What’s really in your fast food?

Pick a potato, peel and slice, then fry in a pan of oil and finish with a sprinkling of salt. Simple, right? Not so. It turns out fast-fries often have more than 15 ingredients, including sugar and artificial colouring. They also have preservatives like sodium acid pyrophosphate and tert-butylhydroquinone, which in high doses has been […]

Pick a potato, peel and slice, then fry in a pan of oil and finish with a sprinkling of salt. Simple, right? Not so. It turns out fast-fries often have more than 15 ingredients, including sugar and artificial colouring. They also have preservatives like sodium acid pyrophosphate and tert-butylhydroquinone, which in high doses has been linked to vision problems.

Hamburgers

Are you sure what you have on burger is just ground beef? Maybe, but there also could be growth hormones and antibiotics—and all end up in your system. And in one American study, some burgers had over 100 calories more per serving than the fast-food places said they did.

Breakfast sandwich

One US outlet offered “fried egg” but its ingredients were more than you could bargain for. It included modified corn starch, soybean oil, medium chain triglycerides, propylene glycol (used in fog machines), artificial flavour, citric acid, xanthan gum, and, oh yes, egg whites and yolks (listed separately). 

Hot dog

When dogs go hot, that’s fancy. While they haven’t dogs in them, they make full use of the animals that supply the meat. They are also loaded with salt and saturated fat (and you might be having too much of that already) and with nitrates, a preservative linked to diabetes and cancer.

Chicken nuggets

It is easy to walk into a shopping mall and order four chicken breasts battered and fried to golden perfection. For just one piece, sure there’s meat there, but there’s also the bones, blood vessels, nerves, connective tissue, and skin. And there’s heaps of salt and fat, which are linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Strawberry milkshake

It’s a milkshake, all right—but where’s the berries? One leading US fast-food outlet adds in milk and sugar, for sure. Then it adds in high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives like sodium benzoate, and artificial flavours and colors to this drinkable dessert. One thing that appears to be missing: actual strawberries.

Sauces

The first ingredient listed for almost any sauce served at a fast-food restaurant is sugar. It may be called sucrose, dextrose, maltose, rice syrup, barley malt, high-fructose corn syrup, or any number of other things, but the end result is the same: quick delivery of lots of calories with almost zero nutritional value.

Adapted from WebMD