This salad makes fatties

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?)