Fast-Food Burgers Deliver Plenty Of Fat

One responsibility of living in a free economy is that you must decide for yourself what to spend your money on, particularly when it comes to controlling your health. Just because a company manufactures and promotes a product doesn’t mean you have to put it in your mouth.

Take, for instance, the McDonald’s Arch Deluxe.

While the federal government and most of the country’s health professionals have been pleading for Americans to curb their fat intake, the country’s largest fast-food enterprise is spending millions of dollars trying to fill us up with fat from a single sandwich, telling us it is the “adult” thing to do.

Eat one 8-ounce Arch Deluxe, with its cheese, hamburger, lettuce, tomato and oozing special sauce, and you get 32 grams of fat - almost half of a day’s recommended allowance. Add the optional bacon and you’re up to 34 grams.

Assume you lose all sense of control and pig out on a lunch of an Arch Deluxe with bacon, large fries and a medium Coca-Cola. You’ve just blown 85 percent of your fat allowance, 1,270 calories and 64 percent of your sodium. Ronald will need to disco all night to work those calories off.

High fat in fast food upsets nutrition scientists, including Dr. William P. Castelli, director of the Framingham (Mass.) Cardiovascular Institute and former medical director of the 46-year-old Framingham Heart Study.

“When you pass through the golden arches, you’re on your way to the Pearly Gates,” Castelli says, not in jest.

McDonald’s isn’t the only fast-food business with mega-fat, calorie-crammed products. Burger King’s Double Whopper with cheese, a two-burger behemoth weighing in at almost a pound, boasts 51 grams of fat and 890 calories, not to mention 1,270 grams of sodium.

But McDonald’s is most visible right now as the company spends millions on advertising the Arch Deluxe, mostly to the young.

“We’ll meet you on the other side of childhood,” reads the one on the side of the city bus with a photo of a teenage boy wearing braces on his teeth. Are grown-ups the target audience here, or are adult wannabes?

Fast-food restaurants are just providing what the public wants, company representatives say. That’s also what the makers of Marlboro and Camels say.