Tag Archives: McDonalds

Chicago McDonald’s to Test Healthier Happy Meals

McDonald’s has never really been known as a place to go for a healthy meal. Now they are trying to change their image, and are hoping consumers will respond positively.

McDonald’s is attempting to create healthier Happy Meals and the first area to test the new menu is Chicago. In this new Happy Meal, kids will get less fries, some apple slices and milk instead of the standard Happy Meal components. McDonald’s has offered fruit as a substitution to fries for many years in the Happy Meal, but it had to be requested until now.

The default for Happy Meals has always been French fries and the drink of your choice alongside a hamburger, cheeseburger or chicken nuggets. The new healthier option will be the first time that the Happy Meals will default to a fruit in an effort to address the challenges kids face in meeting the recommended daily consumption of produce. McDonald’s has plans to roll this Happy Meal out to all of their locations by March.

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Posted on November 4, 2025 by Descygna

What Do a McRib and Your Yoga Mat Have in Common?

These two items seem as far removed as the people who eat the sandwich and those who actually use a yoga mat, but they share something in common that is wildly alarming and worth having a look.

Azodicarbonamide, ammonium sulfate and polysorbate 80 are just three of the 70 ingredients that make up the famed McDonald’s BBQ McRib pork sandwich. Even though these nasty ingredients are in small enough quantities that may not otherwise be harmful to your health, it is worth noting how and where else these chemicals are being used just to put it into perspective.

The biggest one that will get some of you squirming in your seat is azodicarbonamide, a flour-bleaching agent found in the McRib bun. This chemical, in addition to giving your BBQ bun that fresh, white appearance, is also used to manufacture shoes, foam plastics, materials such as gym flooring and believe it or not, yoga mats.

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Posted on November 3, 2025 by Jill

McDonald’s Installs McTV in 800 U.S. Restaurants

Have you ever wished you could catch your favorite shows while chowing down on a cheeseburger? McDonald’s customers in the U.S. will soon be able to. Though seemingly incongruous with the notion of “fast food,” McDonald’s will offer the new McTV network in 800 McDonald’s restaurants across Southern California and Las Vegas.

The network, which  could reach nearly 20 million viewers per month, will feature entertainment, news, sports and video content for Quarter Pounder connoisseurs. Programs will be shown on a one-hour cycle, eight minutes of which will be dedicated to commercials. The in-store channel, which will be customized by restaurant location, is a joint venture between McDonald’s and ChannelPort Communications LLC. According to AOL TV, if it’s successful, it could be rolled out in restaurants nationally.

Leland Edmondson, founder of ChannelPort, told AOL TV “The intention is to catch and engage the customer, and then enhance their experience.”

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Posted on October 19, 2025 by Maris

11 Scary Unhealthy Fast Food Breakfasts

By Melissa Breyer for Care2.com

How would you like to meet your daily sodium and saturated fat allowance, as well as nearly half of your daily calorie needs, in one quick breakfast eaten on the road? It’s becoming progressively easy these day as food technicians, chefs and market researchers, holed away in corporate fast food “studios,” are busy developing monstrous new breakfast items. Trying to claim as much of the $57 billion fast food breakfast market as they can, the fast food giants are drumming up increasingly cheesy, steak-y, fried chicken-y breakfast dishes that tap into flavor combinations that have proven successful for lunch and dinner items. It’s no longer eggs and English muffins for fast food breakfast…breakfast burger anyone?

What’s most striking about some of these high-calorie items–aside from the unsustainable, industrial, often GMO and synthetic ingredients–is the very high sodium and saturated fat content. According to the USDA, the current recommendation for sodium consumption is less than 2,300 milligrams a day. For saturated fat, the maximum allowance is between 18 grams to 31 grams, depending on your caloric intake needs. (You can calculate your caloric need with this calculator from the Mayo Clinic.) Many of these breakfast items meet or exceed the daily sodium and fat allowances, and provide much more than one-third of your daily caloric needs.

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Posted on September 23, 2025 by GuestBlogger

Does Your Breakfast Wear a Health Halo? Try These Healthy Breakfast Alternatives

By Karen Sherwood for NutritiousAmerica.com

These early fall mornings all we want to do is crawl back under our warm covers and sleep for an hour longer. Late, we usually run out the door forgetting the most important meal of the day: breakfast.

We’ve all been told the statistics about how breakfast ignites the metabolism (literally breaking the fast) and how skipping breakfast is associated with obesity; but when we are late for work and still half-asleep statistics are easily ignored. As are nutrition labels. So when we don’t skip, we grab something unhealthy but convenient that puts us at a nutritional disadvantage all day.

But don’t stress. You can still hit the snooze button. You can still run out of the door at the last second possible. We at Nutritious America will keep it simple. We will review three convenience-type breakfast products and give you some healthy, also convenient, alternatives. (more…)

Posted on September 22, 2025 by GuestBlogger

12 Shockingly Unhealthy Coffee Drinks

By Melissa Breyer for Care2.com

Oh, for the day when the worst thing you could do to your coffee was add a hundred calories in cream and sugar. These days, most of the health atrocities being committed in the name of coffee come to us courtesy of the ubiquitous coffee-house and fast food chains that are colonizing our neighborhoods from sea to sea. Why do they see the need to turn a cup of coffee into a concoction capable of ringing up four-figure calorie counts? (Aside from the fact that consumers are scarfing them up…)

A plain cup of brewed coffee has only two calories and no fat. Even adding 49 calories from a tablespoon of sugar, 20 calories from a tablespoon of half and half, or 52 calories from whipping cream–a regular coffee can’t come close to competing with the desserts-in-coffee-cups listed here.

For a little perspective, keep this in mind: the range of recommended calories is from 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day for adult women and 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day for adult men, depending on age and physical activity level.

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Posted on September 14, 2025 by GuestBlogger

McDonald’s Announces More Fruits and Less Fries in Happy Meals

One of my memories as a child was going to McDonald’s to get a Happy Meal. (It happened maybe once every six months.) I knew that my mom didn’t think that the Happy Meal was a healthy meal, but it was a treat. I still wanted to eat it more often, like my friend Beth, whose parents took her to McDonald’s every week. My mom didn’t think it was healthy, and so we weren’t allowed to have it often.

The Happy Meal that I remember is still the same. The hamburger, fries and a drink meal that was first debuted more than 30 years ago has remained virtually unchanged, although apples and low-fat milk were introduced as options in 2004 in an effort to make the kids favorite more healthy. Unless specifically requested, however, each Happy Meal included a 2.4 ounce serving of french fries. Now that I have children, I (shh!) make the same choice as my own mother – McDonald’s isn’t a healthy choice for my family and so we visit rarely.

McDonald’s is hoping to change our minds.

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Posted on July 26, 2025 by Carmen

Food Companies Serving Customers Wood

It’s breakfast time and you want to start your day off right with a healthy and nutritious meal that doesn’t take long to make. You open your pantry and grab the Fiber One Original cereal. Then for lunch time, you are away from home so you run to McDonald’s and get their Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken. Around 3:00, you need a snack so you snack on some Wheat Thins Fiber Selects. Then for dinner, you have some spaghetti and meatballs from Pizza Hut.

What do all of these foods have in common? They all contain wood cellulose, which means that you are eating wood. Many companies, including those listed above, use wood cellulose in their foods all the time, and therefore, you are eating wood on a fairly regular basis. It is shocking to realize that many of the foods we eat when we are trying to make healthier options are so processed that they really are not as healthy as we may have thought.

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Posted on July 19, 2025 by Health Buzz

Conservatives and Liberals Make Different Food Choices

There are many ways that we identify ourselves, and one of our deepest set chosen identities tends to be political beliefs. Self-identified liberals and conservatives (rather than those that identify as “middle of the road”) tend to disagree strongly on a variety of subjects, from the size of government to taxation to gay marriage. A survey of 347, 949 Hunch.com users has identified that those who tend to support liberal or conservative politicians also disagree on what to eat.

Those who identified as liberal seem to be more likely to agree with what they read at DietsInReview. While conservatives were 65 percent more likely to eat fast food a few times per week, liberals were 92 percent more likely to eat fast food rarely or never. When it comes to french fries, conservatives consider McDonald’s the best of the best, while liberals are 64 percent more likely to prefer bistro-type fries.

Similar to their fast food choices, those who identify as conservative were 50 percent more likely to believe there is no significant difference between organic and processed food, while identifying yourself as a liberal makes you 28 percent more likely to disagree. Liberals are 29 percent more likely than conservatives to avoid soda and 27 percent as likely to drink only diet soda when they do. Those who identify as liberal are 28 percent more likely to eat fresh fruit daily, while those who identify as conservative are 35 percent more likely to eat fresh fruit less than once per week.

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Posted on July 11, 2025 by Brooke Randolph

McCafe’s Mango Pineapple “Real Fruit” Smoothie Is Really a Chemical Cocktail

McDonald's Mango Pineapple Real Fruit SmoothieI’ll admit it: a mango pineapple smoothie sounds like a pretty refreshing treat on a hot summer’s day. But the McCafé Mango Pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie that’s being promoted as  #ANewMcDFavorite on Twitter right now is anything but real fruit. Unless you consider “clarified demineralized pineapple juice concentrate” and “mango puree concentrate” or “pineapple juice concentrate” to be real fruit, not to mention the multiple forms of added acid.

There are probably items on the McDonald’s menu that are worse for you. A large soda doesn’t have vitamin A or vitamin C, but you’re still consuming a whopping 220 calories. Plus, you’re drinking those calories, which means they aren’t likely make you feel full or satisfied.

It also contains 49 grams of sugar, or more sugar than a can of Coke. Recent research shows that sugar consumed in liquid form is metabolized differently than sugar in solid foods, and may be more likely to be converted into fat.

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Posted on June 30, 2025 by Margaret

A&W Fast Food Restaurants to Close in 2026

America could possibly bid farewell to an icon this coming year. The fast food restaurant chain A&W is speculated to stop serving burgers and root beer floats in 2026.

Founded in 1919, the restaurant developed the “drive in” format that remains a staple of American fast food even today. Known for its signature root beer and burgers, the company boomed after World War II and over 450 franchises were opened nationwide. However, today there are only 322 operating national stores. The company has been deemed too small to be successful. The soda manufacturing side of the business will remain untouched as Dr.Pepper/Snapple owns the container beverage version of A&W Root Beer.


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Posted on June 29, 2025 by Lacy