I think the OP needs to check whether the kids have a book called “To Serve Parents” lying around.
I appreciate the continued attention this thread is receiving.
For clarification, I didn’t believe McDonald’s actually drugged their food before I went to eat there. But, upon eating there, I had such an exaggerated response, that I felt like I had been drugged. Should someone tell me, “Yeah, they have derivative of nutrasweet/cocaine in there to mess with your brain chemicals,” I would now believe them based on my experience.
Next, as many posters have indicated, it is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions from one experience with one person. I concur: there’s not much we can do by examining my one isolated situation.
But why not use this as a starting point? Has anyone else out there ever had a weird combination binge/starvation experience at McDonald’s? And a corollary: Is there anything unique about the food at McDonald’s that might explain my unusual experience?
The answer to both questions is yes. One poster shied away from sharing their experience due to my initial heavy-handed responses, for which I again profusely apologize for riling anyone up. Another poster linked to a very strange article, out this month, indicating that, well, yes, fast food in general is designed to massively mess with your brain chemicals. I feel somewhat vindicated.
Perhaps in the name of science, I’ll venture there again and order the same plate. I will, of course, duly report my results.
Until then, thank you Straight Dope Message Board, for your assistance!
ps. Alice the Goon, post 71: I took you seriously. I responded in post #37, and felt like I adequately touched the same material when I wondered why especially McDonald’s and not other restaurants?
Troll, Troll, Troll, your boat,
Gently down the stream.
In the spirit of welcoming a new doper I appologize if my posts were snarky (and they were), and I hope you find a place here to try to get answers to all of life’s questions.
But… this leaves me concerned
Are you really ready to make that leap of faith based on one visit that could be easily explained as being hungry? Instead you would believe it despite the increadible risk a large company would take in actually doing such a thing to sell another $0.99 sandwich (of which the profit margin is maybe 25%).
I assume you are familiar with Occam’s Razor.
[Moderator Warning]
ShermanAter, calling another poster a troll in General Questions is against the rules. I have already addressed the issue in one of my previous posts. I have also requested that people address the factual questions at hand, rather than continuing to attack the OP. This is an official warning. Do not do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
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When we buy spaghetti sauce, we buy Prego. We like it. (I also make my own but that’s another story.)
On one occasion CostCo was out so we bought another brand, Classico. At the time, I did not equate the hallucinations and weird dreams I experienced later that night. And, they all returned later in the week with leftovers. At that point, my radar went off. I decided to monitor everything I was eating.
The next few times we used Prego. Kinda like making it the control group. Then we tried Classico. That night the hallucinations and weird dreams came back. I went back to my food list and the only thing that was different was the Classico.
I’m convinced Classico has something in it that affects my brain chemistry, causing the hallucinations and weird dreams. But it’s taken me months of experiments to come to that conclusion, and not just a one-off meal.
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Blimey. I think being impulsively gullible like that will eventually bite you on the arse.
I’ve sometimes felt that I could eat the same again after finishing a meal at McDonalds. In the case of their egg and sausage McMuffin, I’ve occasionally given in to the temptation. I’ve done the same at KFC.
And I’ve over-eaten at every single buffet I have ever attended in my life.
[ul]
[li]The portion sizes aren’t really very big.[/li][li]The food contains stuff (sugar, salt, carbs, grilled meat, seasonings) that press the right buttons to make people want to eat it.[/li][li]People sometimes have lapses of self-control.[/li][/ul]
You’re making this far more difficult a question than it really is.
Fine, I’ll give you my experience.
My ex was a fast food junkie, and by that I mean that he’d eat nothing but take away food like McDonalds, KFC, pizza, etc for the rest of his life and be perfectly happy. As a result, during the eight years we were together, I ate more McDonalds than in the entirety of my pre- and post-ex life. Despite eating approximately one McDonalds meal a week during that eight years, I never experienced what you describe. Additionally, despite eating McDonalds in excess of once a week for the eight years I knew him and many years prior, my ex never described having an experience like yours, nor did I witness him consuming noteworthy amounts of their food at a single sitting. Since we split up three and a half years ago, I’ve eaten McDonalds two or three times a year. I have not had an experience like you describe in that time either. Recently I realised I feel lousy for a day or so after eating there, which I attribute to my system no longer being used to the poor quality of their food, but no bouts of extreme eating have accompanied it.
So, for 416ish meals at McDonalds over the course of most of a decade, I personally report zero bouts of binge eating, inexplicable hunger or ravenous consumption of my fellow diner’s meals.
Okay, here it goes.
I was starving, went on a massive McDonald’s binge… turns out I was pregnant and probably craving salt. I ended up miscarrying a month later, so if you want to draw conspiracy parallels between McDonald’s drugs and miscarrying, have at it. I’ll blame it on the blighted ovum.
While we cannot discount the possibility you are allergic to some ingredient (IANADoctor - can allergies cause hallucinations?), you do realize that every time you ate Classico, you knew you ate Classico. In other words, your experiment was not blinded. Expectations can sometimes cause expected results.
I can probably eat about 6 Krystals and want more. And I always, always regret it after eating only a single one, because they make me sick afterwards, every single time (digestive sick, not vomiting sick). I am having Krystal burgers for dinner today. I love them. LOVE them.
Does the drugging theory extend to this establishment as well? If so, I think we have a case on our hands.
(P.S. They are like White Castle burgers or “sliders”; they’re small.)
Am I the only one here who really gets full on McD’s? I mean, I only eat them about twice a year, but Ill happily have a fish filet sammich and an order of fries and a shake and walk away quite contented and full, and instead of being hungry 2 hours later, I am usually full enough to delay my dinner.
No, like I said above, one double cheeseburger and I’m pretty full. Add large fries to that, and I definitely won’t be eating for at least three or four hours. (Male, 5’11", 165 lbs.)
I don’t think so, lots of people in this thread have posted that they feel very full after McDonald’s. From reading this thread, I was under the impression that I and the OP were possibly the odd ones out. But the difference with me is that I have the same experience with essentially all fast food. I just assume they make their food with something the body really craves, but isn’t quite nutritious enough to satisfy me.
Besides, there is another possibility. Stomach pains can often feel just like hunger and being dehydrated can cause that. Perhaps it was all that salt in all the crap you ate?
The only times I’ve experienced what the OP is on about is with Chinese food (and that’s a common experience for people. It’s almost a cliche to say you always feel hungry an hour after eating Chinese.) I’ve always assumed the reason was the large amount of white carbs–it never occurred to me to think Chinese take-aways are drugging my food.
Though I seriously doubt that a large fast food chain would take the risk of introducing very much of anything into their food (at least in the US or EU, it certainly has been done in the past.
My father, who created food flavoring for over three decades, told us fine stories of things like peanut extract, that stimulated the start of digestive process, ever try to eat just one peanut?
These vegetal derivatives were (are?) used even in petfood the same way cigarette makers use “texture agents” . But peanut products also cause violent allergic reactions in some people, I cannot imagine a company like McD exposing itself to liability for … death, if they can avoid it.
Even blowing the french fries’ odor into the street is a known influence, and is banned in certain countries.
Are you really ready to make that leap of faith based on one visit that could be easily explained as being hungry? Instead you would believe it despite the increadible risk a large company would take in actually doing such a thing to sell another $0.99 sandwich (of which the profit margin is maybe 25%).
I assume you are familiar with Occam’s Razor.
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Ok, there’s a bunch of interesting ideas here.
(1) Does McDonald’s have a financial incentive to create these amazing binge-inducing drugs?
Sure. From Wikipedia, McD’s has 46 million daily customers. Say every fiftieth customer buys an extra $0.99 sandwich. That’s an extra $66 million dollars net income! (McD’s has 20% profit margin, per Yahoo! finance.) That alone justifies an annual R&D budget of $6 million annually over ten years. (at 10% IRR.)
(2) Would McDonald’s risk their reputation to use these amazing wonder drugs?
No. But, look at the poster who described using peanuts as an appetite inducer. That’s food science circa 2,000 B.C. Fast forward a couple millennia, and another poster described pulling the fiber out of fast food so you wouldn’t get full. That’s food science circa 1960. Fast forward another 50 years, and how fancy do you think we are today? Check out that article describing how food is specifically designed to mess with your brain chemistry. They didn’t have to invent a new drug— they figured out how to combine “natural”, FDA-approved stuff in order to mimic drugs. In my own experience, I didn’t feel like I’d eaten, I felt like I had been drugged.
(3) Occam’s Razor
I really like this one. Occam’s razor is great, except when it’s slicing you. Who do we believe, one guy who claims a bizarre experience, or the 46 million folks who eat there every day, apparently without complaint? No contest, right, the loner is the odd-ball, that’s easy. But now put yourself in the loner’s shoes. You’re Koua Fong Lee, it’s 2006, and you’ve just killed a family of four. You say your Toyota just zoomed off on its own, even while you pressed the brakes. Nobody believes you, right, because the simplest explanation is that you confused the brakes and the gas. That’s Occam’s Razor, and in light of new evidence of out-of-control Toyotas, that’s wrong. Occam’s Razor isn’t a guarantee.
Last, the “leap of faith” comment: I’m not taking anything on faith. I experienced it. It’s my first-hand, direct experience. There’s no faith here. Let me hasten to add, however, that I’m not attempting to persuade anyone out there to take a leap of faith and join me . . . . I just don’t have the data. But, I know a heckuva lot more thanks to this message board, and it’s been one interesting and entertaining conversation!
thanks ----
that one guy whose now really scared of McD’s
The backlash from discovery would shut down the company immediately, and expose the officers in the company to criminal prosecution. No, they they are not interested in doing this. It’s not something that they would even consider. It’s a non-starter. Especially when they don’t need to, as what you experienced can be explained completely without resorting to anything like this.
You are taking a leap of faith in putting way too much importance on your experience. People here are letting you know that while it appeared significant to you at the time, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.
I don’t quite understand what you are looking for. Dopers have submitted interest and possible deductions, points have been raised.
No tendancy seems to have emerged through tesimony, though several participants seem to have other experiences and ideas.
If your will was to publish your position, and see if it was confirmed by peer review, it is now public.
If you have other evidence or suspicions, I am quite sure that this information will be instantly integrated into the collective knowledge.
And, if I may say it, flaming out is a very poor way of obtaining objective experience, either others have had similar effects or not, but trying to influence their response will not wring out more (or less) truth
Oh, give me a break.
You’re getting so much flak on this because you refuse to think objectively about the subject and you keep rejecting huge amounts of information and logic that would refute your position.
As I said earlier, McDonald’s is the most studied fast food company of all. It’s not just the U.S. government who tests them. They’re in dozens of countries, so they have to conform with the regulations in every single one of them. In addition, independent agencies and special interest groups, like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, make a crusade of McDonald’s in their efforts to get people to eat healthier. And every other purveyor of fast food studies every ingredient, every cooking method, every step in the entire chain of their process from the farm to the customer. There are no secrets in the fast food industry. Everybody knows everything everybody else does.
Talk about Occam’s Razor. To believe you we would need to believe that not only has McDonald’s figured out the most sought after secret in the entire history of food preparation, but has done so in a way that makes it totally undetectable by formal testing and can keep the entire process in the tens of thousands of stores and the millions of employees worldwide so secret that none of their competitors even knows that a secret exists to be found out.
And then, after all that, stuff that’s so totally incredible that it would be laughed out of a Dan Brown book, it turns out that it doesn’t work on anybody in the world except you. And you rarely go to McDonald’s.
Perhaps you should write novels of your own. With your capacity to think up conspiracy theories you would be a great success in today’s market.
But if you’re trying convince anyone - even yourself - that the above scenario is true, you’re going to fail.