6 ms·

The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fr

The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fresh, unprocessed foods. A whole chicken, rice, and fresh broccoli can feed a family of up to 8-9 for under $20. There are very easy ways to eat healthy for cheap without ever having to resort to sketchy Tyson pre-packaged chicken, or suspicious Wonder Bread. There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.

recuter 14y ago
> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.
- hughlomas 14y ago
  It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expensive-healthy-food-study-dept-agriculture-study-article-1.1079412 http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen... http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunday/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph-popup.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda... People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.
  - recuter 14y ago
    It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time. Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it? The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.
    - thenomad 14y ago
      Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements. Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do. And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either. I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.
      - mynameishere 14y ago
        So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.
        ahoyhere 14y ago
        You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels. A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know. There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue. And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".
- bmj 14y ago
  Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money. [0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.
  - timr 14y ago
    I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods. There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical. Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most. That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.
- LukeShu 14y ago
  Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.
  - timr 14y ago
    I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim. A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else. Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.
      - timr 14y ago
        There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close. You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.
        anigbrowl 14y ago
        I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.
        malyk 14y ago
ahoyhere 14y ago
If you believe that McDonalds is the only one stuffing natural-looking food with HFCS, you are mistaken. And while educated people expect fast food burgers to be bad for you, the salads look like a smarter, reasonable choice (even though they often have more calories than the burger, even though the chicken is injected… not all places require calorie counts on the menu.) You will also find that many sit-down restaurants give the same preparation to their meat. Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work. The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies. Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16. Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5] Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation. [1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary... [2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicken4-2010jan04 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert [4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies [5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-pizza-still-chemical-laden/ http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p... EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either. [6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report-diabetes-increasing-faster-in-dogs-than-in-humans/ http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...
anigbrowl 14y ago
The problem is, people do know [...] No they don't. You know that and I know that, but we're reasonably well-educated, with a general grasp of economics nutrition and so forth. There are a lot of people - I'd guess up to half the country - that don't understand that stuff and have difficulty understanding the 'nutrition facts' labels on food. I do think people ought to be more responsible for their own diets, but consider the impact of poor diet upon brain development. If you grew up being fed low quality food, you're less likely to appreciate how bad for you it actually is.
secabeen 14y ago
McDonalds chicken strips and nuggets have 0 grams of Sugar. There's sugar in the buns, but it's not in the chicken. http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  I wasn't talking about their nuggets — although, there are a few facts you ought to know: One, the FDA allows you to report nutritional categories at 0g if there is .9g or less per serving. A lot of "low carb" foods push this ruling to its limits. Second, I wasn't able to find the page for nuggets specifically, but I doubt their preparation of the chicken meat in nuggets is better than their non-breaded, grilled breast filets: Grilled Chicken Fillet Allergens: SOY LECITHIN Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning (rice starch, salt, sugar, yeast extract, canola oil, onion powder, maltodextrin, chicken skin, paprika, flavor, sunflower oil, chicken, garlic powder, chicken fat, spices), sodium phosphates. Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color). CONTAINS: SOY LECITHIN. SOURCE: http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item=88&showFlyOut=no&countryCode=US&liveData=true http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item... Maltodextrin isn't HFCS but it is a (no doubt corn-)derived sugar. And I highly doubt even most reasonable people would look at a plain grilled chicken patty and assume it has 18 ingredients, including TWO types of sugar (and possibly three — "flavor" is enigmatically opaque).
- bcoates 14y ago
  Looks like it contains vast amounts (~30% of the calories in an alleged meat product) of potato starch. How does that work metabolically? If it turns into fructose in the body, we're right back where we started with the sugars...
  - natrius 14y ago
    Starch is a whole bunch of glucose molecules chained together. No fructose.

recuter 14y ago

> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.

hughlomas 14y ago
It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expensive-healthy-food-study-dept-agriculture-study-article-1.1079412 http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen... http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunday/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph-popup.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda... People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.
- recuter 14y ago
  It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time. Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it? The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.
  - thenomad 14y ago
    Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements. Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do. And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either. I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.
    - mynameishere 14y ago
      So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.
      - ahoyhere 14y ago
        You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels. A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know. There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue. And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".
bmj 14y ago
Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money. [0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.
- timr 14y ago
  I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods. There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical. Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most. That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.
LukeShu 14y ago
Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.
- timr 14y ago
  I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim. A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else. Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.
    - timr 14y ago
      There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close. You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.
      - anigbrowl 14y ago
        I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.
        malyk 14y ago

ahoyhere 14y ago

If you believe that McDonalds is the only one stuffing natural-looking food with HFCS, you are mistaken. And while educated people expect fast food burgers to be bad for you, the salads look like a smarter, reasonable choice (even though they often have more calories than the burger, even though the chicken is injected… not all places require calorie counts on the menu.) You will also find that many sit-down restaurants give the same preparation to their meat. Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work. The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies. Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16. Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5] Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation. [1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary... [2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicken4-2010jan04 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert [4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies [5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-pizza-still-chemical-laden/ http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p... EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either. [6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report-diabetes-increasing-faster-in-dogs-than-in-humans/ http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...

anigbrowl 14y ago

The problem is, people do know [...] No they don't. You know that and I know that, but we're reasonably well-educated, with a general grasp of economics nutrition and so forth. There are a lot of people - I'd guess up to half the country - that don't understand that stuff and have difficulty understanding the 'nutrition facts' labels on food. I do think people ought to be more responsible for their own diets, but consider the impact of poor diet upon brain development. If you grew up being fed low quality food, you're less likely to appreciate how bad for you it actually is.

secabeen 14y ago

McDonalds chicken strips and nuggets have 0 grams of Sugar. There's sugar in the buns, but it's not in the chicken. http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...

ahoyhere 14y ago
I wasn't talking about their nuggets — although, there are a few facts you ought to know: One, the FDA allows you to report nutritional categories at 0g if there is .9g or less per serving. A lot of "low carb" foods push this ruling to its limits. Second, I wasn't able to find the page for nuggets specifically, but I doubt their preparation of the chicken meat in nuggets is better than their non-breaded, grilled breast filets: Grilled Chicken Fillet Allergens: SOY LECITHIN Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning (rice starch, salt, sugar, yeast extract, canola oil, onion powder, maltodextrin, chicken skin, paprika, flavor, sunflower oil, chicken, garlic powder, chicken fat, spices), sodium phosphates. Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color). CONTAINS: SOY LECITHIN. SOURCE: http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item=88&showFlyOut=no&countryCode=US&liveData=true http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item... Maltodextrin isn't HFCS but it is a (no doubt corn-)derived sugar. And I highly doubt even most reasonable people would look at a plain grilled chicken patty and assume it has 18 ingredients, including TWO types of sugar (and possibly three — "flavor" is enigmatically opaque).
bcoates 14y ago
Looks like it contains vast amounts (~30% of the calories in an alleged meat product) of potato starch. How does that work metabolically? If it turns into fructose in the body, we're right back where we started with the sugars...
- natrius 14y ago
  Starch is a whole bunch of glucose molecules chained together. No fructose.