Restaurants, Diners, Fast Food

What’s In Your Big Mac Or Fast Food Burger Besides Beef?

November 13, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Have you had a Big Mac in different parts of the country or even in different parts of the world? It tastes pretty much the same – which, in some ways, is rather comforting when you might be far from home.

Fast food is cheap, quick, reproducible in any outlet, often tasty, and consistent. To be all of those things makes it pretty difficult to use locally sourced and fresh ingredients.

Fast food restaurants might be trying to make their menus healthier by adding veggies and fruit, but the bottom line is that much of their food is processed and preserved – and that doesn’t happen without chemicals.

An occasional trip to Mickey D’s isn’t a disaster and the burger content is beef (although who knows the source of the cows, what parts of the cow are used, and what they’ve been fed). But what about the bun, the sauce, and the cheese that accompany the burger? How does the bun stay soft and how does the “special sauce” always taste the same?

Take a look at the ingredients in a Big Mac, a burger, and cheeseburger from McDonald’s (all info is from McDonald’s own site). Although McDonald’s is used as an example, almost all of the fast food chains use additives and preservatives in their food. One of the biggest shockers is the bun – ask a home baker or a bakery how many ingredients they put in their buns – then look at these. Then check out the sauce.

Then decide how frequently you want to indulge.

Big Mac:

Components: 100% BEEF PATTY, BIG MAC BUN, PASTEURIZED PROCESS AMERICAN CHEESE, BIG MAC SAUCE, SHREDDED LETTUCE, PICKLE SLICES, ONIONS

100% Beef Patty:

Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper).

Big Mac Bun:

Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Bleached Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil and/or Canola Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Ammonium Sulfate, Ammonium Chloride, Dough Conditioners (May Contain One or More of: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Azodicarbonamide, Mono and Diglycerides, Ethoxylated Monoglycerides, Monocalcium Phosphate, Enzymes, Guar Gum, Calcium Peroxide), Sorbic Acid, Calcium Propionate and/or Sodium Propionate (Preservatives), Soy Lecithin, Sesame Seed.

Big Mac Sauce:

Ingredients: Soybean Oil, Pickle Relish (Diced Pickles, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sugar, Vinegar, Corn Syrup, Salt, Calcium Chloride, Xanthan Gum, Potassium Sorbate [Preservative], Spice Extractives, Polysorbate 80), Distilled Vinegar, Water, Egg Yolks, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Onion Powder, Mustard Seed, Salt, Spices, Propylene Glycol Alginate, Sodium Benzoate (Preservative), Mustard Bran, Sugar, Garlic Powder, Vegetable Protein (Hydrolyzed Corn, Soy and Wheat), Caramel Color, Extractives of Paprika, Soy Lecithin, Turmeric (Color), Calcium Disodium EDTA (Protect Flavor).

Crinkle Cut Pickles: Ingredients: Cucumbers, Water, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, Calcium Chloride, Sodium Benzoate (Preservative), Natural Flavors (Plant Source), Polysorbate 80, Extractives of Turmeric (Color).

Pasteurized Process American Cheese: Ingredients: Milk, Cream, Water, Cheese Culture, Sodium Citrate, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Citric Acid, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid, Enzymes, Sodium Pyrophosphate, Natural Flavor (Dairy Source), Color Added, Soy Lecithin (Added for Slice Separation).

Hamburger:

Components: 100% BEEF PATTY, REGULAR BUN, KETCHUP, MUSTARD, PICKLE SLICES, ONIONS

Cheeseburger:

Components: 100% BEEF PATTY, REGULAR BUN, PASTEURIZED PROCESS AMERICAN CHEESE, KETCHUP, MUSTARD, PICKLE SLICES, ONIONS

100% Beef Patty: Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper).

Regular Bun: Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Bleached Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil and/or Canola Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Ammonium Sulfate, Ammonium Chloride, Dough Conditioners (May Contain One or More of: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Azodicarbonamide, Mono and Diglycerides, Ethoxylated Monoglycerides, Monocalcium Phosphate, Enzymes, Guar Gum, Calcium Peroxide), Sorbic Acid, Calcium Propionate and/or Sodium Propionate (Preservatives), Soy Lecithin.

Pasteurized Process American Cheese:

Ingredients: Milk, Cream, Water, Cheese Culture, Sodium Citrate, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Citric Acid, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid, Enzymes, Sodium Pyrophosphate, Natural Flavor (Dairy Source), Color Added, Soy Lecithin (Added for Slice Separation).

Nutrition:

Big Mac, 7.6 oz: 550 calories, 29g fat, 10g saturated fat, 1g trans fat, 970mg sodium, 46g carbs, 25g protein

Hamburger, 3.5 oz: 250 calories, 9g fat, 3.5g saturated fat, 0.5 trans fat, 480mg sodium, 31g carbs, 12g proteinS

Cheeseburger, 4 oz.: 300 calories, 12g fat, 6g saturated fat, 0.5g trans fat, 680mg sodium, 33g carbs, 15g protein

Want To Eat Fast? Choose Restaurants With Red and Gold Décor And Loud Music

October 2, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

What are the main colors used in McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and most fast food restaurants – diners, included? Answer: Red and gold.

Restaurant Décor Is Planned For A Reason You Might Not Guess

Restaurant decor isn’t an accident, especially in chain restaurants keyed into behavioral and eating psychology. Restaurants are designed with the intention of getting you to eat and run or to keep you at the table longer so you order more.

Speed Eating

Fast food and high turnover restaurants are decorated for speed eating. No soothing pastels, sound absorbing surfaces, or soft music to be seen or heard. Instead you’ll find loud music, noise reflecting off of hard surfaces, and high arousal color schemes — frequently red and gold.

It takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to communicate to your brain that you’re full. A red, gold, and noisy environment makes you gulp your food and reach for more way before 20 minutes have come and gone. Or, it helps convince you to gulp down your food and make your exit pretty quickly. The rapid table turnovers allow the restaurant to pack more people in – and then serve more food – quickly!

Leisurely Dining

On the other hand, people tend to linger at restaurants with low lighting, soft music, flowers, and tablecloths. The white tablecloths and soft music of “fancy” restaurants make it pleasant to linger longer — and order another glass of wine, dessert, coffee, or after dinner drink. The attentive waitstaff obligingly offers you more and more options — and you’re likely to agree. In this type of eating environment you end up ordering and eating more than you had planned.

Know your setting: pace yourself in the speed environment and avoid the temptation to keep ordering in the relaxed environment.

Does Alcohol Make You Gain Weight?

September 19, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

It certainly can. Pure alcohol, gram for gram, has almost twice the number of calories as a gram of carbohydrate or protein. One gram of alcohol has 7 calories compared to the 4 calories for carbohydrate or protein – fat has nine calories a gram. Some research is showing that calories from alcohol may be burned less efficiently, but the calories still pack a punch.

There’s another factor, too. If you drink alcohol along with your other daily food, you’re often adding, not replacing, the calories from other food or drinks. If everything else stays the same, you’ll gain weight. And, alcohol can cause disinhibition — it reduces your ability manage your immediate impulsive response to a situation – in other words, it makes you less focused on how much you’re eating.

However, statistically, drinkers aren’t more likely to be obese than nondrinkers. But a number if factors come into play: the amount and type of alcohol; when, where, and the type of drinking pattern; the way your body processes the alcohol; and various psychological factors.

Gender Differences On Drinking Days

A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the food and calorie intake of 1,864 people on days when they did and didn’t drink. On drinking days men (including 10% who were heavy drinkers which would skew the numbers higher) averaged 433 extra calories; 363 of them came from alcohol, the rest from extra food and other kinds of beverages. The men also ate more protein, fat, salt, and meat on drinking days.

Women averaged an extra 299 calories on drinking days, almost all of them coming from alcohol. Although they didn’t eat much more than on nondrinking days, they did eat more fat and less healthy foods.

Good News, Bad News

About 35% of American adults don’t drink, 55% are light or moderate drinkers, and 10% drink more than a moderate amount. It’s estimated that alcohol directly or indirectly causes 90,000 deaths a year in the US, including more than 11,000 traffic fatalities.

But drinking has benefits, too It can be part of social, business and family life and regular drinking, even in small amounts, decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease. Alcohol, like aspirin, reduces blood clotting — a transient effect that lasts for about a day. Alcohol can raise HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels over time and moderate intake helps to reduce the risk of other health problems, including type 2 diabetes, gallstones, peripheral artery disease, and perhaps dementia.

The most serious health risks — alcoholism, heart and liver disease, hypertension, certain cancers, osteoporosis, car crashes and other accidents — come mostly from heavy drinking, but moderate drinking can affect your coordination and ability to drive, operate machinery, or swim.

If You’re Going To Drink, Should You Do It Every Day?

It seems that drinking small amounts regularly and with meals (it slows the absorption of the alcohol) is better than occasionally drinking larger amounts. Some research findings suggest that daily (or almost daily) drinking is best for the heart; other studies have found that drinking every other day is enough to get benefits; and still others have found that it only takes half a standard drink a day. (In the US a “drink” is 5 ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor, which all contain about 14 grams of pure alcohol.)

What’s Moderate Drinking?

In the US, moderate drinking — as defined in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans — is up to one drink a day for a woman and up to two for a man. (Other countries define moderation and the size of a “standard” drink differently.) The recommended amount is less for women because they tend to be smaller, have proportionately more body fat, and have less body water (alcohol is diluted in body water). Generally, the same amount of alcohol would cause higher blood level of alcohol in women than in men and would also cause more impairment.

Did You Eat Too Much? Blame Your Buddies At The Table

September 12, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

How many people do you usually sit with when you’re eating? Not all the people surrounding you in a cafeteria or restaurant, but the number of friends or family at your table?

Amazingly, the number of people you eat with can make a big difference in how much you end up eating. If you have eight people at your table you might end up eating 96% more than if you ate alone!

That’s not to say that you should limit the number of friends you eat with—it should just make you aware that friends, unintentionally, can influence how much and how fast you eat.

How Come?

You tend to eat for a longer amount of time — and eat more — when you’re with people you like compared to when you eat alone. It could be because you mindlessly nibble while someone else talks, or you’re using the good manners you were taught in fifth grade about not letting someone else eat alone, or maybe you’re just having fun and enjoying your food. Whatever the reason, most of us tend to stay at the table longer when we’re with others –and– the longer you stay at the table, the more you eat.

We also tend to mimic the other people at the table. It’s almost as though how much you eat and how fast you eat is contagious. If your friends eat fast, you eat fast. If they eat a lot, you eat a lot.

Friends and family influence how much we eat, too. Sometimes you get so involved in conversation that all monitoring of what you pop into your mouth goes out the window. Have you ever looked down at your plate and wondered where all the cookies went or how you managed to work your way through the mile high dish of pasta or the four pieces of pizza? How many tastes did you take of everyone else’s meal and dessert? Those tastes aren’t like invisible ink. Those calories count, too.

How Much More Do We Eat When We’re With Others?

In his book, Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink, PhD reports on a study that shows how strong the tendency is to increase how much you eat when you eat with others. Compared to eating alone, you eat, on average:

35% more if you eat with one other person
75% more with four at the table
96% more with a group of seven or more

What’s The Reason?

It’s a common pattern for adults to eat more when they’re in larger groups than when they’re eating alone. One reason is a phenomenon called “social facilitation,” or the actions or behaviors that result from the sight and sound of other people doing the same thing that you’re doing. When you’re eating in groups, social facilitation can help override your brain’s normal signals of satiety.

What You Can Do

Think about who you’re eating with – and why. If you want to have a blast and don’t care about how much you eat – eat with a big group and chow down.
If you want to be careful about what and how much you eat, think about eating lunch with your salad (dressing on the side, please) friends rather than the pepperoni pizza group.
Without even thinking about it, you tend to adjust your eating pace to that of your companions. So, sit next to the slow eaters rather than the gobblers if you’re trying to control how much goes into your mouth.

Want more tips — especially if you eat in dining halls of any kind? Get my new book, now available on Amazon — 30 Ways to Survive Dining Hall and Dorm Room Food: Tips to Avoid the Freshman 15.

Dashboard Diner: What Is It And Are You One?

August 27, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

How many ketchup drips, chocolate smears, coffee stains, and random crumbs do you have in your car (or on your clothes)?

Is your road trip to the shore or mountains or the big game an endless fest of fast food, junk food, and all kinds of snacks with your dashboard or vacant passenger seat as your table?

If you’re nodding your head, you’re a dashboard diner.

It’s way too easy to indulge your dashboard dining gremlin when doughnut shops and fast food restaurants have drive-thruus and gas stations come equipped with mini-marts that serve that comes regular,, decaf, dark velvet and hazelnut coffee and baked goods so your coffee doesn’t get lonely.

Mini-Mart And Rest-Stop “Gotchas”

Candy:

Candy is an impulse purchase; 49 percent of shoppers admit to unplanned purchases of candy. We want to treat ourselves and candy is an affordable luxury. Chocolate bars are the main choice — followed by gum; bagged, repacked peg candy; candy rolls; mints and drops; non-chocolate bars; seasonal candy and novelties.

Check out the placement of candy the next time you’re in a mini-mart or convenience store. It’s positioned to grab your attention. Its vividly colored wrappers reach out to you from high-traffic areas of the store: the checkout area, the aisle that leads to the check out, and on the way to the restrooms. Know that your senses are going to be assaulted and have a plan for what you will and will not buy. If you’ve decided you want M&Ms go straight to them and don’t get sidetracked by a new kind of chips, or seasonal displays, or the latest and greatest deal on a king– sized package of some kind of candy.

Coffee:

Unlike candy, coffee isn’t an impulse purchase. Nearly 96% of customers intend to buy a cup of coffee before they walk in. That’s why the stores put impulse-buy merchandise —candy, baked goods, and chips — near the coffee to entice you to buy them. As a man standing in line at a popular gas station mini-mart muttered, “I stop here for coffee every morning and I’ve gained 20 pounds since they put in the Krispy Kreme donut display between the door and the cash register.”

Some Helpful Tips:

Go for the nuts got protein and crunch, won’t cause swings in your blood sugar and are almost always stocked. Tread a little gently — nuts are not low in fat or calories.
Some mini-marts have fruit (oranges and bananas come in their own natural wrapper and don’t have to be washed) and almost all have dried fruit — but balance the higher sugar content of the dried fruit with the fat and protein in the nuts.
Sometimes you can find individual bowls of Cheerios or whole grain cereals. Grab a small container of non or low-fat milk or a container of yogurt.
Popcorn is a great choice and some stations stock fat-free soy crisps or pop chips. Be aware of portion sizes. Sometimes a bag has more than one serving.
Protein bars can be good, better, and best. Check the labels for higher protein and lower sugar. Some can be the equivalent of a candy bar and are so large (with so many calories) that they are made to be meal replacements.
If you’re really hungry choose a sandwich or burrito over donuts, pastry, and cookies. Check out how fresh it is, though. What’s appealing early in the morning when the shelves are first stocked might not be so appealing at 10PM if it has sat around all day and lots of people have picked up the sandwich, squeezed it, and put it back again.
Beef jerky or beef sticks (or nuggets) are good, portable protein snacks. A 1-ounce serving can have around 80 calories and 3 grams of fat or less. A hard– boiled egg is a good choice, too. Just make sure they’re refrigerated and haven’t been sitting around for a couple of days!
If you must go with crunchy stuff, stick with pretzels or look for baked or popped chips. Look for single-serve bags to keep portions in check. Remember that the salty stuff will make you thirsty so stock up on water. There’s something to be said for snacks that take time to eat one by one when you’re driving.
It may take away some of the road trip spontaneity, but when you pack up your car you can pack some food, too. Fill a cooler with water, fruit, yogurt, sandwiches — hatever you think you will eat and that will keep you alert and energized (aim for some complex carbs and protein). Why not throw in someportion bags of nuts and popcorn, too? Planning ahead means you’re not at the mercy of the vending machines and racks and racks of candy, chips, and baked goods.
Use an app or your GPS to find nearby restaurants as you drive through various communities. A little searching can help you find places with healthier options than you might find at a rest stop. This can be really helpful for anyone with allergies or special dietary requirements.
If you just want to leave your rest stop purchases to chance at least have your own mental list of some good, better, and best choices of food to buy. The danger is that the candy, chips, fries, and doughnuts call your name the minute you walk in the door. If you know that you’re going to head straight for the nuts, or popcorn, or even a burger, that’s great, as long as the giant chocolate chip cookie and the bargain 32–ounce soda for 99 cents doesn’t grab you first. Try to decide what you’re going to buy before you go in and then stick to your decision.
Remember that too much sugar causes a spike and then nose dive of your blood sugar levels. The consequence is that you’re initially energized and then can get very drowsy and unfocused as your blood sugar plummets. Not exactly what you want when you’re driving.