A Beef with a Hot Dog

I recently saw some more pricey hot dogs in the grocery store that were made with "real Angus beef." Delicious, I thought–someone has stepped up the meat quality of hot dogs. Pretty cool. So I bought some.

I brought them home and decided to cook them immediately, so as to enjoy them before having to freeze them (though they were probably frozen before I bought them. Poor reasoning). I put them in a pot of hot water (I like my non-grilled hot dogs boiled, thank you) and left them to cook. When I checked the pot five minutes later, I was alarmed at what I saw. Little orange-ish grease bubbles had risen to the surface and had formed a ring around the inside of the pot. This had never happened before, so out of curiosity I checked the packaging for the fat content.

When I boil hot dogs, I cook the whole pack (usually five), and eat them all on slices of oatmeal bread. This package only had four, which will one day save somebody's life. Examining the Nutrition Facts, I found that each of these wieners delivered 35% of the recommended daily intake of saturated fat. Had I eaten all four of these, I would have received 28 grams, 140% of PDV in a single meal.

I am convinced that the wiener company saved money on production by replacing a good portion of what would have been Angus beef with fat. If you think I'm joking, let's do some math.

Each wiener weighs 57 grams and contains 7 grams of saturated fat. That means that 12.3% of that frank is saturated fat (the stuff that solidified on my plate when I was dabbing it off the bitten end). If we look at total fat, that's 16 grams, or 28% of the frank's weight. Twenty-eight percent of that hot dog is pure fat. If you're having trouble with the percentages, let me put it to you this way. Imagine a hot dog six inches long where one end is meat, and the other end is over and inch and a half of pure fat. Guess what! I had two of those for dinner!

Seriously, if you broke this meat-fat matrix down into its constituents, just over an inch and a half would be fat. The remaining four and a half inches would consist mostly of actual meat and water. If I had eaten all four hot dogs, one of them could have been made out of nothing but fat.

I have recently become very aware, and thus concerned, about the typical American diet. We consume very high levels of fats and sodium compared to what we should be eating and compared with typical diets in other countries. These hot dogs are a great example of one of the reasons our diet is so unhealthy: it's not that we go out of our way to eat lots of unhealthy food, the food that we readily eat is just made with crazily high levels of fats and sodium (a point I will have to argue later). Also, the hot dogs marketed as "selects" or "premium" are far less healthy than the standard ones, and whatever taste benefits came from the Angus beef are hidden in the taste of grease.

Why can't a better hot dog just be, well, better?