Of course, a burger is not 100% beef, even if the patty is; there’s also pickles lettuce tomato special sauce and a sesame seed bun. Good grief, there is nothing wrong with a Big Mac - or a whopper, or Wendy’s or even KFC - the problem comes in eating only that, and then starch boiled in fat, and sugar water (or starched sugar-water) every day, 3 times a day. The story has it that McD’s was arm-twisted into providing real breakfasts when a study showed that inner city kids were often eating their burgers for breakfast as well as lunch and supper.
Spurlock’s stupid film “Super Size Me” was a mastery of misdirection. Anyone, especially a thin vegetarian, will have medical problems when they determine to stuff themselves with 7,000 calories of sugar and fat (3.5 times normal diet) every day for months - doesn’t matter whether it’s McD or home-cooked. Restraint is the key.
No matter what conspiracy theories you attribute to the marketing departments, in this case the distinction between 100% juice and not 100% juice is clear in the U.S. In the first case, you have actual fruit juice. Period. It may be reconstituted from concentrate, it may be a blend of juices from various fruits, but it may not be sugar added to water. The phrase exists to distinguish the product from the fruit drinks or cocktails or other phrases which contain only a fraction, if any actual fruit juice.
Of course you can argue whether 100% juice is healthier than 10% juice plus added sugar. For most values of the word “healthier” there isn’t much of a distinction. However, you may get a small amount of vitamins or antioxidants or whatever other micronutrients remain in juice after processing, or you may prefer the fructose found in real juice to whatever sugar is used as an added sugar. These are real differences for some people.
The 100% beef claim by McDonald’s is essentially identical. They have always been accused of putting fillers in their meat, some of them possible like wheat or carrageen, and some of them idiotic, like ground worms. So a claim of 100% ground beef is not mere marketing but a sensible rebuttal to the crazies.
The vast majority of major food companies are extremely sensitive to their reputations. Of course they use marketing claims and of course they stretch them to a limit. But going past that limit quickly becomes counterproductive.
I buy only 100% juice, not 10% juice drinks. That’s because for me the distinction is real and important. YMMV.
Of course, advertising is full of phrases which are totally meaningless if you think about them. Car insurance ads are particularly full of it - the claim here is nonsensical on at least two counts:
10% of customers could save up to £136 or more on Endsleigh motor insurance
“10% of customers could save up to £136”? OK, presumably this is meant to imply that only 10% of customers could save, and of those that could, the saving would be up to £136. But it doesn’t really mean anything. Especially when you read the next bit:
The phrase 100% Multi-Grain means absolutely nothing. The stuff contains less than 2% of some grains other than wheat, less than the amount of sugar or yeast. They could just a well throw a kernel of corn into a trainload of wheat and still use the phrase.
I think it turns out that the bigger the letters and the brighter the colors used for such phrases, the more likely it is to be a junk phrase … like the big, bright “A fat free food” on a bag of licorice.
But I don’t really think that’s what the thread is about. It’s about how combining universally encompassing phrases such as “100%” or “pure” with weasel words such as “made with” or “multi”, as in the last example, renders them meaningless. They are effectively saying “completely partially”, a contradiction in terms.
You have missed the point entirely. “Made with 100% beef” is no different than saying “this patty only contains 30% beef by volume, but the part that is beef is 100% beef”, since that is the threshold the FDA sets for being able to call it a “hamburger”. I don’t know what the other 70% may be, and probably don’t want to know. The wording is what I take issue with, as it’s a lie by omission. Try to keep up.
And I’m saying that you’re wrong, that claims of 100% beef mean 100% beef not 30% beef. No company is the U.S. would ever make the claim for something that was equivalent to “this patty only contains 30% beef by volume, but the part that is beef is 100% beef.” I defy you to show an actual example that wasn’t stomped on by the feds.
The point most of you are missing is that while some marketing claims are meaningless, some are meaningful and point out important differences. Numeric claims especially are looked at closely by government regulators.
His point was that he ordered “the meal” three times a day. He didn’t order five burgers a la carte or anything. He also stated in the film that it could have been Taco Bell or many other restaurants.
I guess I just don’t see the point. You stuff your gob full of calories, of course you gain weight. What’s the revelation there? Who the heck eats McDonald’s meals 3x a day? You can just as well lose weight eating at McDonalds nothing but double cheeseburgers 3x and Diet Coke 3x a day. Heck, if you downsize the fries, you probably will be able to do it ordering smartly off the meal menu.
How is that not useful? Mineral water is very different from regular water. According to wiki, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies mineral water as water containing at least 250 parts per million total dissolved solids (TDS), originating from a geologically and physically protected underground water source. No minerals may be added to this water.” Even using a single drop in cola is out of the ordinary.
Oh, and I knew someone who lost weight on an all McDonalds diet (while doing pot, oddly enough.) She would eat one McDonalds cheeseburger a day, and that’s it. She said she had to force herself to eat that.
Juice is a whole 'nother thing, though. If you start with juice, but filter and ion-exchange it such that all the minerals, acids, flavors, and colors are gone, and all that’s left is fruit sugar in water, is it still what you think of as “juice”? Sure, they started with juice, but if they blended that with some actual pomegranate juice and still called it “100% Juice!”, do you think that’s really on the level?
Made with 100% beef could be ambiguous - are they talking about the burger (obviously other ingredients) or the patties (“made with” or “100%”?).
However, I don’t think there’s any room for weaseling in “two all-beef patties, special sauce, pickle, lettuce, tomato, onion on a sesame-seed bun”. (did I get that right?) Even in the 70’s you couldn’t weasel out of “all-beef”, and you can’t say it if it ain’t so, no matter how large their donations to congress-critters.
McDonalds does not need to fudge their contents. They have the supply chains and economies of scale (and quality control) to ensure they supply exactly what they say and what yo expect, and a Big Mac in China, New Zealand and Rome are identical to the home-made article. (Speaking from experience; except China had deep-fried pineapple pies… yum.)
Yeah, if you overdose on 7000 calories a day and make a point of doing as little exercise as possible - what do you think is going to happen.
This thread has gone off track somewhat. I’m well aware of the distinction between a 10% juice drink and 100% juice. What I was referring to, as Ximenean said, is the use of “contains” or “made with”. They’re not claiming that the product is 100% juice, or whatever, because that would be illegal, but by saying “made with 100% fruit juice” they catch out people who aren’t really reading the label. What they really mean is, "we put a token amount of juice in here, but the stuff we used was totally pure (until we added it to the sugar water that makes up the bulk of our product).
Of course, this won’t catch out anyone who actually reads labels properly, as the ingredients list will say something like: “Water, Sugar, Pure Orange Juice (4%), Flavourings, Colourings, Preservative, Camel Piss*”.
BTW, md2000, over here (UK) McDonald’s advertises its burgers (the patties that is) as “100% beef” and then underneath says “nothing but 100% British beef, seasoned with a little salt and pepper”. Well, that’s not 100% beef then, is it? I guess it’s about 99.8% beef and rounding comes into play…
** not really, but who the hell reads to the end of the list*
Maybe the difference is that you’re in the U.K. In the U.S. I’m 99% sure that the dodge you give is flatly illegal. I’d need to see an actual example of a product marketed in the U.S. in that manner before I believed it.
And I read to the end of every list.
I don’t work in the food industry but if I did and if I was mean and having followed Duckster’s link, would I be wise to label my fruit beverage as “Made with 99.99% fruit juice with added sweetener” if I’m using ingredients which dissolve into the fruit juice (without adding weight) and I really could be claiming 100% fruit juice but my spin makes it appear that only .01% of my drink is non-fruit juice, while actually a lot more of it is not (as could be seen only on the little ingredients label)? Are fruit juice bottlers simply not as mean as me? And why is soursop juice called guanabana juice on cans? Can I claim “canned with 100% passion fruit” if I’m only 14% in love? Next time–rhubarb & raspberry.