I keep hearing horror stories about how bad for your health fast food in general, and McDonald’s in particular, are.
But, if you get a plain hamburger, with no topings, then how bad can it be?
I assume it’s 100% beef, so
a) Do they use beef parts that are bad for your health?
b) Do they fry it in some godawful high-fat oil?
c) Is there something unhealthy about their buns, or how they bake them?
d) Something else?
The main motivation for this question is the many parents I’ve met who never buy McDonalds for their kids because it’s “the worst food in the world for your health”.
From what I’ve read about McDonalds (the rumors mentioned on snopes.com and I think some article by Cecil himself), the worst thing about a McDonalds burger is that it comes from a cheap cut of beef, so it seems to me that giving your kids McDonalds once a week should be OK, healthwise.
Am I missing something?
P.S. Anything nasty about their shakes?
There’s nothing wrong with a McDonald’s hamburger, even with the condiments. The meat is ordinary, if cheaper, cuts of beef and the buns are white bread and no worse than what you’d get in the bread isle of your local supermarket. There may be some preservatives and flavor enhancers, but you’ll find those in nearly all processed foods. In other words, even if you make a hamburger at home, it’s not going to be any better for you than one from McD’s.
Speaking as a diabetic who travels from time to time, most simple fast food simple is actually not bad for you. A plain hamburger and a salad is usually reasonably non-fat and balanced, and fairly cheap.
The SuperMcWhopperGrandeBurger with extra bacon, fat, mayo, ham, and habanero ranch salsa maybe not so good. But a bun, slice of meat, pickle, tomatoe, shred of lettuce? Not bad.
According to McDonald’s own site, one hamburger (the dinky kind, not even a quarter pounder), has 260 calories, which is over 10% of the recommended 2000 calories for men, and over 20% of the 1200 calories recommended for women. If you add small fries and a soda, you’re at 660 calories. Small fries and small shake: 950 calories.
Meanwhile, the hamburger alone has 14% of your total recommended fat intake, and 22% of your sodium intake. Fries add another 20% of your fat intake, and 6% of your sodium intake. A soda doesn’t add much to this, but a shake adds 16% fat and 8% sodium.
Meanwhile, the %RDA of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Iron, Calcium and Fiber are almost negligible.
So you’ve got two other meals to make up these nutritional requirements, when your recommended intake of sodium, fat, and overall calories have taken a big hit on this one tiny meal.
So even before you get into any scare stories of E. coli, trans fats, etc., we’re talking about a meal that is extremely poor from a nutritional standpoint.
… he said a hamburger, not hamburger, fries & a shake. To be fair, I added a salad, and shouldn’t have. But the hamburger itself, with 1/7 the daily allotment of fat, isn’t anything special.
Now, McDonald’s breakfasts… let’s just not go there…
I think the biggest damager is the price. If you watch what you order to make sure you’re getting what all nutrients you need, and simply don’t eat too much, it’s just food. But if you by two of the sets they have, don’t order anything but meat and bread, and treat that as being a snack, then certainly you’re going to have a problem.
McDonald’s is just one of many companies that make it affordable to eat poorly. But the reason they have done so well is because people want to eat lots of salty stuff “for cheap.” No one’s making them put the money on the counter, and no one is forcing them to choose an imbalanced meal out of everything that is on the menu.
Yeah, but if you get a salad and go easy on the low fat dressing instead of fries and get the diet soda, you are good to go. The diet lemonade is caffeine free. Yeah, there is still a lot of sodium, but for many people that is not as big an issue as it is for some people. If you are fit and work out, the extra sodium won’t hurt you and you may even need it because you have been excreting it.
McDonald’s own nutritional guidelines state that McDonald’s can be PART of a healthy diet, and it can be. If you eat it 24/7 like that guy that made the movie, then well no duh. I don’t have a nutrition degree, but I could have foretold the outcome. McDonald’s is fine. If you like it, feel free to eat it once in a while. Then get the veggie thing when you go out to Thai for dinner.
AIUI, what’s so bad about fast food isn’t the small plain hamburgers. It’s the larger sandwiches with lots of cheese, bacon, and what have you. Another problem is that the chicken or fish sandwiches, which some people think of as healthier than beef, often have more calories and fat than a small hamburger.
And then there are the fries, where a large fries has much more in it than a small and only costs a little more, so you think you should get the large fries to “get your money’s worth” and end up eating all of it. Same deal with the sodas or shakes.
McDonald’s in the US does, AFAIK, fry their fries in beef tallow, which makes them unsuitable for vegetarians or people who keep kosher. I never eat at McDonald’s for that reason, and if and when I have kids, I won’t take them there for the same reason.
I think some of the parents who will never buy McDonald’s for their kids are falling into the same kind of thinking that the people who think a chicken sandwich must be healthier than a hamburger are doing. There’s a pervasive idea that there are some “bad foods”, and if you just eliminate those from your diet, you’ll automatically have a healthy diet. What the “bad foods” are varies over time- for a while it was fat, then it was carbs, for these parents it seems to be fast food. But it’s entirely possible to have an unhealthy diet that doesn’t include fast food.
I think he also forced himself to eat when he wasn’t hungry, or to keep eating when he was full. If you do that, pretty much no matter what it is you’re eating, you’re going to have problems.
The problem with such an analysis, though, is that there’s no comparison to what people would eat at home if they didn’t go to McDonalds. Does the average person prepare a low-sodium meal of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains when they eat at home? I seriously doubt that they do. The average person would probably make a sandwich with processed lunchmeat high in sodium, high-fat mayo, and packaged bread with little nutritional content. Or they’d open a can of soup or a box of Mac & Cheese and get about 100% of their sodium intake in one meal. Or worse.
Anne Neville, McDonald’s does not use beef tallow. They fry in hydrogenated vegetable oil (which is apparently even worse for you).
To summarize: McDonald’s in the US has not fried in beef tallow since 1990; however, they do use beef extract to flavor the oil in the US, thus their fries are not vegetarian. Canadian McDonalds do use beef fat.
I’d appreciate a cite for the bolded portion, please. When I was a young woman (1980s) I always read that 1,200 calories a day was the minimum number of calories recommended for weight loss, and anything too much below that was a diet too extreme to provide necessary nutrients. So it is surprising for me to see that that is now a recommended normal intake.
True. I was trying to think about the ordinary hamburger, not the things that I would actually order. Their hamburger is very teeny. One wants to add to it to make an actual meal, and that adds significantly to the total. If you treat the hamburger alone as a snack outside of three other square meals, it means you’ve taken away from the calories you can consume in your other meals, and you don’t have a lot of nutrition to show for it.
For my young daughter, that one plain burger is enough.
OTOH, I sometimes get her a chocolate shake also, and from the McDonald’s website info, it seems the shake has more harmful stuff (sturated fat, cholesterol, etc) than the plain burger.
True. The OP asked specifically about the hamburger, so that’s what I went with.
Yes, but that all goes back to the McLibel trial in England. McDonalds sued the members of a grassroots public action organization for circulating a leaflet criticizing McD’s for a wide variety of misdeeds. The defendants had the choice of proving the statements in the flyer with evidence to convince a judge, or following an “out” in England’s then-current law where they could publicly apologize to McDonalds to get the case dropped, which is the option most of the group chose. Two of them didn’t however, and set about taking on McDonalds, Inc. with donated legal help and resources. The case dragged on for years. While the judge ultimately ruled in favor of McDonalds, it was only in the sense that the activists had not proved every single item in the pamphlet. The judge found they HAD made their case on a number of points, such as exploitation of children through advertising, and other things very damaging to McDonalds public image.
One of the areas in which the judge ruled McDonalds was in misleading advertising in terms of the healthiness of their food. Up to that point, NO McDonalds advertising even remotely suggested that eating every meal at McDonalds was in any way an unwise choice (true, you’d have to be an idiot to think it was wise, but still), and they cultivated a false air of health around their products.
Right around the time a documentary about the trial became known, Morgan Spurlock did his month of Mickey D’s stunt, and suddenly, McDonalds was all about only eating their burgers occasionally, and out came the salads and fruit.
True, most people who eat a hamburger at the golden arches aren’t going to go home for bean sprouts afterward. People eat what they eat. My point is not that McDonalds is surrepticiously ruining people’s nonexistent attempts to eat healthy. I was simply trying to illustrate the deficiency of their burger using their own numbers regarding recommended dietary intake.
The OP was asking what’s so bad about a McDonalds hamburger. While you could go on for days about specific isolated misdeeds of the company, and whether or not all of them are publicly known, blah, blah, blah, I just felt like sticking to basics: It’s not so much that the burger is actively harmful to you, it’s just that it doesn’t offer much in the way of actual nutrients for all the calories, fat and salt it delivers. Hence the term “junk food”.