Just to follow up on the home versus McDonald’s bit, in a small fries at McDonalds (4.1 oz) there are 380 calories and 19 grams of fat. Even if you started from a package of Ore Ida’s, in two servings (about 5.9 oz) there are 260 calories and 7 grams of fat.
Uh, it’s common sense. Meat and bread are going to have the same calories at home as at a restaurant, assuming you buy the same type of meat. I imagine McDonald’s meat is more in the 70/30 range than the 80/20 or 90/10 that I usually buy, but if I bought 70/30 ground beef, my patties ought to be identical in caloric content.
Same thing for potatoes- if I got the same weight of raw potatoes and cut & deep fried them just like McDonald’s, I’d end up with the same calories- oil and potatoes have the same caloric content at home & at the restaurant.
Same thing goes for the condiments, vegetables, etc…
I’m curious as to what strange things you think goes into McDonald’s food- in most cases, agricultural products like meat, bread, cheese, oil, etc… are some of the very cheapest commodities out there, and any sort of additives just add to the cost. It’s unlikely that any additives or anything too weird is used, unless there’s a compelling reason to spend that money.
My understanding is that McDonald’s fries are not actual potatoes that are cut and deep fried. They are extruded paste made from potatoes and other ingredients.
5,000 is not 4,500. And you cannot have that same meal over and over again. (You’re also cheating by having two beverages with your breakfast.) Again, Suprlock’s own rules stated he had to eat everything on the menu. So on some days he has to drink a small Coke. In some meals he has to drink a diet Coke, which has no calories at all and sets you really short of the 5,000 target. In some meals, instead of the Big Mac, he just gets a cheeseburger.
Your own scenario is nearer to the top of the potential daily calorie intake and you still aren’t at 5,000. Now include a rotation through their food items, including the diet drinks and less gigantic burgers.
5,000 a day as an average cannot be done under his stated conditions.
Exactly. He had to be drinking multiple cups of soda or something on the days he didn’t drink diet soda. Like four or more cups of it.
How is that cheating? People have both coffee and orange juice with breakfast all the time. Lots of people routinely have fast food meals with two sandwiches, or a burger combo plus chicken nuggets, or some such. Some construction workers I know would tell you they’d still be hungry if they ate only a standard combo meal for lunch.
I agree that Spurlock would look better here if he had recorded and presented exactly what he ate on each and every day, but this seems a strange devotion to a narrow interpretation of “the rules.”
The actual rules appear to be,
I don’t see how this limits beverages with or between meals, “extra” items in meals, or snacking. Really his caloric intake would seem to have no upper bound.
Uh, your common sense doesn’t stand up to what I’ve already posted regarding Ore Ida’s fries versus McDonald’s, and that could be improved even further by starting with potatoes at home.
The regular hamburger at McDonald’s is 250 calories and 9 grams of fat. You could easily do the same size hamburger for 215 calories and 5.4 grams of fat.
I’m shocked that anyone would even contend that one could not make healthier alternatives of the same meals at home.
I’m not cheating at anything. I simply picked out what I would probably eat, and yes, I would like to have orange juice and coffee.
A few points here: Burger King has even more limited food options, especially one without their veggie burgers. And Marie Callender–isn’t that the sodium king of processed food?
Do people actually make french fries from scratch at home?
And yes, many people don’t buy that 70/30 blend McD’s uses in regular burgers unless they buy frozen chubs. Also, at home people might broil the meat, allowing more fat to drip out. (Maybe I’m the only one who broils burgers?)
But I do think that even the laziest, dimmest bulb from a nutritionist’s standpoint might grab a can of green beans or corn instead of fries, simply because canned food, with all its deficiencies, is a helluva lot easier than preparing potatoes in any manner except baking.
I have been known to make fries at home. Usually with sweet potatoes instead of white ones. I’m far more inclined to make onion rings at home (because it’s so hard to get decent onion rings out in the world), but I only do that a couple times a year when I’m having a grease craving.
If you have one of those at-home deep fryers, you can pick up frozen “fast food” fries (Ore-Ida makes some that are cut exactly like McD’s). It doesn’t take much longer to heat up the oil and drop a basket of fries in to cook while your burger is grilling, than it does to drive to McD’s and buy 'em, where they might be soggy/not crispy. Per meal, it probably comes out far less expensive. When I make them, I spread the frozen fries out on a cookie sheet, drizzle with a tiny bit of olive oil, then bake in the oven for 15 minutes. I am probably reducing the fat in my homemade fries by not deep frying.
I hate to burn your strawman, but I think fast food companies are morally bankrupt, and should be ashamed. I think the same of the rest of Big Agro, as well. That said, I also think that Spurlock was fundamentally dishonest and arrogant in this movie.
I don’t know where you got this from. I saw a show, I believe it was Modern Marvels, that explained that McDonalds fries are made by shooting potatoes through a grating using water pressure, then frozen.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but I recall that I felt he was building a weak version of his own argument. Yes, he used McDonalds to grab attention, and even just as a touchstone McDonalds a good case because in many ways that company continues to pioneer the industry and the industry’s appeal to consumers has led to a dramatic shift in not just the habits of its consumers, but the culture in general, and this shift has had deleterious consequences. But his stunt fails to drive this point – instead, it distracts from it.
If critics are missing the point of the film, I submit that Spurlock’s mishandling of the material helped them do so. We ought to be guided by a principle of charity in discourse, seeing the stronger argument underlying a weaker one. But what are we to do when the arguer himself sets up an artificially wooly and absurd version of his own position? The strawman that people are beating on is of Spurlock’s making.
I joke that the movie should have been called Morgan Spurlock is Such a Pussy, but as people have pointed out, drastic changes to diet and excercise would likely caused problems regardless of the relative nutritional merits of the food in question. Nor can we ignore the nocebo effect.
If McDonalds has offered more healthy options as a result of the controversy the film has created, that’s just swell. I’m in favor of raising awareness, especially if it works. I remember when such controversy led McDonalds to make nutritional information available. This led eventually to a situation where now most eateries offer nutritional information online, and this is a great boon for everyone. The fact that SuperSize Me generates buzz just from its glaring stupidities may in fact be helping. But do we really want to work from a rhetorical principle of using brazen foolishness to get people talking?
Those aren’t the same product. If you deep-fry the fries at home, they are going to have more calories. If McDonald’s offered a baked version of their fries, they’d have fewer.
I do think fast food makes higher calorie food easier and cheaper to get your hands on than if you had to make it from scratch–I mean, I am not going to go home and impulsively make and eat an apple pie, but I might impulsively swing through a McDonald’s and get one. And restaurants cooking does encourage larger portions and allows us to be ignorant of what we are eating–for example, I might not realize that the reason the potato soup at such in such is so much better than mine is that there’s a pound of butter in the recipe. At home, I probably wouldn’t make that recipe because I’d see the pound of butter. But if I did make the recipe, it’d have the same number of calories.
This is part of the point, isn’t it? I remember an interview on N.P.R. with one of the recent “fast food is bad” type authors who said that restaurants like Chili’s inject a ton of butter into their chicken breasts, so even if you think you’re making wise choices, you might well be mistaken.
The issue isn’t whether you CAN make a healthier version at home. That’s also common sense. You could really easily get low fat beef, skim milk cheese, etc…
The issue is whether or not a hamburger of that size is necessarily hugely more unhealthy by virtue of being made at McDonald’s than at your home, or some other restaurant.
My contention is that their burgers and fries aren’t any more caloric than you’d expect from what you’d expect from the ingredients they use. They probably use a higher fat burger patty and more salt than we’d use, but that’s because fat & salt are what tend to taste good on a burger.
Don’t get me wrong- I agree that a diet composed primarily of almost completely prepared foods, restaurant foods OR home prepared high fat foods will likely cause health problems for almost anyone.
What I’m saying is that the above statement is true for almost ANY restaurant or prepared food, not just for McDonalds, and that there’s nothing special about McDonald’s in that regard.
If you lived in the country, and milked your own cows, and also butchered them and your own pigs, you’d end up with the same sorts of health problems if you ate bacon and hamburgers all day, as if you ate at fast food restaurants. There’s nothing special about fast food in that regard.
Thank you! I keep reading this whole “I CAN MAKE OVEN FRIES AT HOME!” thing over and over when. . . it isn’t the same. If you deep fry those freezer section fries, I can’t imagine it’s all that different.
It’s like me saying that my home chicken strips are a million times healthier than any restaurant. I mean, they are, but I also cook them in the oven instead of frying them.
Has anyone suggested that there’s anything exclusive to McDonald’s in any of this?
They’re just the biggest, easiest example, just like Walmart would be in any discussion about the effects of big-box merchandising.
That’s essentially what Manda JO and Acsenray were just saying. It’s not that given ingredients do something different in their hands; it’s that the ingredients they do use often aren’t exactly what people would at home, or what people think they’re getting at the restaurant.
The reasonable comparison isn’t to what people would come up with if they tried to cook McDonald’s food at home with identical ingredients–because for the most part that’s not what people do. The reasonable comparison is to what people would actually produce at home, if they weren’t eating at McDonald’s.*
- Again, McDonald’s here is the example, not the argument.
I do think a lot of people think that “fast food” is inherently more unhealthy than other restaurant food: I see people all the time that turn up their nose at fast food as being “terrible for you” but will eat casual dining type places every day. Assuming you are comparing like items, they really aren’t any different, and as I said above, at least at McDs your portion control is more modular. I think it’s a kind of class-ist delusion that a 1200 calorie salad or a 1000 calorie “wrap” and fries is a healthier choice than a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries.
The unique health problem caused by McDs is the ease and affordability of it: the immediate opportunity cost is almost nothing, and it’s really easy to indulge in something that is so cheap in every way.
ETA after seeing your edit: I also think there are a lot of people for whom the alternative to McDs is frozen pizza, or hot dogs, or Chili Mac and those are not automatically better.