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As Wesley Willis once famously crooned, “McDonald’s will make you fat.” (Indeed it did, which killed him.) Lately, however, fast food chains like the Mick have introduced a new class of items onto their menus — wolves in sheep’s clothing. That’s right, salads. According to The Consumerist (and health professionals everywhere), these salads are nothing but a big, fat lie: almost across the board, they’ve got more calories, more carbs, more sodium and more fat than their beefy value menu brethren. To prove it, they did a little side-by-side comparison, using the nutritional info provided by the chains themselves.
Turns out that Wendy’s Garden Sensations Mandarin Chicken Salad outweighs their 1/4-lb. double-stack cheeseburger by three times (447g to 166g), has 6 grams more fat, about 300 grams more sodium, twenty grams more carbs, 130 more calories and nearly five times the sugar content. Wow. (You get the same sort of stats when you stack McDonald’s asian salad against its double cheeseburger (I’m hatin’ it!), Burger King’s “Tendercrisp” salad against its Whopper Jr. and Taco Bell’s taco salad against its “Chicken Stuft Burrito.”) I know it’s the meat and sugar and dressing and croutons that they add to the salads that’s mostly to blame, but it makes me imagine some Frankenstein’s workshop where fast food Igors are injecting innocent cucumbers with syringes of salt and beef tallow … by the way, the title of this blog is a reference to this. (For those of you who were all like, whaaa?)
Comments (7)
Comment
To be fair, the majority of the fat and calories in those salads IS found in the dressing (and croutons, nuts, etc). If you’re intelligent enough to realize that and use those toppings sparingly or not at all, the salads really are a healthy choice.
There’s a website called Dotty’s Weight-Loss Zone (www.dwlz.com) that lists the Weight Watchers “points” for items at hundreds of restaurants, including fast food, and you can see that the salads (listed separately from the dressings and toppings) are considerably lower in “points” than the burgers and such you mention.
posted by Sara on 6-1-2007 at 10:22 am
But those salads without toppings are gross. I’m guessing one of out maybe twenty fast food salad eaters doesn’t use the provided toppings.
posted by Ransom on 6-1-2007 at 10:39 am
in my family, when we eat fast food my mom get a salad and my brother and i trade off with crutons and the sun flower seeds or whatever they are. i don’t know why we do this, but it’s just the way it is. we’re strange i guess
posted by trouble on 6-1-2007 at 10:51 am
Those premium salads taste great, but they give you enough to feed three people. It would be nice to get a half-size salad that still has chicken on it, but then people wouldn’t pay $5 for them.
posted by Miss Cellania on 6-1-2007 at 8:00 pm
Going to McDonalds for a salad is like going to a crack den for vitamins.
posted by Melissa on 6-1-2007 at 8:32 pm
if you just eat less for a long period of time you will lose weight.
posted by matthew on 6-2-2007 at 2:08 am
I have to second what Melissa has to say. You can’t really go to a fast food joint and expect anything healthy. Support your local farmers and buy some fresh vegetables and make your own salads for the week (Which I do), or at the very least bring your own dressing and realize that no one owes you anything(even honesty); they just want your dollar.
posted by Woody on 6-3-2007 at 11:17 pm