Can You Eat Healthy At McDonald's? (Food Review)

I'm Bryan Marcel. I've been doing a series on how to eat healthy, if you're going to eat fast food. So far I've been to Subway, Wendy's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell. Today I'm at McDonald's. What I'm trying to do is to find the best items to eat at the fast food restaurants, if you're going to eat fast food, knowing the limitations, that fast food is not really quality food. With any fast food restaurant a lot of the things that I recommend are the same. For example, avoid the sodas. The sodas are either sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners, neither are good for you. Also avoid the French fries. The French fries are typically fried in an oil that contains TBHQ. TBHQ is actually a potential carcinogen that's derived from petroleum and I try to avoid those. The French fries and most of the crispy chickens are fried in that same oil. Now with McDonald's a little interesting thing about the French fries here. I just bought these about five minutes ago. These French fries right here, you'll notice they're a little bit smaller. The color's a little bit different, but there's no mold, they haven't broken down. These particular French fries were purchased on June 17, 2010. These are eleven months old and they look almost perfect. That's why I avoid the fried foods all together. Another item that I try to stay away from are the bread items, because they're simply not high quality. McDonald's uses high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and they also use an ingredient called azodicarbonamide in their buns. Azodicarbonamide is a bleaching agent which is a known carcinogen. And that's why I avoid it. Now McDonald's has three different types of buns. They have their regular bun, that you'll find on a McDouble. They have their Big Mac bun and they have what they call their premium bun which you'll find on their premium sandwiches. And I wanted to address that. Every word that is used in relation to food has a definition. Unfortunately, the word premium has no definition. So when you see it assigned to, premium chicken, premium salad, premium dressing, it means absolutely nothing. The only difference between a regular bun, a Big Mac bun and a premium bun are pretty much they have the same ingredients, in a different order. There's nothing premium about them Okay. So what do you get? What are the best choices? Well, if I was going to eat at McDonald's I would get any of the burgers, and I would simply not use the bun. I would just throw the bun away and eat the meat. I wouldn't get the Big Mac though. I wanted to kind of focus on that. The reason is the Big Mac sauce. And that's kind of what made McDonald's famous, as far as the Big Mac, is the sauce. If you look at the ingredients of McDonald's sauce, it is 33 ingredients, 4 of which are sugars including high fructose corn syrup. But the concerning ingredient for me is that it contains propylene glycol. Have you ever been on an airplane in the winter time? You push back from the gate and the de-ice trucks come up to the airplane and they start spraying the ice off of the wings and the fuselage. Well what they're spraying on there is an anti-ice fluid. It's actually basically the same as what's in the radiator of your car. The ingredient in that is propylene glycol. It has a lot of side effects, from skin irritation, to central nervous system shut down. Now, people say to me, come on Bryan propylene glycol, azodicarbonamide, TBHQ, you're not getting enough of it to really matter. What does it matter? And I understand that reasoning, but my take is always the same. Why expose yourself to those chemicals. Because if you have those chemicals in your body, your body has to process them. Your body has to remove them. Your body has to deal with them. And while it's doing that, it's so busy getting rid of all of that junk that it can't focus on your overall health. Look at our rates of cancer, disease, leukemia. A lot of that, I think, is tied into all of the chemicals, all of the toxins, all of the carcinogens in our food. Now we said, back to the beef here, we said the meat is actually a relatively good choice. Also what you can do is you can order the grilled chicken patty. Now this is the same chicken patty that comes on the grilled chicken sandwich, for example. But you can order just the meat. You don't even have to order the bun. A lot of the cashiers don't know how to do that, but if you ask for just the grilled chicken patty, they'll find a way and they'll get it done for you. Always a good choice is the salad. The dressing in this case, I actually chose the balsalmic vinaigerette. And I didn't do that because it's fat free or low fat. That really doesn't matter to me. I did that because in most salad dressing the number one ingredient is soy oil, which I try to avoid. The problem with soy is that it is very high in Omega-6 fatty acids. And Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids are both required by your body. You can only get them from food. But they need to remain in balance and unfortunately in the American diet our Omeg-6's are way up and our Omega-3's are way down. So I try not to consume too many Omega-6's that way both stay in balance. The number one ingredient here is water. The balsalmic vinegar, then sugar, then fourth on the list is actually the soybean oil. So that's why I like that. The advice I always give if you're going to use the salad dressings, just use half and that actually helps reduce that too. So at any fast food restaurant, just like McDonald's there are some decent choices that you can get as long as you understand the limitations on the quality of the food.