Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Would You Eat a Big Mac?



Fast food? How convenient. You pull up to the drive through or walk inside and tell the cashier what you would like to order and then your food is ready in less than five minutes. Sounds great especially when you’re working two jobs and don’t have time to go home and cook a meal. Happy meals even come with a drink and toy, perfect for parents who don’t feel like cooking that night. Whoever came up with this whole fast food idea must have been a genius, right? Fast food restaurants such like McDonalds attract customers because they are convenient, inexpensive, and the food is delicious. Sounds ideal but unfortunately this food isn’t found to be very healthy and I’m almost positive most people don’t know what they are putting in their bodies.
                Don Gotske was extremely successful in inventing a burger that everyone loved. This burger is sold in more than 100 countries worldwide and 560 million of these are sold each year in the United States alone (Friedman 1). This goes to show just how popular these “tasty” burgers are. Americans seem to love this burger with "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun". McDonald’s turned the ingredients of the Big Mac to create a catchy jingle used in their commercial back in 1975 as advertisement for this new burger. How could someone resist going down to McDonald’s to get one of these after watching this commercial? Many try this burger once and fall in love with the taste and then end up consuming these on a regular basis or at least what I’ve noticed with some of my friends. They seem to be hooked. I’m going to assume they have never looked at the nutrition facts.
                According the McDonald’s website the Big Mac has a whopping total of 540 calories in just one burger. Based on a 2,000 calorie diet, that would be more than one fourth of your recommended daily caloric intake. If one makes it a meal by adding French fries and a drink or eats two burgers in one sitting, that’s already more than half of the calories one should be eating in a day in just one meal. Then add on two more meals and probably two snacks that will be eaten in the same day and you will most likely go over on your calories which will cause weight gain if you do not burn as much calories as you take in ("Balancing Calories"). The calories from fat are two hundred and sixty.  My Food Guide Pyramid recommends that we keep our calories from fat down to 30% of our caloric intake which is roughly 660 calories each day. This means that you’d get more than one third of those in just one Big Mac which will make it tough to balance out the rest of the foods you will consume that day. The total fat is 29 grams which is 45% of your daily value.
                The Big Mac contains ten grams of saturated fat which is 50% of your daily value and 1.5 grams of trans fat. Both saturated and trans fats are considered unhealthy fats ("Trans Fats on the Nutrition Facts Label" 1).  Trans fats are formed when hydrogen is added to some kind of vegetable oil to make it a more solid fat which is known as hydrogenation. This is done to increase shelf life and maintain texture and flavor of foods. Saturated fats mostly come from animals. The USDA recommends to keep trans fats and saturated fats as low as possible as they raise lipoprotein which is “bad cholesterol” that can increase your risk of heart disease (McGrane 1).
                Where as there are bad fats and too many calories in a Big Mac, there aren’t many nutrients. Sure you will get 25% of your Iron and Calcium which is great but you could be getting those in healthier ways. Foods rich in calcium are milk, cheese, yorgurt, and leafy greens and foods rich in iron are meats poultry, fish, and also leafy greens ("Calcium & Iron - Are You Getting Enough?").
                Not only are Big Macs not nutritious, when I was looking over the ingredient lists of the hamburger patties, the Big Mac “special sauce” and the bun I came across some interesting ingredients. Although McDonald’s says there burgers are just 100% pure USDA inspected beef with no fillers and no extenders, until just recently they were using ammonia based hydroxide to treat scrap meat known as boneless lean beef trimmings so that they could use it in there patties. These trimmings are the left overs after all the choice cuts of meat are taken. This meat is banned to be eaten by humans in the United Kingdom but in the United States it was allowed as long as it was treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria (Rosenbaum).  Not too long ago McDonald’s finally made the decision to stop using the ingredient known as “pink slime” which is great but what about all the weird ingredients listed in the bun and the “special sauce”?  The ingredient lists below are straight from the McDonald’s website.
Big Mac Sauce:
Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative),
spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate,
sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy
lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).
Big Mac Bun:
Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar,
soybean oil and/or canola oil, contains 2% or less of the following: salt, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, wheat gluten, ammonium sulfate, ammonium chloride,
dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: sodium stearoyl lactylate, datem, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, mono- and diglycerides,
ethoxylated monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, enzymes, guar gum, calcium peroxide), calcium propionate and/or sodium propionate (preservatives), soy
lecithin, sesame seed.
                I’m sure you haven’t heard of quite a few of these ingredients or even pronounce them. That’s a good indicator that it probably should not be in there. Sure they stopped using ammonia in the meat but it’s still in the bun. This might explain why a burger from McDonalds that has been left out for over 12 years doesn’t look much different from when it was originally bought. It hasn’t broken down nor has it rotted as you would expect it to (Lee).  The image below is a photo from this experiment. The burger on the left is from 1996 and the photo was taken in 2008.
                Sodium benzoate is one of the ingredients I’ve never heared of before. It’s naturally found in some fruits and some sweet spices like cloves and cinnamon but the sodium benzoate that’s being used as a preservative is not natural. Instead it is chemically produced. This preservative is genotoxic and damages DNA (Zengin 763-69).



                I’m currently in a Dietetic Technician program and thought it would be a good idea to get my advisor, Nancy Johnson’s take on the Big Mac and fast food since she is a Registered Dietitian. I asked her if she ate McDonald’s. She told me she actually worked at McDonald’s in her teenage years so she ate her fair share back then but now not so much. She didn’t say she wouldn’t eat it but that she doesn’t. She told me a story of where her son came home one day telling her how he ate this burger that was so delicious, and it ended up being the Big Mac. He was in high school at the time and until then he had never eaten a Big Mac, and hardly knew what one was. There must be a reason why Nancy hadn’t introduced her kids to that type of food.

I wonder if these Big Mac lovers know what they are eating when they are mowing down that burger. I wonder if they even stop to think twice about buying a second one or adding fries and a milkshake to complete the meal. Have they even thought about looking at the nutrition facts or the ingredient label? Or have they and they just don’t care?
                As you can see there are plenty of reasons to avoid eating Big Mac’s and all fast food in general. There are many healthier options, like simply making burgers at home. I found a recipe for a burger that had only 259 calories and 7 grams of total fat, and 3.5 grams of saturated fat ("Epicurious"). This is a lot healthier and only takes twelve minutes which is probably less than the time it would take you to drive to McDonalds and back. Don’t get me wrong everything is supposedly okay in moderation, but I still think I’ll stay away from Big Macs and tell my friends to do the same.






Works Cited 

Friedman, Emily. "Happy Birthday Big Mac." ABC NEWS . 24 AUG 2007: 1. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3521002&page=1

United States. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Balancing Calories. Atlanta: , 2011. Print. <http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/calories/index.html>.

. "Discontinued Use of Select Lean Beef Trimmings (SLBT)." McDonald's. N.p., 2010-2012. Web. 10 Apr 2012.<http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/mcdonalds_statements_and_alerts/Discontinued_Use_of_Select_Lean_Beef_Trimmings.html>.

. "McDonald's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items." McDonald's. N.p., Dec 2010. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/ingredientslist.pdf>.

. ". "McDonald's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items." McDonald's. N.p., Dec 2010. Web. 10 Apr 2012. . ." McDonald's. N.p., Jan 2007. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/ingredientslist.pdf>. 
                                                                                                                                                                              
United States. Department of Agriculture. Trans Fats on the Nutrition Facts Label. Washington: , Web. <http://www.fns.usda.gov/fdd/facts/nutrition/TransFatFactSheet.pdf>.

McGrane, Mary. United States. Department of Agriculture. Dietary Saturated Fat and Cardiovascular Health: A Review of the Evidence. 2011. Web. <http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/NutritionInsights/Insight44.pdf>.

. "MedicineNet.com." Calcium & Iron - Are You Getting Enough?. N.p., 21 Dec 2001. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=19323>.

Rosenbaum, Matthew. "ABC News Blogs." McDonald’s Announces End to ‘Pink Slime’ in Burgers. N.p., 01 Feb 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/02/01/mcdonalds-announces-end-to-pink-slime-in-burgers/>. 

Lee, Robyn. "12-Year Old McDonald's Hamburger, Still Looking Good." Serious Eats. N.p., 25 Sep 2008. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/09/12-year-old-mcdonalds-hamburger-still-looking-good.html>.

. Epicurious. N.p., Sep 2003. Web. 10 Apr 2012. <http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Healthy-Homemade-Cheeseburgers-230146>.

Zengin, N. "The evaluation of the genotoxicity of two food preservatives: Sodium benzoate and potassium benzoate." Food and Chemical Toxicology. 49.4 (2001): 763-69. Web. 24 Apr. 2012. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691510006988>.

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