Challenging received wisdom

[caddyman]

Or at least hoping to.

A documentary film maker in the US is to eat nothing but McDonald's over the counter food for the whole of April and lose weight, by making informed and sensible menu choices. The idea is to highlight the role of personal responsibility in the obesity issue, rather than just shift the blame to the Big Corporations. It's not as if there aren't enough points of contention with them on other issues...

This will bear keeping an eye on, if you're as fed up as I am with the health Nazis and nannyism from the Government.

Comments

[westernind.livejournal.com]

I bet she gets hungry. I wonder if she'll say so?
Or do McDonalds do veggies nowadays?

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

I bet she gets bored. I reckon I could lose weight eating there through boredom, but that the biggest problem would be to prevent salt levels from soaring.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I have no idea!

I suspect that if you're after veggie only food, you will go very hungry at McDonald's.

The study looks interesting, though. Hopefully she will have the integrity to say she's wrong, if it turns out she is. Nonetheless, it's interesting and refreshing that she's having a go rather than just accepting what she's been told.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

They do offer a salad; it comes in a tall plastic cup and you put the dressing in at the top and shake it. See, veggies can be fun, children! I've never tried one, but from the pictures it looks like iceberg lettuce with little bits of tomato and carrot. (And bacon bits and shredded cheese with some styles, naturally).

So yes, if she manages to lose weight it will probably be because she's starving for something or other. I doubt MacDonald's really designs its menus around providing complete nutrition for a healthy adult. The thing is, I think they're required to provide nutritional information about all of their products now (at least in the U.S.; I think it's an FDA regulation), so it should be possible to determine whether or not you could construct a healthy diet out of their offerings on paper without putting oneself at such risk. I wonder if she knows about the apparently permanent effect on metabolism bizarro diets can cause ...

[fromaway.livejournal.com]

Well, they do still sell plain burgers and such, and I think they often carry bagels and fruit cups and things like that - and while they're probably nowhere near as nutritious as what you'd get at, say, a farmer's market, I expect they're okay as far as calories and fat go. And you don't have to supersize anything (I never have, although I also haven't eaten at McDonald's since high school).

The real question is what it will do to her energy level (even if she avoids the high-calorie/high-fat items, I expect she'll be taking in a lot of sugar and sodium and not too many vitamins and minerals), and also whether she'll be hungry all the time.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Actually, you can't supersize anything anymore. They withdrew that recently in response to all the media pressure and publicity about the lawsuit. So U.S. Americans are going to become positively svelte in a few short months now that MacDonald's isn't abusing us anymore! Phew, that was easy!

I didn't know that about the fruit cup and bagels; I don't go in very often, and when I do, it's to satify my once or twice-yearly insane craving for a Big Mac, so I don't look at the rest of the menu much. (It's some sort of nostalgia/comfort food thing; for some reason a MacDonald's burger is the one thing you can always get children here to eat when you're out somewhere, no matter how picky they might be. I wonder what they really put in that orange mystery sauce.)

[fromaway.livejournal.com]

Actually, you can't supersize anything anymore.

Really? I had no idea. I wonder if that will change anything - are the other chains still supersizing? As I said, I've barely been in there in about five years (although come to think of it, I did share an order of McNuggets in university - once), so I'm not up to date on their menu...although when I lived in Halifax, I did notice they had a McLobster sandwich. Kind of disturbing.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

It was just announced in the newspaper a few weeks ago. It may be a U.S. only thing, I'm not sure (on the assumption maybe that it wouldn't occur to anyone else in the world to sue a fast-food chain for making them fat). I haven't heard of any other fast-food chain reacting to any of this controversy; MacDonald's seems always to be the target of reformers (I'm remembering the anti-meat activists who were leafleting about MacDonald's a few years ago), I suppose because of its recognizablity and symbolic meaning, even though it's been steadily losing market share to other chains for years here.

[pauln.livejournal.com]

Chap called Morgan Spurlock has already done this, recording the month in his documentary Super Size Me

Doh!

[pauln.livejournal.com]

Which, of course, she's responding to ...

Note to self - glance at links referred to before posting

[fromaway.livejournal.com]

Well, it'll be interesting to see what she discovers.

On the one hand, of course it's nonsense to say that eating at McDonald's, in and of itself, will make you fat. On the other hand, this study may well be used to make the point that poor people who are fat (and fatness is a class issue these days) are just lazy and irresponsible, that it will just be used as another club to bash low-income people, and given who's publishing that study and that there's an ad next to the article for a book "debunking" environmentalism, I fear the worst.

[fromaway.livejournal.com]

Bah. Excuse my grammar. I need to read my posts all the way through before I hit the button.

[willowing.livejournal.com]

I have to agree - even though I think MacDonalds and similar companies are filthier than the scum of the earth, I do not hold them responsible for the increased obesity of the human race.

No one has ever forced people to walk into these places and forced burgers down their throats.

Now, media and advertising... that is a different story...

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

1. She doesn't say whether she will be taking vitamin supplements
2. It's possible to eat nothing but chocoate and lose weight - people do

[thalinoviel.livejournal.com]

McDonalds do publish a nutrition facts booklet which I once picked up from by the counters. They do also sell small baggies of fresh fruit with apple slices and grapes in, and orange juice.

I don't rate her chances of losing weight if she eats a burger (of any kind) once a day, though, and if she doesn't she'll risk protein deficiency given the available food choices.