At least, that is what a new study seems to suggest. Movie popcorn, the kind that you get in the movie theaters has changed little in the last fifteen years. It is still pretty bad for you.
I have to confess that I am not a big movie popcorn fan. I had been away from the movies for a while. Then one afternoon, my husband and I got to actually go to a movie. We ordered a tub of popcorn. A few minutes into eating it, we felt ill from the artificial butter.
For those of you who do love that movie theater popcorn, let me give you some facts. A medium sized popcorn along with a medium soda will contribute the following to your body: “the equivalent of three Quarter Pounders topped with 12 pats of butter.”
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group released this information in a recent report.
One of the worst examples comes from movie theater chain Regal. A medium popcorn her contains “1,200 calories, 60 grams of saturated fat, and 980 milligrams of sodium.” (It is important to note that Regal offers a larger “medium” than many other chains, and that contributes to the additional calories.) But wait, we haven’t even added the “butter topping” yet. A couple of squirts of that can give you an additional 400 calories (200 per 1.5 Tablespoons of the stuff.
How can popcorn contain so much saturated fat before the topping is even added? Well, for most major movie chains, the popcorn is popped in coconut oil, an inexpensive oil that is 90 percent saturated fat. Cinemark, another move theater chain in the study uses canola oil. Cinemark medium popcorn was only 760 calories and just 3 grams of saturated fat without the topping, of course.
Your best bet? Skip the movie popcorn all together. Eat healthy before you arrive at the theater.
You can read more blog posts by Mary Ann Romans here!
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