You know that really big fast food project that I mentioned I’ve been working on? Well, it’s done… and it’s F’ing awesome!

What it is, is a side-by-side comparison of the most popular foods from over 20 popular fast food restaurants to see how each restaurant’s version of the same food stacks up against all of the others.

I call it Fast Food Restaurants and Nutrition Facts Compared.

So, for example, you’ll see the nutrition facts of the French Fries from McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, White Castle and a dozen more side-by-side to compare which has the most/least calories, fat, saturated fat, trans fat, carbs and sodium.

Like I said… it’s quite awesome. Go check it out.

Have any questions or feedback about it? Leave it in the comments here. Also, if you have suggestions for other fast food items you would like to see added to the comparison, feel free to leave them in the comments as well. I can’t make any promises, but if you know of a similar type of food that is sold at 2 or more fast food restaurants, I’ll do my best to put it all together and add it to the comparison.

Hope you guys like it. My eyeballs almost exploded while putting it all together.

So, three days ago I finished putting together a list of the 88 fast food items highest in trans fat (which I gave the lovely nickname of The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You). I personally thought it was something a bunch of people would find either useful, interesting or a combination of both. As it turns out, a “bunch” was an underestimation on my part.

Within the span of a couple of hours, the article got mentioned on seriouseats.com, consumerist.com, and kottke.org. Within about an hour or so of that, the article was on the front page of Digg and a bit later in the day, the front page of del.icio.us as well.

To the non-geeks in attendance, this translated into about 40,000 people coming to a Calorie Counter in less than 24 hours to check out that fast food/trans fat article. Another 14,000 came the next day. Today, as of 11:30am on a Sunday morning, another 2,000 were here. Quite insane (and very awesome), if you ask me.

So, to all of the sites/blogs that mentioned the article, thanks a lot. To everyone who continues to mention it (it’s honestly hard for me to keep up at this point), thank you as well. I’m glad people seemed to dig it (pun most definitely intended).

You same people will most definitely dig the wayyyy bigger fast food related project I’m currently working on. Stay tuned.

I’d also like to point you guys in the direction of something a guy named Michael put together. He took all of the data from the trans fat fast food list and made it a bit more visual. You can see what I mean here: bar chart and here: tree map. Pretty cool. Thanks Michael.

Later.

Catchy title, don’t ya think?

I’m currently in the very early stages of putting something pretty big together involving fast food. However, I came up with a little something to show you guys in the mean time. I’ve nicknamed it The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You.

Basically, I looked over the nutrition facts of nearly 20 popular fast food restaurants to put together a list/ranking of the foods that contained the most trans fat (AKA the very evil, disease-causing type of fat).

I started with the intention of making a list of the 10 highest trans fat foods, but even I was a bit surprised by how many foods ended up being significantly high in trans fat. So, what started out as 10 foods turned into 88 foods.

Crazy, I agree.

So, if you happen to eat fast food often (or just semi-often) yet still care about your health, take a peak at The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You and do your very best to avoid them.

Questions or feedback? Leave ‘em in the comments.

With Halloween almost here, it made up coming up with my next food comparison idea (after the cereal one) pretty easy.

So, I present to you… Candy & Chocolate Bars Compared

This comparison features almost 70 different types of candy and chocolate bars from brands like Hershey’s, Nestle and Mars. Before you dig into your left over Halloween candy (or what you/your kids bring in from trick-or-treating), you may just want to give this a quick glance. Enjoy.

Questions or feedback? Leave ‘em in the comments.

If there is one thing I certainly won’t be doing around here very often, it’s recommending a product. The reason for that is pretty simple… most diet and fitness products are complete and utter crap, and I just happen to be one of those weird people that would prefer to give you really good info rather than steal your money. I’m insane, I know.

So, on the rare occasion that I actually go out of my way to recommend something, you should know that I’m doing it because — brace yourselves — the product is actually useful. Welcome to one of those times.

I’m just going to come out and say it. You should own a digital food scale. It is, in my opinion, the most useful “diet product” in existence. Whether you’re looking to lose weight, gain weight or just eat healthier, this should be the first (and perhaps only) product you ever spend your money on.

Why, you ask? I can answer that in one sentence. A digital food scale just makes the life of a person who gives a crap about what they are putting into their body so much easier. How’s that for a selling point? And, when used in conjunction with a Calorie Counter, your days of having any diet problems of any kind are officially over.

See, if a Calorie Counter was Batman… a digital food scale would be Robin. Let me explain.

If you’ve played around with a Calorie Counter’s nutritional search engine before, you probably noticed that it allows you to search for a food and then view its full nutritional information (calories, fat, protein, carbs, etc.) instantly and for free. What you may have also noticed is that you have the ability to enter in any serving size you want for a food, at which point all of the nutritional information shown for that food will automatically adjust itself according to the specific serving size you entered.

Yup, it’s like magic.

So, how exactly does a digital food scale play into all of this? Simple. It eliminates all of the guessing and estimating and makes accurately keeping track of your diet really, really easy. Now all you need to do is just:

1. Turn the food scale on.
2. Put your food on it.
3. Read the weight.

Hard work, ain’t it? And then after that just:

1. Come to a Calorie Counter.
2. Search for your food.
3. Select grams or ounces (depends which one your scale uses) from the drop-down menu.
4. Enter in the weight of your food as the serving size.

That’s it.

The digital food scale gives you your EXACT serving size which you then enter in right here on a Calorie Counter. You will then be instantly shown the EXACT nutrition facts for your specific serving of food. Did I say the word EXACT enough? Just in case I didn’t… exact, exact, exact.

Let’s see, what else might you want to know? Oh, digital food scales are small and cheap. The one I personally use and fully recommend (Salter 2001 5-Pound Microtronic Kitchen Scale) costs $29.99 and is about 1-2 inches thick, and a little bit wider than a DVD. I’ve used it daily for almost 2 years with no problems whatsoever, and only needed to change the battery twice.

That pretty much does it. So yeah, go get one already.

Hey there. As of this week, a Calorie Counter is officially live. So far, people seem to like it… a lot. The site was mentioned on a few big blogs (Lifehacker and Fitsugar, for example) and even spent most of a day on the front page of del.icio.us. Awesome!

I’ve been getting some feedback, and it has all been really positive. I’ve also gotten a few really good suggestions. If you have any feedback/suggestions of your own, leave ‘em in the comments.

And, as if you didn’t notice, the a Calorie Counter Blog is officially live as well. Be sure to grab up the feed, because you’re definitely going to want to read this blog. Seriously. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m not even joking. Fan-freaking-tastic. So, go ahead and add that feed to your feed reader of choice. You’ll be happy you did.

Other than that, stay tuned for some of the most useful diet, nutrition, weight, food, and health related content this here internet has ever seen.