This meal is healthier than what 95% of Americans had for lunch today and it only takes seconds to make!
This fast, tasty meal can be made in one minute and its healthy! Perfect for losing fat or gaining muscle. Worlds healthiest, fastest, and cheapest meal! Under a buck for the complete meal. It helps prevent cancer, its loaded with fiber, its packed with complex carbs, its free of pesticides, its free of bad fats and simple carbs and it helps you gain muscle as well as lose fat! On top of that, its delicious! But wait, there’s more – no shopping required! This recipe uses canned products that you can keep in your pantry for months. Sounds too good to be true?
Most people do not understand what a “healthy meal” is and those in bodybuilding just as guilty as sedentary folks. I know you bodybuilders already think you know it all, and you do know about how to eat to maximize muscle gain, but that is only just one small part of what a healthy meal is. Please read about what it takes to be a healthy meal.
I challenge you to find a healthier, faster, cheaper meal!
If you think your lunch today was healthier than this, why? My guess is that if you think your lunch was healthier than mine, either you didn’t read the nutritional label or you don’t understand what it takes to be a healthy meal. Have you read the list of ingredients of your lunch? Do you know exactly what each of the ingredients is? How do you know your lunch is healthy if you cant even pronounce the ingredients?
Here is my meal:
- 97 cents
- organic
- 24g protein
- 27g fiber
- only 1g fat
- 360 calories
Many of you have objections to me calling this meal healthy, lets dispel some of the myths:
- Canned food isn’t nearly as good as fresh. Yes and no. If you buy your produce at a chain supermarket, there is a good chance that canned is healthier! To get produce into stores without it being squished and rotten, it needs to be picked weeks before it is ripe. Ripe fruit and vegetables are healthier than un-ripe. With canned foods, they are picked ripe and immediately canned to preserve their high quality. For those of you in the slow-food movement who think my recipe is appalling, please re-read the title of this page – “World’s healthiest, fastest, and cheapest meal”.
Its awesome if you have the time to go to a farmers market every day where local farmers bring freshly picked produce and then have time to create home cooked meals. Yes, your home cooked meal from produce picked today is healthier than my meal BUT yours takes hours of work a day and its just not practical for 95% of us. Time is money and most of us are short on both. This recipe is a good tradeoff of health, taste, and convenience. - Canned food has too much salt. Yes, you are correct – canned food has too much salt but so what? Salt is not a four letter word! Salt makes you retain water so if you are within 3 days of a photo shoot or a bodybuilding competition you want to drastically cut back on salt. To show off striations in muscles and show the delineation between various muscles in the body (aka definition) you want as little as possible between the muscle and the skin. Of course, fat under the skin is the worst enemy of definition but the hydration of the body also plays a role. Eating lots of salt makes you retain water which makes everything more puffy, including the layer under the skin and that puffiness hides the definition. Many people who do not understand how to weigh themselves accurately get the mistaken notion that salt makes them fat. Why? Because when they have something really salty their weight goes up by 5 pounds the next day. This weight increase is only water, not fat! There is actually no research I know of that shows that salt is bad for healthy individuals. So can everyone eat as much salt as they want? No, of course not! For people with congestive heart failure, too much salt can be deadly. For about 10% of people who have high blood pressure, reducing salt intake will lower their blood pressure – that means that for 90% of people who have high blood pressure, salt intake does not matter. Is this license to chow down salt? No! Moderation is the key. Get some no-salt seasonings you like and use them when you cook instead of the salt shaker. So in my view, the convenience, taste, fiber, vitamins, anti-oxidants, and low fat benefits of this meal overshadow the minor fact that it has more than the optimal amount of salt especially given the options. For most people who need a fast meal like this, the other options are far saltier, fattier, sugary, and unhealthy – vending machines, convenience stores, and fast food restaurants.
- Beans are not a complete protein. Correct, beans are not a complete protein, according to nutritiondata.com, beans have a protein quality of 103 where eggs have a protein quality of 145. Clearly eggs are a much better complete protein but before you go crucifying beans, remember that beef has a protein quality of 83. Black beans are even better than beef. Does that mean that just eating beans is heathy? Certainly not. There are certain essential amino acids that beans are deficient in which is why the protein quality is only 103 so you need to get those missing essential amino acids from some complementary form of protein. I’ve been dancing around the 900 pound gorilla in the room, the real question at hand is: Does every meal need to have complete proteins in it? Old school bodybuilders who cling to their 6 meals a day thing would say yes but they are in a minority these days. Most people would say that all that matters is that when your head hits the pillow, that everything totals up correctly – calories, your macros, vitamins, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, etc. The whole Leangains intermittent fasting movement is based upon the premise that frequent, small, well balance meals is a waste of time. Many people maintain that getting all your protein in one meal is just as good for muscle building as is getting that protein spread out in small doses over the day. Clearly then, in the intermittent fasting camp and believe that you don’t need frequent, small meals then it follows that each meal does not need to have complete proteins – all that matters is that all the essential amino acids for the day total up properly when your head hits the pillow. As you know, I am in the old-school camp and still believe in 5-6 small, well balanced meals but yet I still eat meals like this all the time, why? Because I alternate meals with incomplete proteins (like beans) with meals that have high quality protein like egg or whey. I get protein every 2-3 hours and over the period of 4-6 hours, I get complete proteins.
- It doesn’t taste as good as a big mac, french fries, and a chocolate shake. Please read the book by Michael Moss titled “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”. You need to make a decision here, do you want to be healthy, muscular, and have ripped sixpack abs or do you want to eat food that tastes so good that there is a party going on in your mouth? You cant have it all, make a decision. Please note that I am not saying that healthy food isn’t tasty, it is, but you have to train your taste buds. Artificial flavors are designed specifically to make you want to eat more than your body needs and they bludgeon your taste buds. If you have been eating at McDonalds for lunch the last year, its unlikely that a healthy salad wont taste good … at first anyway. Give it a few weeks of eating natural foods and those healthy things you didn’t like before will suddenly become flavorful. Carrots are really, really sweet but not after eating a snickers bar!
Nutritional Labels for Organic Beans And Salsa
