While Gut Check is on vacation, enjoy highlights from the past two years.
Men’s Health magazine has released its annual “Worst Foods” list. Scoring the top spot as the absolute worst food in the country? A large Chocolate Oreo Shake from Baskin Robbins. This bad boy has 2,600 calories, 135 grams of fat (59 of which are saturated), 263 grams of sugar and 1,700 milligrams of sodium.
And now it sits on my desk, taunting me.
Now, I don’t blame Baskin Robbins for selling this. No one’s forcing you to buy a Chocolate Oreo Shake in any size, let alone large — unless you’re a food blogger desperate for content on Friday, that is. Frankly, I bet Baskin Robbins will sell more of these now that Men’s Health has declared it the country’s “worst food” than it ever did before. I mean, I never would have thought to buy one.
It’s hard to say just how much ice cream goes into this thing. The man who made mine used four or five GIANT scoops of ice cream. It wasn’t mixed using the store’s traditional milkshake mixer but rather in a blender, which was placed inside a contraption that looked like a blast shield. I guess that many calories spun at a high rate speed have the potential for an explosion.
Ironically, for all those calories, the Chocolate Oreo Shake’s texture is kinda thin. It certainly lacks the lung-draining thickness of a classic soda-fountain shake. And all that crumbled up cookie gives it a grainy feel. A colleague astutely compared it to a protein smoothie loaded with whey powder.
The most unappetizing part — assuming, for a second, that you somehow didn’t know it was a heart attack in a plastic cup — has to be the color. The same colleague and I just had this exchange:
Colleague: “It looks blueberry-flavored. You expect there to be berries.”
Me: “It looks Dockers flavored. It’s khaki.”
No, I didn’t eat the whole thing. In fact, three or four sips were more than enough. Those had to be 200-300 calories by themselves. Too bad we retired Keep It Down.
