McDonald's Really Messing With Me

Factual Questions
101

Well it really depends on how widely you are willing to define the word “drug” doesn’t it?

I would guess that there are natural and artificial flavoring agents added to McDonald’s food that are probably exclusive to McDonald’s (which is probably true for most fast or processed food businesses). These flavorings were developed with the direct goal of improving their profits – by either making the food taste better, or allowing them to use cheaper ingredients.

The statement “McDonalds spent a lot of money on engineering chemicals that try to increase the chance that you will eat more McDonald’s food and do so more often.” is most likely true. Is it malicious drugging? By most reasonable standards, no, it is not. Although I could see how somebody could see it that way, even though almost every company making processed food does it one way or another.

102

Nah. I often go for long walks in my neighborhood, and there’s a McDonald’s on the route I usually walk. I’ll stop in on the way for a meal every so often; maybe once a month or so. I always get a non-supersized value meal. And I always think to myself, “ooo, if I’m still hungry afterwards, I’ll get me one of them M&M McFlurrys, they look good!”. And I never do. I’m always full after the meal.

103

I don’t think McDonald’s or any fast food outlet has exclusive flavoring agents that have these magical properties. Plase provide a cite.

104

Not the OP but mine are 6 and almost 5 and they just don’t know what they want from most fast food joints. We just don’t go there (I do from work once in a blue moon, but never as a family). We have had a couple of forced instances (airports, mostly) when we had to eat fast food and they didn’t know what to order. They didn’t like what the food did to their tummies, either. I think of this as one of my parenting victories.

105

I didn’t claim they have a magical property of any sort. They are natural and artifical flavoring agents specifically engineered to make the food taste the way it does, and some things that taste good stimulate the appetite. Looking for cites, it seems most peer reviewed articles supporting my claim actually themselves cite “Fast-food nation” or “Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good”, both by Eric Schlosser. I was hoping to find something a little more rigorous, but it seems that the statement “Processed food uses flavor additives” is almost an accepted fact. Makes sense since they are listed on most ingredient labels.

However, it is no secret that flavor by itself is a billion dollar a year industry. It is also no secret that each fast food brand has distinctive tastes that are fairly uniform across the nation. Other than citing Schlosser I don’t have any proof that the the flavoring agents McDonald’s adds to their food are for their exclusive use, but I believe that would be a fairly reasonable guess since the company would not put up with anybody else having access to their exact same flavor profile.

106

Here’s some citations:

  • David Kessler, former head of FDA, devoted an entire section of his best-seller on how fast food interferes with “the opioid circuitry of the brain”
  • This just in, scientists compare fast food to heroin
  • As noted, an anonymous food industry insider, a “Henry Ford of mass-produced food”, leaks that the food industry is intentionally designing fast food to alter the biological circuitry of the brain to be “similar to . . . cocaine”
  • A few years back, lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s and other fast food outlets claiming that they were knowingly marketing an addictive substance, as fast food acts on the brain “in much the same way that heroin and nicotine do.”

I would have laughed and scoffed at these folks . . . until my own alarming experience.

So, let’s dismiss this unfortunate business of calling each other best-selling novelists and focus on the topic at hand.
(1) http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852

(2) http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20100328/hl_hsn/junkfoodaddictionmaybereal4

(3) Obesity: The killer combination of salt, fat and sugar | Obesity | The Guardian

(4) Is fast food addictive?

107

OK, lets.

You went to a McDonalds and got very hungry and ate a lot. We have millions and millions of data points where this didn’t happen. I’ve eaten at plenty of fast food restaurants and never have experienced what you claim. I’ve also had binge experiences with some foods, including home cooked food.

So, what are we left with? You had an experience that many people had, but also that occurs with some frequency outside of McDonalds restaurants. It’s not something that is remarkably out of the ordinary, and although you’ve posted some cites they are speaking in generalities and don’t really support the idea that there is anything in McDonalds or any other fast food menu that could cause binge eating.

108

Ok, this is one for the “Bizarre Files” ----
Google these different phrases and notice the different quality of the hits:

“fast food addictive”
“McDonald’s addictive”
'Burger King addictive"
“Taco Bell addictive”
“Kentucky Fried Chicken addictive”

You will notice way, way, way more hits on “McDonald’s addictive.” Lots of people are wondering if there’s an addictive ingredient in there. One pitiful post even came from a “confidentialdrugrehabilitation.com” !!!

So, I take this sampling to indicate that I am not a loner in suspecting something uniquely insidious about McDonald’s compared to other fast food.

109

[quote=“baprisbrey_aol.com, post:106, topic:533583”]

I’ve been kicking myself that I didn’t take the opportunity to go over a previous point you made, so thanks for this second opportunity.

This isn’t evidence of being wrong; it’s a shining example of the problem of not knowing how to think.

You’re using a variation of the “They All Laughed At Columbus” fallacy. That’s the one that states that because one theory that was thought to be crackpot eventually proved true, then your crackpot theory may also contain the same truth. Nonsense. The proper comparison is to every theory in all of history that anyone has ever claimed to be crackpot, billions, trillions of them. Then you have to look at how many of them turned out to be correct. Damn few. The proper odds are billions to one that your particular crackpot theory is true.

This is relevant because your new post has no relevance to anything I said or anything anybody has been arguing in this thread. None of your quotes has anything to do with exclusive flavoring agents. They all talk about fast food as a category, food laden with fats and sugars and salt and other generally unhealthy ingredients when consumed in high doses and outside of the proverbial healthy, balanced diet. Nobody is arguing against that. What we’re saying is it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether this is true or not. Whatever the fast food industry is doing as a whole will apply to consumers as a whole. Millions, tens of millions in America, hundreds of millions around the world, will have the same responses. This is the exact opposite of your claim that something fantastically individual happened to you, something that nobody else has ever experienced, something that is contrary to most peoples’ reactions.

How do you get from your quotes to your claim? Again, because you’re not thinking about the problem. You’re grasping at any straw that would allow you to be correct, no matter much else to have to reject or ignore or explain away to make that right.

We’re not buying it. But you are giving us a beautiful capsule illustration of how every conspiracy works, from start to end, in a single thread. Something odd happened to you. You insist it’s real, even though you don’t bother to do the most basic, elementary testing to see whether it can be replicated. Nobody else believes you. You start insisting with greater and greater certainty that you were right. You find pieces of information that have something to do with topic, even if they aren’t related to your claim, even if they contradict your claim. But somebody somewhere has said something negative about the same evildoer that you said something negative about. That proves you were right. That proves all the naysayers are wrong, biased, ignorant, in the pay of the conspiracy.

All within one thread! That’s just beautiful. You’ll be the subject of theses some day. But that’s the only way your claims will ever increase knowledge.

110

Exapno Mapcase-- I appreciate your continued attention to this thread. From a number of your posts, I feel that you have generally mis-interpreted me. These posts are brief, and so I believe the error is mine.

Where to begin. Let’s start with this: I had an unusual experience, and so I generally wondered, “What’s up with that?” I made a general inquiry. I confessed, more than once, that nothing could be learned from my single, isolated experience. I was out to gain knowledge, not to forward a position.

My Occam’s Razor point was not, as you suggest, that special attention should be made to me because I was feeling ostracized. Rather, my point was, that outlying data points shouldn’t be ignored merely because they are outliers. (I can still here my chemistry professor yelling this at me.) Instead, they can be counter-intuitive, unexpected, and highly informative (if you can figure them out.)

Next, due to an unfortunate “cut-and-paste” error, my “Citations” post #106 indicated that I had found some citations for a “magical ingredient.” I’m new to this forum, and I didn’t meant to quote the entire phrase. I merely meant to quote the “citations portion”, pointing out that I actually had some citations (from some pretty heavy-weight sources) that fast food actually DID possess unusually addictive qualities.

At this point, I feel the conversation in your last post #109 has narrowed, in that you have misinterpreted me as advancing an argument that McDonald’s has a special addictive drug. Rather, I am continuing the inquiry into the addictive qualities of fast food in general and McDonald’s in particular.

To your credit, in you original post in this thread you correctly identified the culprits (fat, starch, sugar, salt et al) and correctly identified their action on us as being more-or-less an evolutionary adaption. You’ll forgive me for missing the implication of this post—it was brief and I wasn’t familiar with the mechanism (which David Kessler painstakingly explains) and I over-looked it.

Although I feel that I have a handle on this, qualitatively, now I want to get a handle on this, quantitatively. Basically, I’m interested in not “Does the addicting quality exist” but “How bad is it?” I am still in the stage of gathering information, and in the next post I will suggest a hypothesis and a test.

111

Are you a trader joe’s shopper bychance?

I ask because I used to work there, and I was exposed to oversensitive people with hyperactive imaginations every day who over-analyzed their food to a ridiculous degree. Very glad to not be dealing with those types anymore.

I bet you I could find some drugs for you that would show you the difference between feeling hungry and being DRUGGED.

112

Man, the flak I’m getting!

Ok, here’s the McDonald’s Challenge:

(1) Go to Mcdonald’s. Buy yourself $10 of chicken nuggets and $10 of fries. Look at that mound of food. Go sit down.
(2) Start eating.
(3) Stop eating.

That Step #3 is the tricky one. Let’s amplify the experience; cast a wider net: Do this at dinner time. Better yet, do it an hour after your usual dinner time. This is a dry meal; don’t drink any water with it. Sit there until 45 minutes are up, staring at your food, you may not leave.

What we have here, of course, is a scenario for over-eating. That’s not what’s interesting to me; I’m not interested in mere over-eating. I’m looking for an exaggeration or an aberration. Let’s do a control of course, have your buddy sitting next to you bring in frozen tater tots and frozen nuggets (umm, cooked, of course, prepared at home).

My hypothesis is that McDonald’s will produce an unusual, exaggerated reaction (in some of us, not all of us. How many of us, and how bad, that’s the question.)

113

You also might want to have someone eating chicken nuggets and fries made from scratch at home. There is no telling what those folks at tater tots and frozen chicken nuggets are adding to their product.

114

“Bet you can’t eat just one.”

No, not a McDonald’s ad, but Lays Potato Chips, IIRC. Maybe they’re in on the conspiracy, too?

115

So you have company. So what?
I don’t care to try, but I suspect searching for ‘moon landing faked’ or ‘9/11 WTC Government cover up’ and get a similarly bulky set of wrong answers.

116

You’re making an extraordinary claim - you should expect to be challenged on it.

Don’t take it personally, because it’s about your claim, not you.

117

Since I regularly throw away french fries from a medium sized fries at McDonalds, I don’t think your test will show what you anticipate. Chicken nuggets would be much easier, I don’t really like them. I see people throw away fries all the time.

Your test doesn’t have a control either, so it’s not particular scientific. You need to do the test with other kinds of food to show that McD’s is somehow different. Fries and nuggets from other chains, and cooked from scratch, and other foods with similar nutritional properties.

And why sit there for 45 minutes? People don’t eat like that, I’m not sure what that is attempting to prove.

But, I think it’s good that you’re approaching this from an experimental side, rather than appealing to emotional experience. I still think you’re misguided, but this is a way to demonstrate it.

118

Boobies.

119

So you ate a lot one time. Unless this behavior is something that consistently happens every time you go to McDonald’s, why are you so worried about this?

Have you tried going back to McD’s and seeing if this happened again?

Has this ever previously happened to you at McDonalds or any other time? Because if it’s a one time thing, to immediately feel that you can believe a conspiracy against a company is a rather large leap. It would be more logical to assume that that one single meal was drugged or that something happened that one day to cause this sort of behavior, and not a whole company wide plan was instituted to cause this sort of thing. Why not consider that your previous meal perhaps was insufficient (or drugged) to induce you to have a reaction as such with the next meal you ate?
Or perhaps that someone had drugged you just before you entered the McDonald’s so that when you ate there you would overeat and thus blame McDonald’s? Perhaps it is a rival company that you should be blaming for drugging you rather than McDonald’s?

I’m just fascinated at how people come to the oddly specific conclusions after a single problematic event. When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not Zebras. And if something happened one time at one event, perhaps it’s the variables that only affect that one event that should be considered vs. assuming that there’s a global variable at play that’s affecting everyone out there.
Though I’m a fan of the blood sugar theory myself, most logical and it fits the scenario quite well, and it ties up the loose ends nicely. That or you just overate (as binge eating is medically considered eating quite a bit more than just a few extra kids meals, we’re talking getting more than the daily nutritional calories in a single meal- over 2000+ Calories sorta deal at a single meal, with numbers being reported as high as 2-5x the daily value being consumed in a single binge episode).

120

Nope, I come away stuffed the rare times I go there. Not that conspiracy theories hold up when examined closely, but wouldn’t a restaurant that made you hungrier go out of business pretty quickly?