McDonald’s Says Don’t Eat Fast Food

What can you say when McDonald’s themselves advise you to better not eat at their restaurants?

I’m Glad I’m Not Him

Don Thompson, CEO of McDonald’s, probably hopes that next year will be better.

At the company’s annual shareholder meeting in spring, a pesky nine-year-old lectured him about it being bad to market fast foods to kids (although mom seems to use her daughter to market her blog).

In October he had to look at shrinking profits in a business field becoming tougher and tougher.

And now his own company tells people to not eat fast food because “it can make you overweight.”

The “Unhealthy Choice”

McDonald’s, CNBC reports, runs (or better ran, it’s offline due to “technical difficulties”) a website for employees, giving them advise about life, the universe, and the rest. One of the categories on there was “Healthy Living” and in it an entry read:

Fast foods are quick, reasonably priced, and readily available alternatives to home cooking. While convenient and economical for a busy lifestyle, fast foods are typically high in calories, fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt and may put people at risk for becoming overweight.

Another post showed a picture of the typical fast food lunch consisting of burger, fries, soda. It was titled the “unhealthy choice.” The “healthy choice” was right next to it: a lightweight sub, a salad and water as drink. Yet another entry advised readers that “it is hard to eat a healthy diet when you eat at fast-food restaurants often.”

By Jupiter, putting the adverb at the end of the sentence instead of right before its verb gets on my nerves often.

Is That A Suicide Wish?

Grammar aside, maybe the company had an Uncle Scrooge moment right before Christmas and wanted to get a clean conscience just in time.  Maybe they started that website for employees, bought bulk content to have something to post and never looked at the actual words. Whatever it is, they’ll now deny that their food is bad, and fast food bashers will claim that the big evil M finally admitted that fast food is crap. That won’t change a thing, because neither stance is true.

Fast food is high in calories and they do want to sell as much of it as they can. But no food is per se good or bad. To get fat from fast food, it takes two to tango: people who eat too much of it, and fast food restaurants doing their best to have them eat too much. It’s a lack of personal responsibility encountering corporate greed.

Picture courtesy of “moyerphotos“.