Have you found any information on the McDonalds hamburger bun vs a non-McDonald’s bun?
I’ve tried looking but can’t find information on just the bun.
Despite the wealth of information that has developed in this thread, the real problem is the way the question is framed. Foods are not simply good for you or bad for you. No more than fire is good - or bad. Unless something is an out and out poison, or has been universally demonstrated to have deleterious effects on health, and I’m not talking politicially now, but chemically, whether something is good or bad for you has to do with what you need and how much of it. Things that you must have in your diet to maintain good health include various types of protein, carbohydrates, fats, and miscellaneous vitamins and minerals. These are available in a number of foods. Depending upon your own health and physical condition, you may require more or less of some of these in the course of a day or week or year. If you are deficient in one of them, then eating the proper amount of it is good for you. Eating too much would be bad for you. There have been various nutrients that over the years have been labeled as “good” or “bad” without any reference to their presence or absence in individual diets, which is lamentable. Some people would say that, for instance, salt is bad for you. Or fat. Or sugar. All of these things are absolute requirements for optimal health. We MUST have salt in our diets. We must have fat. And sugar. The question for an individual is the amount, and the source, since certain sources, while providing the essential nutrient also provide materials that may NOT be required, or may be in excess of that required, or may have been shown to be detrimental to health. It is extremely short sighted and simple minded to state flatly that such and such a food is good for you or bad. And until transfats are proven to be of no use at all in the human body, it may be assumed that we even require some of those.
If you follow the Bag A McMeal link I provided earlier, you can add verious menu items to the bag. If you request more info on an item, it will give you nutritional info for that menu item. If you click the plus sign next to it, it will give you nutritional info by ingredient, and you can select and deselect each one. Using that, you can isolate the bun.
Thanks! My husband swears that there is a lot of sugar in the buns. He said they taste sweet to him. They pretty much taste the same to me.
But I’m not just talking about people who eat at McDonalds. I’d bet if you took your average person who brags that “I never eat fast food”, and went to his/house for dinner, they aren’t going to be eating broccoli and brown rice. There seems to be an idea among many people that anything you prepared at home is automatically better for you.
I think those numbers are unrealistic, though. People don’t actually eat that way, even people who cook at home. A lot of the stuff people make at home is even worse than what you get at McDonalds. That’s why I don’t think it tells us anything to look at numbers without a real-world comparison.
Maybe, but that wasn’t what I was talking about at the time. I was talking about the Mickey D’s burger compared with other foods in general, not what foods people are likely to eat.
Which is why the direct comparison, a couple of posts above this one, are so telling.
Lots of interesting stuff, folks. Wanted to add a couple of small points.
As I recall the movie Supersize Me, he did not “gorge himself” at every meal. Instead, he would only eat what was sold at McD’s (and I believe he had some rule about not repeating things too often or ordering all the various things on the menu.) But anytime he was asked if he would like to “supersize” his order, he would accept - which I understand was getting at the marketing tactics. But it isn’t as tho he went in there and ordered 2-3 Big Macs and multiple orders of fries, ice cream and a cherry pie for every meal.
Somewhat recently I read an article about whether McD’s was doing enough for nutrition. The rep said something like, “Believe me, if we could make as much money selling fresh fruit, that’s what we’d sell.” Fat and salt taste good.
Final point, I recall reading something that said that - at least in its earlier days - to some extent McD’s success is in its real estate holdings. Whatever they sold to maintain the value of their holdings was somewhat unimportant. Not sure how well that holds up to scrutiny…
My opinion, the occasional McD’s burger can taste good, but every time I eat one I get the feeling that it isn’t really “food” - every aspect of it is so darned processed. And more often than not, my gut complains afterwards.
I didn’t say you weren’t talking about that. I simply said that absolute numbers do no good without anything to compare them to.
Not really. Differences in methodology will net different numbers. Here’s a site that says a homemade 1/4 pound burger has more fat & calories than a McDonald’s burger:
http://magazines.ivillage.com/goodhousekeeping/diet/calc/spc/0,,284562_295584,00.html
But I think the point was that he forced himself to eat all the food, whether he was hungry or not. Also, I thought I did see him drinking shakes in the film.
Veddy interesting. Here are my site’s claims about the sources of their information.. What are your site’s calculations based on?
scotandrsn, you seem to have an issue with McDonalds marketing and business practices, and your complaints along these lines are probably very valid. So why don’t you just say that? This are separate issues from whether or not their food is unhealthy. And if your goal is to get people to avoid McDonalds, then focusing on their business practices will probably be more effective then massaging data. To be quite honest, some of the claims you’ve made here (like the idea that a woman only needs 1,200 calories a day) demonstrate that you probably know more about corporate ethics than about nutrition.
Well, he was sure as hell gorging himself at some of the meals. There’s one scene of him puking in the parking lot after forcing a quarter pounder with cheese and fries down his throat. He did have a rule that he had to order everything on the menu at least once, and would ONLY get it supersized if offered (and if offered, he would accept). That said, he was offered a supersized meal very rarely, which either means that McD’s isn’t pushing that anymore, or it has some highly unmotivated employees (or a little of both).
Speaking of 2-3 Big Macs, the movie also featured a guy who DOES buy 2-3 Big Macs every time he goes to McDs, which I understood was a daily or multiple-times-daily event for him. The bastard woulda made an Ethiopian supermodel feel bloated in comparison. He DID make a point of avoiding the french fries though. He’s no doubt an exception rather than the rule, but it was still interesting to see.
I have a question, on the subject of Supersize Me: Was I the only one who went to McDonalds for the first time in a very long while after seeing that movie? Cause I had a serious craving for a cheeseburger (Which turned out to be not nearly as good as I was hoping).
That’s a cute little whine by the poster n that thread. But I’ve been ordering plain burgers at various fast food joints for over 25 years and have a wrong order maybe twice a year. And in most cases that gets remedied pretty quickly.
The double cheeseburger is a much, much worse thing for McDonald’s to be selling than a plain burger.
260 vs 460 calories
9 v 23 grams of fat
Twice as much sodium, so it’s almost half of your daily value.
And it’s $1. So a lot of guys buy 3 with no problem, because it’s a good deal.
and you’ll be thirsty, so let’s get a small drink. no wait, the larger ones cost only abit more. hey let’s get a set meal or two - you’ll save more and get fries too!
Your link says:
That’s awfully vague. You can’t tell how much fat a cooked hamburger has by looking at a raw hamburger package. Since they don’t appear to have done their own testing, where exactly did they get the info for a burger cooked at home? From “individual submissions”? What does that mean? A random person emailed it to them?
The question you should be asking is: “Do your site and the McDonald’s site use the exact same methodology?” If you can’t answer that question, then you can’t know if it’s a valid comparison.
I don’t recall saying anything about their marketing practices other than to repeat what I saw in a documentary about the British trial. I personally think they’ve let their product quality slide over the years to the point that their food sucks now, both in flavor and nutritional value, and now that they are getting called on it in multiple quarters, they have found salad religion. But then I’m generally very cynical.
People can eat at McDonalds all they want as far as I’m concerned. I personally don’t eat there very often because at this point, I think their food tastes like rancid sponge rubber and it usually gives me the runs.
For large chain burgers, I prefer Jack in the Box and Carl’s Jr., in that order. One of the best burgers right now is from an up-and-coming SoCal chain, Farmer Boys. Another very small chain, Mr. Pete’s, is delectable, and a place right near me called Chris’ might be my favorite burger at the moment. But Farmer Boy’s is expensive, and sometimes, ya just gotta have a Sourdough Jack. Although my wife likes In ‘n’ Out burgers better. Especially Animal Style, which I love too.
I’ve massaged no data, other than to correct an error I made that resulted in the appearance of an unadorned McDonalds Quarter Pounder having more calories, salt and vitamins than it actually does, according to easily-reproducible information provided on McDonalds own site. To answer Polerius’ question, I used for comparison to the QP what seemed to me to be a credible source. I find my source more credible than lowbrass’, and I’ve invited him to convince me otherwise.
The OP asks how bad for you is a plain McDonalds hamburger. While I am no nutritionist (as you point out with the 1200 calories reference, you timely devil you) I know that fat, sugar and salt, while necessary nutrients, are not exactly hard to come by (and that RDA represents a reasonable minimum or maximum depending on the nutrient involved), and someone concerned with health, as is implied by the OP, would probably be better off going elsewhere for the other substances one needs.
I found Polerius’ later question about comparing a fast food burger with a homemade on intriguing, and found the best data I could. That data, which I will gladly abandon if someone has a more credible reference, tells me that the McDonalds product is notably, but not drastically poorer in nutritional quality than if you made it yourself. the results frankly surprised me. Going into it, I thought the QP would probably come out slightly worse, but I assumed there would be less of a discrepancy.
Massaging the data to make McDonalds look bad, IMO, would have been comparing the QP to broiled 90% lean ground beef. Not only would this have been unfair, but unappetizing. The advice of a number of master grillers, IIRC, is that fattier ground beef makes for more flavorful burgers.
I did my best to even the playing field. McDonalds still came out the loser.
Deal with it.
I agree its not wonderful, just the best I could find. At least they say something about where their data came from. You still haven’t lent an ounce of credibility to your own source, which you claim validly contradicts mine in terms of the comparison. What’s the methodology and source data of your barbecue calculator, and is it the same as McDonalds? if you can’t say either, then your contradiction doesn’t carry an ounce more certainty than my assertion, and I’ll stand by my figures.
Except that it really isn’t that telling. scotandrsn, I think you should look a little more carefully and dispassionately at your numbers, and learn something about statistics.
Many of your bolded scare facts are of questionable statistical accuracy and nutritional relevance. Most glaring are the claims which fail because you don’t understand rounding: for example, your 25% more sugar claim. This is more than a little misleading when the quoted values are 5g vs. 4g. First, in the best case all you can really say, given a naive guess of ±1g error bars, is that the McD’s burger has somewhere between 0% to 57% more sugar. But even this is optimistic. The values for the homemade burger (and maybe the values for the McDonald’s burger as well) were calculated by adding other values; if they were similarly quoted to ±1g then the error is even larger, and you can’t even say with confidence which burger has more sugar. But more important than this is that nutritionally speaking 5g is not a lot of sugar. An ounce of Coca-Cola or orange juice has about 3.5g of sugar, for example. If you’re really worried about the extra gram, just don’t take that last sip of soda and call it even.
There are similar problems with your calculations on calories, fats, cholesterol, and fiber, for example. You can read the FDA’s rounding and presentation rules if you want to understand the error bars associated with nutrition information labels. Note that this probably applies to the McDonald’s presentation but not to the values calculated for your homemade burger. Because those values are scaled and summed from provided values, you have to be more careful about the numbers. I doubt that all of the provided figures are significant, however. Just because the homemade burger claims “361Cal” doesn’t mean it’s likely to be 361±1Cal; more likely it’s got an error of about ±10Cal.
About the saturated fats, I wonder if any of that comes from oiling the grill surface. (Does McD’s oil its grills? I have no idea.) The values given for McDonald’s burgers include, I assume, all preparation, while the values for the raw patty of course do not. Similarly on the sodium content: many people season their homemade burgers with salted spice mixes; if McDonald’s gives you the option of an unseasoned burger (I have never asked) then it is a little unfair to include the 120mg in the one case and not in the other.
The apparent disparity in calcium is probably also incorrect. The primary source of calcium in a (non-cheese) burger is from the enriched flour used to make the bun. So comparing a bun made with enriched flour to one without (or without the calcium data; the burger buns I checked on your linked site didn’t seem to have calcium data) is not a fair comparison.
There’s also a big problem with the bun size. I’m not sure what size or type of bun you used in your homemade burger, but since essentially all of the carbohydrates (and half of the calories) come from the bun, a choice of a slightly larger bun will easily swing the calorie balance the other way. I’ve found burger buns with a lot more calories, fats, and sodium than McDonald’s. (Here’s one.)
Since you disagree, I’ll explain a litte more about what I meant by “massaging data”. To address this post:
I’d like to add a few points to what has already been said:
- Just because food A has 10% more calories than food B, this does not mean that food A is less healthy than food B, as implied by your “pros v. cons” breakdown. For example: 1100 calories of apples is not more unhealthy than 1000 calories of lard.
- #1 is especially true when the difference is as small as 39 calories. To be honest, if someone kept their kid from eating a burger because it had 39 calories too many, I’d be a little worried. Especially if they had a pre-teen daughter.
- If calories of A goes up by 10%, then for a nutritionally equivalent food, you would expect other nutrients to increase by 10% as well. so your 10% more fat …almost 10% more cholesterol is kinda offset right there. You can of course reinterpret the protein and iron losses accordingly, to add “points” to the homemade burger.
- 1 gram of fat is about 9 calories. the increase “by weight and calories” will always be equivalent.
You’ve brought some very interesting data to the discussion, like the fact that the sodium can be kept off at point of sale, and that its possible to prepare your own hamburger with less saturated fat. Nonetheless, I think we can improve on the way that this data has been interpretted, from a nutritional standpoint.
Anyhow, like Omphaloskeptic said, it would be nice to understand the source of the extra saturated fat.