clarke (2010. The geography of fast food outlets: a review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 7: 2290-2308).
Their conclusions from their worldwide literature reviews include:
- most studies indicated fast-food restaurants were more prevalent in low-income areas compared with middle- to higher-income areas (ie. there is a positive association between availability of fast-food outlets and increasing socio-economic deprivation);
- most studies found that fast food restaurants were more prevalent in areas with higher concentrations of ethnic minority groups;
- those studies that included overweight or obesity data (usually measured as the body mass index) showed conflicting results between obesity / overweight and fast-food outlet availability — most studies found that higher body mass index was associated with living in areas with increased exposure to fast food, but the remaining studies did not find any such association;
- there is some evidence that fast food availability is associated with lower fruit and vegetable intake.
These patterns have continued over the five years since the reviews appeared, with published studies both pro (eg. J Currie, S DellaVigna, E Moretti, V Pathania. 2010. The effect of fast food restaurants on obesity and weight gain. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2: 32-63) and con (AS Richardson, J Boone-Heinonen, BM Popkin, P Gordon-Larsen. 2011. Neighborhood fast food restaurants and fast food consumption: a national study. BMC Public Health 11: 543) the association between fast food availability and health. To them has been added the issue of Type II diabetes and fast-food consumption (see DH Bodicoat et al. 2014. Is the number of fast-food outlets in the neighbourhood related to screen-detected type 2 diabetes mellitus and associated risk factors? Public Health Nutrition 18 : 1698-1705).
Moving on, people have also considered how the role of restaurants might define the identity of American cities. For example, Zachary Paul Neal has considered whether US cities can be classified on the basis of the local prevalence of specific types of restaurants (2006. Culinary deserts, gastronomic oases: a classification of US cities. Urban Studies 43: 1-21). He counted the numbers of several different types of restaurants in 243 of the most populous cities in the USA, and ended up classifying them into four distinct city types: Urbane oases (where one finds an abundance of restaurants of all sorts), McCulture oases (which have larger than normal concentrations of "highly standardised eating places designed for mass consumption"), Urbane deserts and McCulture deserts (both of which have fewer restaurants than their respective oasis counterpart).
Unfortunately, this sort of classification approach is self-fulfilling, because any mathematical grouping algorithm will form groups, by definition, even if there are no groups in the data. I have shown this a number of times in this blog (eg. Network analysis of scotch whiskies; Single-malt scotch whiskies — a network). These culinary data are thus crying out for a network analysis, and I would normally present one at this point in the blog post. However, I do not have a copy of Neal's dataset.
So, instead, I will finish by analyzing some data on the salt content of fast food (E Dunford et al. 2012. The variability of reported salt levels in fast foods across six countries: opportunities for salt reduction. Canadian Medical Association Journal 184: 1023-1028).
The authors collected data on the salt content of products served by six fast food chains that operate in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Subway. The product categories included: savoury breakfast items, burgers, chicken products, french fries, pizza, salads, and sandwiches. Data were collated for all of the products provided by all of the companies that fitted into these categories (137-523 products per country). Mean salt contents and their ranges were calculated, and compared within and between countries and companies.
We can use a phylogenetic network to visualize these data. As usual, I have used the manhattan distance and a neighbor-net network. The result is shown in the next figure. Countries that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their fast-food salt content, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.
You will note that the North American countries are on one side of the network, with the highest salt content, while the European countries are on the other, with the lowest salt content (on average 85% of the American salt content). This difference was reflected even between the same products in different countries — for example, McDonald's Chicken McNuggets contained 0.6 g of salt per 100 g in the UK but 1.6 g of salt per 100 g in the USA). As the authors note: "the marked differences in salt content of very similar products suggest that technical reasons are not a primary explanation."
The solution to the spinach fallacy?
Last week I blogged about Spinach and the iron fallacy. I analysed an early set of data by Thomas Richardson (1848), who calculated the amount of iron in combusted ash for various vegetables and fruits, and showed that spinach is not at all unusual in its constituents. The idea that spinach is rich in iron is untrue, and the story about a mis-placed decimal point seems to be nothing more than an urban myth.
In the meantime, Joachim Dagg, at the Natural History Apostilles blog, has reanalysed Richardson's data and revealed that The first source for the spinach-iron myth is likely to have been a somewhat inappropriate attempt to combine his data for the percent iron values in relation to the ash with the percent values of the ashes in in relation to the fresh matter.
So, I have recalculated the phylogenetic network using these "adjusted" values. I used the percent values of the chemical constituents in relation to the pure ash (raw ash minus carbonic acid, charcoal and sand), and combined them with the percent values of the ashes. The issue here is that radish roots and leaves have the largest ash values, followed by cherry stems and spinach. This leads to an over-statement of the chemical contents. In particular, the iron content moves spinach from being ranked sixth to second (behind radish foliage, which is not usually eaten).
Spinach and the iron fallacy
A few weeks ago, the Natural History Apostilles blog ran a series of posts on the origins of the well-known spinach-is-rich-in-iron fallacy. This is more complex than expected. Spinach was originally alleged to have been incorrectly claimed to be rich in iron due to a mis-placed decimal point in a set of comparative data. In fact, this explanation itself seems to be untrue (read the posts).
In the blog posts, Joachim Dagg traced the origins of the alleged explanation, in detail, looking at (almost) all of the relevant historical data. One of the earliest sources of data on spinach turns out to be itself something of a mystery:
Thomas Richardson (1848) Beiträge zur chemischen Kenntnis der Vegetabilien. Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie LXVII Bd. 3.This was a single-page fold-out table (without page number) included at the end of volume 67 of the journal. In modern electronic copies, it has been erroneously attached to the last article in that issue.
The table contains values for a range of compounds in the ash produced from a variety of plants and their parts. These data are ripe for a visualization.
As usual, we can use a phylogenetic network as a form of exploratory data analysis, to compare all of the plants in a single diagram. I first normalized the data (since the compounds have very different ranges), and then used the manhattan distance to calculate the similarity of the plants based on their constituents. This was followed by a Neighbor-net analysis to display the between-plant similarities as a phylogenetic network. So, plants (or their parts) that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their chemistry, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.
As you can see, spinach is not particularly unusual in its chemical constituents. Indeed, it is radish, leek and asparagus that are the most unusual.
Note: there is a follow-up post indicating why spinach might have been singled out as having a high iron content: The solution to the spinach fallacy?
A network analysis of pizza styles
Over the past century a number of food styles have become internationalized, including hamburgers and fried chicken. Not all of these foodstuffs are nutritious, and some people have noted that not all of them are even particularly edible. However, perhaps the most interesting of these foods is the venerable pizza, not least because the customer has considerable say in what it looks and tastes like, but also because it is made and cooked fresh, right in front of us.
Pizza originated in Italy, Greece, or Persia, depending on how we define pizza. After all, covering flat bread with a topping is an idea that goes back a very long way. In the ancient world, the Egyptians made flat bread; the Indians baked bread in an oven, but without a topping; and the Persians cooked their bread without an oven, but they did put melted cheese on it. The Passion 4 Pizza site notes this more recent history: "The ancient Greeks had a flat bread called plakountos, on which they placed various toppings [eg. herbs, onion and garlic], and we know also that Naples was founded (as Neopolis) by the Greeks; and Naples is the home of the modern pizza."
In 16th century Naples, a yeast-based flat bread was referred to as a pizza, eaten by poor people as a street food; but the idea that led to modern pizza was the use of tomato as a topping. Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from South America in the 16th century, and by the 18th century it was common for the poor of the area around Naples to add tomato to their bread. Pizza was brought to the United States by the Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, and became popular in places like New York and Chicago.
Kenji López-Alt publishes The Pizza Lab, which is part of the Serious Eats blog, and he has taken a serious interest in pizza styles, at least in New York. He recognizes three main styles of pizza, based on their dough, the way it is treated, and the temperature at which it is cooked (see the picture above, left to right):
- New York
- Sicilian
- Neapolitan
As a basis for discussion, I have analyzed the dough ingredients of these three styles, using a phylogenetic network as a tool for exploratory data analysis. To create the network, I first calculated the similarity of the pizzas using the Manhattan distance, and a Neighbor-net analysis was then used to display the between-dough similarities as a phylogenetic network. So, pizza-dough styles that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their ingredients, and those that are further apart are progressively more different from each other.
The Neapolitan-style dough is the simplest in terms of ingredients. The dough is not kneaded, but instead is allowed to rise for 3-5 days in the refrigerator, although it remains a thin-crust pizza. It is cooked quickly at a high temperature. The New York-style dough is an offshoot of this that is slightly thicker, and is cooked cooler and slower. The unkneaded dough stands in the fridge for only 1 day. Like all of the styles except the Neapolitan, olive oil is used in the dough, but unlike any of the others it also contains sugar (to help the crust brown more evenly). The Sicilian-style dough is intended for a thick-crust pizza. It requires only a little kneading, after which it is allowed to rise for 2 hours at room temperature. It is essentially fried in olive oil while baking.
The Sfincione is the original Sicilian pizza style, thinner and chewier than the New York Sicilian. It is also cooked at a lower temperature. The Deep Pan pizza is, of course, another thick-crust style. It is allowed to rise for longer than the Sicilian, and is cooked at a higher temperature. The network shows that these all have closely related doughs.
The Greek-style pizza is allegedly a style "found mostly in the 'Pizza Houses' and 'Houses of Pizza' in New England". As shown by the reticulation in the network, it has characteristics of the Neapolitan pizza dough (relatively low water content) and the Sicilian (relatively high oil content). It is left to rise at room temperature overnight, and is cooked like the New York and Deep Pan pizzas.
There are many other pizza styles, of course, but I do not have recipes for them. For example, there is another Deep Dish style found in Chicago.
Fast food and diet
Season's greetings.
For your Christmas reading, this blog usually provides a seasonally appropriate post on fast-food, including to date: nutrition (McDonald's fast-food) and geography (Fast-food maps). This year, we will focus on the effects of fast-food on people.
Defining fast-food is a bit of a trick. The U.S. Census of Retail Trade defines a fast-food establishment merely as one that does not offer table service. However, legislation recently passed in Los Angeles defines fast-food establishments as those that have a limited menu, items prepared in advance or heated quickly, no table service, and disposable wrappings or containers. Some people feel that these definitions should include all pizza restaurants, even those that do offer table service in addition to take-away (or take-out). The latter are sometimes distinguished as fast-casual restaurants rather than fast-food restaurants.
About 90% of Americans say they eat fast-food, including those who visit an establishment on average once per day. The main concern about the effect of fast-food, then, is on people's diet. By "diet" I mean the combination of foodstuffs consumed each day, which may or may not match what is known to be required for a healthy human. Fast-food rarely matches this diet, and so there must be some effect of eating the stuff.
In particular, fast-food has been implicated in what is now known within medicine as the "obesity epidemic" — the observation that an increasing proportion of the people in the developed world are formally classified as obese. The usual symptom of obesity is a body mass index (BMI) > 30 (overweight is 25-30, normal is 18.5-25). BMI is an approximate measure of body fat.
Obesity has risen rapidly in recent decades, but there is some evidence that the levels are now beginning to stabilize (Obesity Rates & Trends Overview). The main risk with obesity is its strong association with potentially fatal health problems, notably heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Indeed, it has been suggested that obesity may be the greatest cause of preventable death in the United States.
Demonstrating a relationship between fast-food and obesity is not hard, given the high sugar, carbohydrate, fat, and salt content of most of the food items. This results in the intake of more energy than the body uses, and this excess is stored as fat. This pattern shows up clearly in large-scale samples of prevalence, such as this one collated on the DataMasher site, where each point represents a state of the USA.
An obvious issue concerning fast-food is our ability, or lack of it, to understand just how many calories (or joules) there are in fast-food meals. The marketing people seem to have a clear idea about how different fast-food chains are presented in terms of their food quality, as shown in this Perceptual Map.
However, this perception is clearly not accurate in terms of calories, especially for Subway. An article in the British Medical Journal evaluated the ability of people to estimate the calorie content of the fast-food meal they had just purchased. As shown in the next graph, clearly in most cases there was a major under-estimate, and this was worst for the highest-calorie meals. The under-estimation of calorie content was largest among Subway diners. Diners at both Subway and Burger King showed greater under-estimation of meal calorie content than those at McDonald's, whereas diners at Dunkin' Donuts had less under-estimation. In other words, Subway is not as healthy for you as you think it is, but you already know how bad those Donuts are.
One response to this situation has been to insist that fast-food places advertise the calorie content of their food on the menu board itself. For example, it has been suggested that nutrition experts can compose apparently healthy meals based on the nutritional information provided in the menus of fast-food restaurant chains.
This will only have an effect, however, if people actually use this information when choosing their meal. An article in the Journal of Public Health suggested that most young people don't actually do so, and that people who eat fast-food most often are least likely to do so. Indeed, a report from Sandelman Associates showed that the only people who are likely to use calorie information regularly are those with a specific "calorie target" for their personal diet, as shown in this next chart.
Nevertheless, an article published in the British Medical Journal has reported a decrease in the energy content of fast-food purchases after the introduction of calorie information on the menu boards, except at Subway, where there was an increase. (before the labeling the Subway meals chosen had fewer calories than for the other chains but afterwards they had more!)
Another important feature of fast-food is the usually large portion sizes, which exacerbates the energy imbalance. An article in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association has shown that not only does modern fast-food exceed dietary standard serving sizes by at least a factor of 2, and sometimes by as much as 8, these serving sizes have increased dramatically over the past 50 years.
What is perhaps most surprising is the truly vast difference that can occur between servings of what is allegedly the same fast-food product, not only between countries but within a single country. The following graph is from an article in the International Journal of Obesity. It shows, for the named locations, the amounts of total fat in a meal consisting of 171 g McDonald's french fries and 160 g KFC chicken nuggets. The darker colour indicates the added amounts of industrially produced trans fat. The values in parenthesis are the amount of trans fat as a percentage of total fat.
On a somewhat different note, one of the main characteristics of fast-food is the focus on a sweet taste, rather than on a diversity of tastes. In contrast, traditional cooking in many cultures has focussed on mixing together a diversity of complementary ingredients. Indeed, this was the impetus for the formation of the Slow Food movement, founded "to prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions ... and combat people's dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from and how our food choices affect the world around us." (It was organized after a public demonstration at the intended site of a McDonald's franchise at the historic Spanish Steps, in Rome.)
This topic was investigated in detail in an article published in Nature Scientific Reports. The authors produced the following network of food flavours.
Interestingly, they conclude that:
We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food-pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound-sharing ingredients.There is diversity even in the amount of diversity.