I realize that they do offer low fat/low calorie foods like chicken breasts, but hear me out.
When you go to McDonalds, Arbys, Wendys, etc. and you want to drink a pepsi you can drink regular pepsi or diet pepsi, they don’t just offer regular pepsi. Why aren’t the same variations offered for sandwiches? low fat/no fat mayonnaise instead of regular, extra lean beef instead of regular, no fat cheese instead of regular? A whopper with cheese has 760 calories & 48 grams of fat. I am not 100% sure, but if the mayo, cheese & beef were low fat versions those numbers would probably come down to roughly 450 calories & 15 grams of fat. People could choose the low calorie whopper or the regular.
You’d think in an age where obesity is an epidemic and many people want to eat low fat/low calories, fast food restaurants would offer a choice between regular beef, regular cheese, regular mayo, etc. on your food and low/no fat versions. So why hasn’t it happened? Why in an age, where roughly 1/2 of women & 1/3 of men are dieting each day do fast food restaurants only offer the most high calorie, high fat versions of their foods that they can?
Low fat substitutes are often dry and tasteless - half fat cheese doesn’t melt very well, low-fat burgers would be just like little cardboard discs. Low-fat mayo is probably OK, but it might not be as stable, so maybe your sandwich couldn’t sit in the chute for 5 minutes.
The plain fact of the matter is that fat tastes good, fatty foods are more immediately desirable (to most people) and fast food is all about immediacy.
Also diet pepsi (or coke) is not low fat, it’s low carb. Almost all soda is no fat by definition. I personally world like to see them do away with hydrogenated vegatable oil and go back to beef tallow.
As for why they don’t offer low fat alternatives, the cost per item will go way up, plus they will have to carry 2 product lines. I fully expect to see a low carb product line before a low fat product line.
This has been done. In the early '90s McDonalds introduced the McLean Deluxe. I ate them a couple times. They were not profitable for McDonalds, so they were discontinued. Some said the taste was not good. In my opinion the taste was OK. If I want a special taste I don’t go to McDonalds. When I eat at McDonalds (rarely) it’s because that’s what’s available-hot, fast and cheap.
I suspect McDonalds and others will try something similar soon. Low fat food technology has improved somewhat since then, and consumer tastes are focused more on nutrition, people are more used to eating low-fat food now.
You can order a BigMac without the special sauce, which contains about half the fat of the regular BigMac. As you said, most fast fooderies offer a grilled chicken sandwich, which, if you get it with no cheese and with mustard or ketchup instead of some fattier sauce, is a low fat option. Some, not all, places offer low fat dressings for their salads.
McD briefly offered a lower fat big burger, and it just didn’t sell. As you have probably read, they are converting to a lower fat fried potato product. That’s a terrifying risk, because a big chunk of their customer base hangs on those McD fries.
Technically, McDonalds is trying to convert - but has not done so yet because they can’t quite match the flavor properly - to a fat that contains fewer or no trans fats. However, it will still be pure fat overall, just a different mixture of fats.
McDonald’s in Canada still fries in beef tallow. The fries taste better than in the US, but better make it a small.
They have vegetarian burgers, not-bad salads and some lower fat items like fajitas. I often eat at McD’s due to a busy schedule. A lunch of a diet coke, salad and a filet-o-fish has about 400 calories. I think with the Kraft changes and fear of lawsuits, fast food will become a lot healthier (and not just KFC serving non-neon salads).
Seriously, if I’m gonna indulge in a hi-fat item like fries once in a blue moon, at least they could taste as delicious as I remember them back in the good old beef fat days!
I don’t think they are really afraid of the lawsuits because they have very little chance of losing these battles. I know the cigarette industry has been hit hard by them, but the fast food industry has the advantage that people actually do need to eat food and other than the whole beef tallow for their fires incident, they don’t appear to have made a secret of the lack of healthiness in their food. McDonalds for years has had the nutritional content of their food available in their stores. There is no “warning label” like cigarettes, but it would be much harder to argue that someone did not know the food wasn’t healthy. Plus their food is not really addictive. Some have argued maybe high fat foods are addictive in a similar manner to some drugs, but they certainly aren’t as addictive as nicotine and to win a lawsuit based on this you’d have to prove the industry knew it was addictive and hid the information. I don’t think that is true.
The industry will change when the market dictates that it do so. That is slowly happening with the rise of many other chains that serve food that is healtheir and fresher. We can make them change by changing our own eating habits. I've slowly done this, though it does take some effort and is still difficult.
I agree that the fast food, while nobody’s idea of health food, is much better than it used to be. A small example: you can get actual orange juice if you want it, or milk, not just soda. Or a salad. Or grilled chicken instead of fried. I think it was Wendy’s that used to carry a baked potato that you could get plain, with cheese, or with broccoli.
Actually MacDonalds here in the UK offer a new range they call “taste” or something like that. Although i don’t think its specifically meant to be low fat some of it is, stuff like salads etc.
McDonalds is selling vegetarian burgers here in New York. As I haven’t eaten one of their hamburgers in nearly a decade, I’m probably not the best person to ask, but I thought it tasted damn near exactly like their regular fare. A little disquieting.
The McLean Deluxe actually rated tastier than ordinary burgers in double blind taste tests. But what McDonalds didn’t quite understand was the association in the public mind between “lean” and “diet” and “tasteless”. So the burger didn’t sell.
The link has much more and very interesting information on human perception of calorie intake, fat, sugar etc. Interesting stuff.
I took an advertising and marketing class at Uni where we had a lot of industry people give guest lectures, one being this older guy (forget his name) who owns a large number of McDonalds in the Phoenix area and he also used to hold a variety of high up positions in McDonalds corporate (including dean of Hamburger University, no less).
During a question and answer session he was asked the same question, and his reply was along the lines of “they don’t sell”. He said people don’t go to McDonalds looking for health food, they’re looking for a burger and fries. They’ve tried a lot of times to offer healthy food but thus far they’ve been unable to sell them.
He did point out that they switched to baking the apple pies instead of deep frying them to make them healthier.
