![]() ![]() If you want to know where they source their ketchup or their pickles in France, it's right there. It does have a couple excesses, but as we'll see they're not unusual, and by themselves not problematic.Īs McDonald's is constantly under pressure from food activist groups, they publish all of their sources in every country on their website. #Big mac calories fullThe notion that a Big Mac's full complement of diverse ingredients would be lacking in nutrition is demonstrably wrong as is the belief that it contains unusually large amounts of things we normally think of as bad. Historically, the Inuit did perfectly fine on a diet consisting mainly of saturated fat, the Maasai on cow's milk and blood loaded with cholesterol, Paleolithic Europeans on a staple of starchy grains and tubers with a little of everything else sprinkled in. We can, and do, live quite well on extremely varied diets. The simple fact is that human beings are omnivorous. The reason for this is simple: people are generally ignorant about nutrition, believing healthy eating to require strict adherence to certain things and avoidance of others. In fact, we're going to show that not simply one, not even two, but three Big Mac hamburgers a day can be part of a nutritious and healthy diet - one that, if not perfect, is substantially better than what most people eat each day. The answer, as we're now going to prove, is a resounding no. ![]() Is the Big Mac indeed representative of America's nutrition problem? The purpose of today's episode is to drill to the root of this puzzlingly widespread belief. ![]() And one place that I see the Finger of Blame pointed for this problem is fast food specifically, McDonald's and even more specifically, the world's single best-known food product, the famous Big Mac hamburger. So it's a fact that Americans are missing the mark. Most Americans exceed the recommendations for added sugars, saturated fats, and sodium.More than half of the population is meeting or exceeding total grain and total protein foods recommendations, but are not meeting the recommendations for the subgroups within each of these food groups.About three-fourths of the population has an eating pattern that is low in vegetables, fruits, dairy, and oils.Here are the report's three bullet points for the chapter "Current Eating Patterns in the United States": But that's OK, because Americans are almost always the ones held up as an example of the world's least healthiest eaters. So, with apologies to our overseas listeners, this episode is America-centric. They all contain things your body needs, and often they contain excesses of other things that your body doesn't want, but that won't cause any issue at all if they're integrated into a diverse diet.įor the actual eating habits of people and comparisons to what we currently consider ideal, I'm going by the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines, a publication of the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. A candy bar, a pizza, or a quart of ice cream aren't going to hurt you. It has to do with any normal food item that has some foodie stigma attached to it. In fact, the truth is so far from that, I'm hoping you will be surprised.Īnd really, the point today has nothing to do with McDonald's or the Big Mac. According to pop fearmongering, this sounds like it should trigger an immediate trip to the emergency room. So to hammer the point home, I want to take this to an extreme: three Big Macs, eaten in a single day. Nutritional science just doesn't work that way. But food science shows that such a reaction is unjustified. Many foodies will typically throw up their hands in horror at the prospect of eating even a single Big Mac, let alone one every day. It's gotten to the point that virtue signaling by vilifying the Big Mac has become a de facto requirement of the modern foodie movement. This notion is popular among organic proponents, foodies, and the majority of the population who conflate fast food with unhealthy food. Today we're going make a frontal assault against one specific manifestation of pop food woo: the notion that the iconic and oft-maligned McDonald's Big Mac is among the most unhealthy foods in the world. ![]()
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