It’s nearly game day and, if you’re a fan, you’ve already set aside your roomiest sweatpants and your own personal Family-size bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. But if you’re at all concerned about overindulging—which, if you live in America, you probably should be—you might take a tip from a public health advocate at the New York City Food Policy Center. Charles Platkin says that one way to avoid overdoing it is to consider how much you’d have to exercise to work off what you consume.
So to prepare for Super Bowl Sunday—the second biggest day for food consumption in the U.S.—Platkin crunched the numbers for some of our favorite couch-side snacks. And he’s helpfully converted them into football-themed exercise equivalents.
So, for example, two slices of Domino’s ultimate pepperoni hand-tossed crust pizza would require running nearly 11,000 yards—that’s 109 football fields—at a speed of five miles per hour.
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Two KFC original drumsticks? Just do the wave 1,561 times.
To pay for a single potato chip loaded with French onion dip you’d have to sing along with Coldplay and Beyonce for 30 minutes during halftime.
And even five pretzels—yes, puny little pretzels out of a bag—would take six-and-a-half minutes of jumping up and down whenever your team scores a touchdown.
Which means that if you want to avoid post-bowl paunch, your team better bring it. Either that or just stick with the celery sticks. And pass on the dip, if you want to maintain the current size of your end zone.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
