Stanley Bernstein has helped 450,000 patients lose a ton of fat by putting them on a merciless 850-calories-per-day diet and injecting them with his secret vitamin B cocktail. His critics say the diet is dangerous. His followers say they’ve never been happier. Inside the weight-loss empire.
Posts Tagged ‘fast food’
From the Print Edition, In Print
The Toronto diet: inside Stanley Bernstein’s weight-loss empire
Caffeine High
McDonald’s gives away coffee in promotion that has nothing to do with Timmie’s Roll Up the Rim
Three-time loser (Image: Shayne Kaye)
It’s that time of year again, when coffee aficionados ditch their independent coffee shops, and the streets are strewn with Tim Hortons cups. Yes, it’s time for Roll Up the Rim to Win. This year, however, McDonald’s isn’t sitting idly by as the country gets ready to roll. The Star reports that the fast food giant is handing out free coffee for two weeks. A spokesperson for McDonald’s says the promotion has nothing to do with Roll Up the Rim, but rather that it’s due to the increased exposure of the fast food chain during the Olympics, when commercial breaks offered nothing but McDonald’s, Visa and Government of Canada ads.
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Culinary Curiosities
This Olympics, McDonald’s claims the word “burger,” forcing native pavilion to rewrite its menu
A burger by any other name: a Big Mac from the last Olympics
Olympic attendees stopping in at the Four Host First Nations pavilion in Vancouver this weekend should look for “sliders” or “bannockwiches” (bison patties with wild mushrooms and Saltspring goat cheese between bannock rounds)—just not burgers. The organizing committee, VANOC, has decided to eliminate the word “burger” from the FHFN pavilion at the behest of McDonald’s, a major sponsor of the Games. Bill Cooper, VANOC’s head of commercial rights management, told the National Post that “there are a number of guidelines…at all designated 2010 Games celebration sites, of which the FHFN pavilion is one.” The rules forbid “certain brands or words that create special associations with our sponsors and their products.” The guidelines are enforced to protect sponsors’ “significant commitment and investment.”
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Read All About It
Booze may have led to the founding of civilization, ranking the world’s weight woes, the 10 most common fast food ingredients
Confirming the obvious: Big Macs are "unnatural" (Photo by Geronimo De Francesco)
• Breaking news: Big Macs are unnatural. TLC’s Fun Facts section presents a list of the top 10 ingredients in fast food, including citric acid (#10), MSG (#6) and chicken (#1). Profiles of each entry reveal disturbing facts, like a statistic indicating that North Americans consume an average of 41.5 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year. [TLC]
• Alcohol motivated early humans to adopt agriculture, says archaeologist Patrick McGovern. The University of Pennsylvania scientist has discovered tartaric acid (a booze-related compound) in pottery shards at the 9,000-year-old Jiahu site in China. The first neolithic encounter with fermented grains may have occurred when someone ate a sprouted grain that had fallen into a shallow pool of water. Once consumed, the grain would have triggered the brain’s reward centres, causing our enthusiastic ancestors to domesticate crops in order to get their next fix. [The Independent]
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Culinary Curiosities
Taco Bell founder dead at 86 (and seven other recent fast-food mogul deaths)
Nacho tacos from Taco Bell (Photo by Steven Depolo)
Taco Bell founder Glen Bell Jr. died on Sunday night at his home in Rancho Santa Fe at the age of 86, according to a press release sent out by the company. Bell created the Tex-Mex chain in 1962 in California, selling it to PepsiCo in 1978, meaning he’s not to blame for the creation of the Taco Bell Chihuahua or the Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet viral marketing disaster.
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Read All About It
Best cookbooks of 2009, five tips for dining with kids, Paul Sorvino gets into the tomato sauce racket
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• Lucy Waverman’s list of the top cookbooks of 2009 has (like the Junos) both Canadian and international winners. Canadian authors Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann score for their locavore tome Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes From an Organic Farm, though Waverman chastises them for not featuring any Canadian chefs. Prince Edward Islander Michael Smith gets a nod for The Best of Chef at Home: Essential Recipes for Today’s Kitchen. We’re intrigued, considering that Smith is incessantly advocating cooking without a recipe on his Food Network show. Internationally, chef David Chang of Momofuku (the name of his restaurants and book) gets a nod, as does Thomas Keller. [Globe and Mail]
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Fifty tidbits about Nigella Lawson, predicting the food trends of 2010, Anthony Bourdain as a teenager
Going smokeless: Nigella Lawson (Photo by Phile Guest)
• Food Network Humour has published a series of photos of famous cooking show hosts in their salad days. Our favourites are Paula Deen and her enormous bouffant hair, Nigella Lawson attempting Audrey Hepburn, and Anthony Bourdain’s long hippie hair. [Food Network Humor]
• Speaking of Nigella Lawson, the Daily Mail presents 50 tidbits about the kitchen kitten in celebration of her upcoming 50th birthday. Among the revelations: she washes her hair only once a week, she doesn’t wear “knickers,” she has a 32G bust, and her favourite recent purchase is a Slanket, to keep her warm on planes. We have more in common with the domestic goddess than we ever knew. [Daily Mail]
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Read All About It
Cora Pizza reopens, Joanne Kates picks her top restaurants, the fooderati’s top Twitterers
Ratted out: Cora Pizza reopens after health inspectors discovered rats on the premises (Photo by The Pizza Review)
• U of T students, rejoice: Cora Pizza reopened its doors last week. The restaurant, a long-standing refuge of drunken university students, was closed due to unsanitary conditions (including, apparently, several dead rats and rat feces on the premises). With a history like this, we’re sure the customers will come flocking back. [CBC]
• Joanne Kates counts down Toronto’s top new restaurants of 2009, with fairly predictable results. Among her favourites are Buca, Black Hoof, the revamped Splendido, Osteria Ciceri e Tria and Mildred’s Temple Kitchen. The one wild card is Ba Shu Ren Jia, a Szechuan spot with a four-figure Steeles Avenue address. [Globe and Mail] Read the rest of this entry »
Read All About It
Grizzly bear bolognese, David Gest cooks with Viagra, Wendy’s is not so big in Japan
Get ready to hear a lot about Vancouver (Photo by PoYang_博仰)
• With the Olympics opening in mere weeks, the gaze of the world has been turning to all things Vancouver, including its food scene. The L.A. Times scoped out the culinary offerings, pointing out that the city’s “cuisine scene is practically an Olympic Village unto itself.” Their finds range from the predictable (like Vij’s, an Indian food spot so popular even Martha Stewart had to queue for a table) to the quixotically Québécois (Café Salade de Fruits). Canada’s western city appears to offer a world of food options—almost as rich and broad as Toronto’s. But until we get the Olympics, perhaps no one will ever know. [L.A. Times]
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