My favorite sweet tea is the sweet tea from McDonald’s. I love the fact that I can get a large sweet tea from McDonald’s for only one dollar. The thing that bothers me about it though, is the thought of exactly how many calories are IN that large sweet tea? I just found out that there are 280 calories in a large McDonald’s sweet tea. There are 15 calories in a teaspoon of sugar. So that means that there are almost 19 teaspoonfuls of sugar in a large sweet tea!
When I go to any other place that sells sweet tea, it is not nearly as sweet. In fact a lot of the times I order a sweet tea and I would have to say that the tea that I get had no sweetener in it at all. So I end up dumping three or four sweetener packets into the tea.
I wish that McDonald’s would sell a sweet tea that had a sugar substitute in it. I like the Truvia and the Splenda sweeteners, and if they would use those sweeteners in their sweet tea I would not be so worried about the calorie count in it. Now that I know how many spoonfuls of sugar there are in their sweet tea I might start ordering the tea unsweetened and just add my own Truvia or Splenda. I gotta watch my weight!
Have you ever noticed that in rural areas that most houses do not have any address signs other than a number on the rural mailbox at the end of the driveway? And sometimes that number is written on the side of the mail box that is facing the opposite way of regular oncoming traffic? That never made a lot of sense to me, because that would indicate that the rural mail carrier is driving on the wrong side of the road, and it seems to me that is illegal – even for mail carriers!
To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the mail box is on the opposite road of the house that is receiving the mail, and that makes it even more difficult to find someone’s house if you don’t already know where you are going! That is why I think that every rural house should have an address plaque at the end of their driveway with their entire house number clearly visible from both directions.
Properly placed address plaques are not just to make life easier for visitors coming for a social visit, they are important because in rural areas it can be difficult for rescue services to respond to an emergency if the location is not clearly marked. Every house should have clear identification, down by the road, and on the house itself. It could save a life!
A few years ago a good friend of mine died of some form of cancer. At the time no one told me exactly what the cancer was, but I’m beginning to think it was Mesothelioma because he ran a cement company. I’m thinking that because I just found out that there is asbestos in insulation, roof shingles, cement, brake linings, flooring products, and textiles. The “textiles” part really worries me – because “textiles” generally refers to fabrics. Does that mean carpets and fabrics?
I really didn’t realize that asbestos was in so many products that we come into contact with on a daily basis! And I just found out that the symptoms often don’t surface until as many as 30 to 50 years after the exposure to the asbestos!
With the baby boomers were born, there was a massive housing explosion that created a lot of these products to be put into the general population. I think that the repercussions are yet to be fully seen.
Several years ago there was a television show that I liked to watch called “30 days.” One of the episodes was about the producer and his wife trying to live on minimum wage for thirty days. As part of the deal they had to rent an apartment, furnish it, find jobs, get to and from those jobs and make ends meet for an entire month. One of the things that had to do was act as if they had no medical insurance during that period of time.
There were a couple of times during that time period that they did go to the hospital’s emergency room, and because they had no medical insurance they ended with a huge bill that they were going to have to try to make payment arrangements on. I was quite impressed with the television show and how that episode in particular highlighted the need for everyone to have medical insurance because medical care is very expensive, and beyond the reach of many of the people in the working class.
My wife’s doctor has told her that it would be a really good idea for her to eliminate caffeine from her diet. She has varicose veins and a sleeping disorder, and her doctor said that caffeine would make both of those problems worse. So over the past couple of weeks my wife has changed her routine from two cups of tea daily to one cup, and now she has switched over to decaffeinated tea. Unfortunately she has been suffering from migraine headaches over the past couple of years and the caffeine was helping to treat those migraines.
I asked our pharmacist if there was any over the counter treatment for migraines that does not have caffeine in it, and he said no there wasn’t. I think maybe we should change her decaf tea to half-decaf and half regular for a while and see if that helps.
Food, General life, Health | Dean | 
May 7, 2012 9:31 pm | 
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