Hot Cheetos are a public health menace

Nurses General Nursing

Published

I had a woman come in for abdominal pain the other day. She accompanied by a husband and 3 small children. I walked into the room after reading the triage note in the computer.

There she was, a woman who had the appearance of someone with unhealthy eating habits. On the gurney was a large, opened bag of hot Cheetos. The family came prepared! The only thing missing was the 20 oz bottle of Pepsi.

Naturally she got a the huge workup, and by all appearances, I'm guessing it was a taxpayer funded one. And while I'm on that subject , why in the world are items like hot Cheetos allowable under the federal food stamp program? Oh, multinational corporation lobbyists of course.

Specializes in Med/Surge, Psych, LTC, Home Health.

Don't let any of these posts distract you from the following fact:

A Flamin Hot Cheetos Frappucino, is actually a thing.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in LTC, Rehab.
Don't let any of these posts distract you from the following fact:

A Flamin Hot Cheetos Frappucino, is actually a thing.

I'd say 'unbelievable!', but where I live - let me tell you first, that as a local radio station jokes, the Official Question of New Mexico is "Red or green?" (chile - on enchiladas, breakfast burritos, and lots of other things) - a local place is actually selling a green chile shake right now. I love green chile, but in a shake? No.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Don't let any of these posts distract you from the following fact:

A Flamin Hot Cheetos Frappucino, is actually a thing.

You are my hero. :inlove:

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Med/Surge, Psych, LTC, Home Health.

I tried posting a picture of one, but the picture was too big.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
I tried posting a picture of one, but the picture was too big.

No worries, I was already Googling trying to figure out where I can find one :D

The pictures look freakin amazing...Flamin' Amazing.

Up Vote Up Vote ×

Reading the back of a bag, there's MSG, and it also says there's syrup and sugar under the ingredients, but the label says 0 added sugar, so I'm not sure if everything is on the level there, and perhaps it's worth a food investigator's time and effort to pull it apart. None of what I've read definitively points to these causing gastritis but I'll keep going. What I have seen is that if you eat enough, it can turn BMs red, which freak a lot of people out and at that point probably do become a drain on resources.

But doctors and nurses need to start lobbying Congress and their localities about health and nutrition, else we're just playing whack a mole.

I found this on a firm's web site that specializes in lawsuits based on defective products:

It's almost amazing that Flamin' Hot Cheetos are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration instead of the Drug Enforcement Agency. A breakdown of the ingredients by WIRED magazine shows just how little actual food the snack contains. The full article is worth a read, but we've summed it up here:

Enriched cornmeal. Corn is milled to break and remove hard kernels, along with most of the nutritional value. Artificial chemical versions of natural nutrients are added back in to "enrich" the meal.

Maltodextrin. This flavorless white powdered chemical is used to evenly distribute other chemicals. The FDA considers it safe, but the powder has a high glycemic index that can cause big blood sugar spikes; diabetics, be warned.

"Cheddar cheese." When cheeses age, milk fat and protein break down into small fatty- and amino-acid fragments. Fatty acids taste cheesy, and amino acids taste savory; combining them into a slurry with milk solids and salt and drying it to a powder is not the same thing as using cheese.

Monosodium glutamate. The dreaded MSG is great for flavor, but bad for almost everything else; the compound has been linked to headaches, fatigue, and cancer.

"Natural" flavor. These are protected trade secrets; they're required to be a concentrate of an edible, naturally occurring substance. Unfortunately, natural flavors can constitute as little as 0.1% of the product by volume. With ultra-light Cheetos, that's an ultra-small amount of natural flavor.

Red 40 Lake and Yellow 6 Lake. Last but definitely not least, the dyes that make this product look improbably, unnaturally "fiery" are water-soluble dyes that don't play well with food until you make them act like oils. In order to do this, they are chemically altered into substances know as "lakes" through the addition of aluminum hydroxide. The next time your fingers turn orange or red from a helping of snack food, you can rest assured knowing that the sticky colors are the direct result of the aluminum compounds binding to your skin.

The Common Ingredients in Your Snack Foods Could Kill You

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Trauma, Teaching.
I'd say 'unbelievable!', but where I live - let me tell you first, that as a local radio station jokes, the Official Question of New Mexico is "Red or green?" (chile - on enchiladas, breakfast burritos, and lots of other things) - a local place is actually selling a green chile shake right now. I love green chile, but in a shake? No.

Umm, it isn't a joke. New Mexico really does have an official question, the kids got it passed through the legislature. We take our chile very seriously. I just bought some green chile/cactus jam at the Renne Faire. I offered to put a little green chile in the cornbread one Thanksgiving, and my out-of-state sister exploded with "Is there ANYTHING you people don't put green chile in!?". Couldn't think of anything.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Trauma, Teaching.

Back in the day when we routinely pumped out stomachs for overdoses, we were getting a lot of red stuff out of the tube. My doc started to say GIBleed! get some blood ready!, Looked a bit closer, and said, no, that's just salsa with his beer.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in OB-Gyn/Primary Care/Ambulatory Leadership.
"By all appearances."

The original poster may need to take a break and re-charge his/her batteries and come back fresh and ready to help people that feel that they are in a crisis without worrying about how they buy their damn Cheetos.

Agree. The OP was yucky. That's all I can allow myself to say without going into a tirade.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in ED, med-surg, peri op.

They don't sell cheetos in my country. But I got to try them when I was in Australia a couple of months ago. Seriously tasted like dried cat biscuits. Don't know how any one eats them. ended throwing out the whole bag. I'm going to the US next month for the first time, I always hear about the cheap array of food, just hope it taste better than Cheetos.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Cardiology, School Nursing, General.
FYI: When a 5th grader eats several bags of flaming hot cheetos and drinks several bottles of water to cool the flaming hotness, the ensuing vomit will be hot pink and will stain the school nurse's floor:nurse:

Yup and then they wonder WHY their stomach hurts SOOOO much today.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in ED, psych.

Sorry to be so "predictable."

But it's gross (both the judgment and the Cheetos). And I'm going to stand by that.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Add a Comment