I posted to Twitter/Facebook earlier with a comment asking if it were worth it to avoid McDonald's despite the fact that I can get a full meal there for $3. While I was being facetious, it sparked an interesting conversation that revealed the many misconceptions I think people have about McDonald's.
In any discussion of the world's largest fast food chain, the documentary Super Size Me is bound to come up. Super Size Me is perhaps one of the most egregious forms of unfounded propaganda of this decade. All Morgan Spurlock proves is that if you eat 5,000 calories a day, you are going to get sick. He chooses to ignore the fact that consuming 5,000 calories a day of any food items is going to make you sick. There is nothing rigorous or scientific about his "experiment". It's merely an exercise in shock value and extreme behavior.
A friend of mine argues that Spurlock was trying to show how McDonald's and all the other fast food restaurants are "socially engineering" people to eat more, crappier foods. I don't think this is correct either. Here's why:
1. If anything, it's quite the opposite. McDonald's has been at the forefront of offering healthier fare for many years. They were selling salads as early as 1987, and low-fat burgers like the McLean Deluxe in 1991. They offer apple sticks in lieu of French fries, and fruit parfait instead of ice cream and shakes. As a matter of fact, they are ranked among the top ten healthiest fast food chains by Health magazine. Let's face it: it's fast food and everyone knows it's not nutritionally optimal. But for what it is, McDonald's should be recognized as an innovator and trend-setter in delivering healthy options well before other comparable fast food chains.
2. Is McDonald's any more guilty of "social engineering" than Burger King, or Safeway, or Cheesecake Factory, or any other food seller in the U.S.? First and foremost, McDonald's is a business. Their goal is to make money, and in order to do that they have to convince people to buy more of their food. It's no different than grocery store tactics that rely on optimal shelf placement for maximizing sales. Making McDonald's a scapegoat for this is ridiculous as it's something that has permeated the entire food industry for decades.
3. Despite what Spurlock asserts in his documentary, McDonald's is much more transparent regarding its nutritional content than most restaurants where one can supposedly get a nutritious meal. My wife and I went to a nice restaurant this evening for dinner. While the food was typical San Francisco fare, and supposedly made fresh with the best ingredients, how am I supposed to figure out the sodium content of my fillet of sole ceviche? There is no easy way to do this, but I know exactly how much sodium was in the McDouble and the McChicken I had for lunch yesterday (1,750 mg... ouch) by simply visiting their website. I can even learn the relevant nutritional information per ingredient and use that information to customize my order.
All that "social engineering" business aside, I will make one final point about the food at McDonald's (or any comparable fast food chain, or anything you eat at all, for that matter): the food is only as bad as the context in which you eat it. In other words, your body needs a certain number of calories; grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fats; and milligrams of sodium and cholesterol per day (among other things). McDonald's food is just fine as long as you are not exceeding these boundaries. If that Big Mac causes you to go over your daily allotment of calories, then it is unhealthy. If you are eating it once per day and are within those bounds, then it's not unhealthy. The context of what you're eating renders it healthy or not, not the food in and of itself.
6 comments:
Who cares about health? Welcome to flavor country:
If I was making a list of national fast food burger places in order of preference, McDonalds would probably be last.
1. Wendy's (great overall menu)
2. Fat Burger (probably the best fast food burgers, very good shakes)
3. Dairy Queen (Blizzards are good enough to over come the crappiness of everything else)
4. Burger King (good onion rings)
5. McDonald's (I will say they have the best french fries by far, but I place a low value on fries)
Intentionally Unranked (never been): Arby's, Hardee's/Carl's Jr
If you really like fries, I can see liking McDonald's, but everything else is lamesauce.
You need to remember what kicked of Spurlock’s documentary. McDonald's was being sued for their food making two girls obese, so an executive ran a full page add stating that McDonald’s food was so healthy you could eat it for every meal. So he did. That is why he sampled the whole menu, even the bottled water. He used a pedometer to move as much as the average American, which as he points out, isn’t very much. The only reason he picked on McDonalds was because they ran that stupid ad in a paper. McDonalds food is not healthy, it is a treat.
Let us look at what treating yourself to a Big Mac® meal consists of. All information is gathered from McDonalds (http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/nutrition_facts.html)
A Big Mac® is 540 calories, 260 of which are from 29grams of fat and equals 45% of your daily value. All of this is in ONE sandwich. Now, let us get to the rest of the “meal” or treat, as it should be called. The treat of A Big Mac® “meal” comes with an order of medium french fries that has 380 calories, 170 of which are from 19 grams of fat and equals 29% of your daily value. I’ll be nice and say you are health conscious and drink water.
That means that in one sitting you would consume 920 calories and 74% of your daily value of fat.
What this does, if you even eat ONE treat like this a day, is it takes almost half of your allotted calories and three quarters of your fat grams in one sitting. The quality of these foods is so poor due to all the processing and preservatives that you can’t compare them to healthy foods like fresh ground beef that you could make in to a burger or baked potato wedges.
What Spurlock proved was that if you eat at McDonald’s every meal, everyday and you sample the entire menu that you cannot stay under 5,000 calories a day. The whole concept of “supersizing” is unhealthy. As a result of this McDonald’s doesn’t supersize anymore, they have added healthier options like apple slices, and fat free salads. Yes, fat free salads, because even though they introduced salads their salads had more fat than most of the burgers, and some still do. The Premium Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken has 430 calories, 180 of which are from 20 grams of fat and equals 30% of your daily value.
Again, McDonald’s isn’t healthy, like smoking. Sure you can do it, but if you do it every day, multiple times a day you will have a shorter life span, guaranteed.
Krishna, what do you define as a national chain? Presence in every state? More than 1 state? Most states?
My list would look like this:
1. Burger King - I love the Whopper
2. Carl's Jr. - $6 burgers are the bomb, especially bacon guacamole
3. In 'N Out - Is this a national chain? Who cares, it's on my list
4. Wendy's - I agree the menu is best overall; chili instead of fries is a huge plus
5. McDonald's - for lack of a better option
Mr. Dragon, you need to remember that those two fat girls who sued McDonald's lost their case. The judge dismissed the case as frivolous and essentially asserted that individuals were responsible for making themselves fat, not McDonald's. The lawsuit was just as stupid as the exec's claim that you could eat it for every meal.
And that brings me back to my original point: McDonald's is only bad for you given the context of everything else you eat. You can eat it as often as you want provided you stay within nutritional bounds. Even if you eat that Big Mac and French fries meal, you simply have to ensure you don't go over your fat content for the day with the rest of the food you eat.
It's all about individual responsibility. McDonald's can't be held accountable for making people fat and unhealthy when a) every other food establishment is doing the same exact thing, and b) ignorant people who don't know any better are eating poorly anyway. McDonald's is no more guilty of "social engineering" and serving bad food than any other food establishment, or any individual out there with no information on nutrition.
As an aside, the average person visits McDonald's twice per month according to the company's website.
five guys is coming, your burger world is about to get rocked
i am still waiting to read the next RAJ AGAINST THE MACHINE blog entry. BTW, denny's, yes, denny's has one of the best cheeseburgers around. believe it.
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