The Today Show's health blog has a very serious-sounding article about the dangers of eating high-salt foods. Specifically…chicken nuggets. Yup, according to the article, those little nuggets of fried goodness can kill you!
Using 17-year old Stacy Irvine (who recently collapsed at work after a 15-year chicken nugget-only diet) as an example, the article says that "experts warn of high-salt diet." Really? Let's read a little more about Stacey:
As reported by the Daily Mail, when Stacey Irvine’s mother first took her to a McDonald’s restaurant 15 years ago and bought her some Chicken McNuggets, it was love at first bite. Since then, the British teen has eaten almost nothing but Chicken McNuggets. A diet like this not only lacks vital nutrients, it also serves up a dangerous amount of salt. A 10-piece order of Chicken McNuggets packs in 900 milligrams (mg) of sodium, more than half the sodium you should have in a single day.
Ok, so let's just get the facts straight here. Little Stacey goes to McDonalds at 2-years old and eats a chicken nugget. A full fifteen years later, that's the only thing this girl has consumed? Something tells me that Stacey has a lot more problems than just chicken nuggets….like, oh, having crappy parents that let her eat chicken nuggets at every meal. I don't know, call me crazy, but that kind of seems like bad parenting practices…no? Maybe next time, the food nannies over at the Today Show could use this as a headline:
"Extremely Negligent Parents Allow Child To Eat Nothing But Chicken Nuggets For Fifteen Years"
Catchy!
The mainstream media positively salivates when they get a hold of these outliers like this Stacey Irvine. I look forward to their next story recommending we all lower our water consumption based on this 2008 story about a guy who literally killed himself by drinking too much water.