Nutritionists Take Long, Hard Look at America’s Passion for Fast Food : Industry on the Grill in Hot Controversy Over Health Issues

To Darrell Barker, a 36-year-old Thousand Oaks sales manager, fast food had always been a part of life. Every lunch and perhaps a dinner a week was a large hamburger or double cheeseburger, with the usual trimmings.

Did he know exactly what was in those items--what oil, for instance, his French fries were cooked in? “No. I never paid any attention to that stuff,” he recalled.

An Ominous Warning From His Doctor

Then, 11 months ago, he went to his doctor for a checkup and learned levels of fat in his blood were dangerously high. Barker says the doctor’s advice was: Cut out many of his favorite fast-food items or risk a heart attack or stroke--or worse.

“I still go to fast-food restaurants, but I get the salad bar,” he said, noting that his levels of potentially harmful cholesterol--a variety of fat commonly found in meat and eggs--has returned to what his physician believes is a safe level. (Cholesterol in the normal range is essential to health, but in excess it becomes dangerous, clogging the cardiovascular system.)

Barker is just one of millions of Americans who spend about $47 billion a year on fast food. From fast food, these customers derive about 10% to 15% of their total nutrition.

By some published estimates, every second of the day, 200 people someplace in the United States order fast-food hamburgers--or 6.7 billion beef patties a year, worth $10 billion.

Growing Industry, Growing Controversy

As the fast-food industry has burgeoned, it has become the subject of intense nutritional controversy. Is fast food good for you--or is it bad? What’s in it? It isn’t a new controversy--Consumers Union in 1984 surveyed fast foods, reporting that if “junk food” is defined as food of no nutritional value, “fast foods aren’t junk.” But within the last few weeks and months, the issue has taken on several new dimensions:

- Medical and nutrition groups have begun to pressure fast-food chains to make more and better information available to their customers concerning what’s in their products and why they follow certain cooking practices--such as cooking French fries in animal fat, a method virtually certain to impart cholesterol content.

- City, county and state governments have begun to mull--and in some cases pass and enforce--laws and regulations to force fast-food chains to disclose both their ingredients and basic nutritional information. San Francisco now has such an ordinance in effect. A federal law to encourage the practice is to be reintroduced in the House and Senate next year.

- Some fast-food chains are starting to realize that healthy nutrition content may be a potentially strong marketing tool. The presence or absence of salad bars and plain baked potatoes on menus have already become grist for fast-food advertising wars, and there have been media skirmishes over the comparative health and safety of different cooking methods. One chain--Arby’s--has aggressively courted the official healthy nutrition imprimatur of the American Heart Assn. while another chain--McDonald’s--met with the association once but didn’t pursue meeting the group’s restaurant health program objectives.

- A new book appeared late last year rating the nutritional shortcomings--and, to a more limited extent, strengths--of the fast-food chains as a whole and hundreds of their menu items, in particular. It is the work of Michael Jacobson, director of the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest. One average burger, fries and a soda, Jacobson contends, may contain as much as 15 teaspoons of animal fat.

Skirt the Issue

Both government and health industry diet guidelines skirt the issue of dietary objectives for fat volume in the diet, per se, with both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and American Heart Assn. preferring to suggest percentage of total daily calorie intake that can appropriately be made up of fat.

The government suggests that total fat be not more than 35% of daily calories while the heart association’s latest revision of its dietary guidelines say total fat should be not more than 30% and saturated fat--the type linked directly to harmful levels of cholesterol in the blood--should be not more than 10% of the diet. Jacobson contends that the 15 teaspoons of fat his researchers say they found in fast-food meals is excessive in terms of the government or heart association goals.

Nutritionists generally compute fat content in fast foods in terms of grams--with one gram the rough equivalent of four teaspoons of fat, according to a conversion formula used by the American Heart Assn. A gram of fat, nutritionists questioned by The Times said, is equal to about nine calories. To determine percentage of fat content in a fast-food meal, the fat calorie count is divided by the total calories.

To make the point about fat dramatically on television talk shows, Jacobson has been touring the country with a small satchel jammed with laboratory containers into which he has poured the fat equivalent of a variety of fast-food indulgences. The showmanship supports the recent release, by Workman Publishing of New York, of “The Fast-Food Guide,” written by Jacobson and Sarah Fritschner, food editor of the Louisville Times.

Spokespersons for fast-food chains have used such terms as “very sensational” and “unscientific and deceptive” in characterizing their opinion of the book.

Fast-food chains protest that they have taken significant steps to broaden their menus and include more healthful items like salad bars and plain baked potatoes. Wendy’s says it has removed from the menus of at least a third of its outlets a hamburger item that was unusually high in fat content.

Becky Lankenau, an American Heart Assn. nutritionist, said some fast-food chains have good records in addressing health concerns. Arby’s, for instance, has employed a “superb” head of its food technology program and the chain has taken significant steps to cut down fat content of its items, she said. McDonald’s has reduced the sodium content of some of its items by more than 15% in the last two years in what the company says is an ongoing program to cut down on salt.

And though Burger King was often skewered by Jacobson, spokesperson Joyce Myers said the Miami-based chain believes “Jacobson and his writers did an excellent job in pulling together factual information about ingredients in fast food.

“(The book) is one reference where people can look for information on fast-food items. We think he took a step beyond where he should . . . by becoming too subjective in terms of the ‘gloom index’ (a rating scale) and some of his references not only to Burger King but to other fast-food products.”

Jacobson said he first got interested in fast-food technology when an associate did an analysis of the cholesterol and fat content of fast-food French fries, which are comparatively cholesterol-free when cooked in vegetable oil. The analysis, however, found a higher-than-expected cholesterol content, Jacobson recalled, and researchers quickly concluded the oils being used by fast-food chains were to blame.

“A burger, fries and a shake or soda,” Jacobson said. “It was just the normal kind of stuff. We were astonished at what was in it with the calories, cholesterol and sodium content. We were amazed and disgusted.”

Chain Uses Coconut Oil

One initial surprising discovery, he said, was that the Taco Bell chain uses coconut oil--high in saturated and generally considered more unhealthful than beef fat--to fry tortillas for a variety of dishes. (Spokesmen at the firm’s Irvine headquarters did not respond to requests for comment.)

In San Francisco, an ordinance went into effect last September that requires every fast-food outlet in the city that is part of a chain of 10 or more stores to provide customers with detailed nutrition and ingredient information. New York State legislators are considering a similar measure and the attorneys general of California, New York and Texas have persuaded the nation’s five biggest chains--McDonald’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy’s--to distribute ingredient information to customers in pamphlet form.

Nationally, fast-food chains and their trade group, the National Restaurant Assn., say labeling requirements are impractical because of regional differences in ingredients.

The fast-food industry took just that position earlier this year when U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.) introduced an unsuccessful bill that would have formally extended to fast-food suppliers federal ingredient labeling requirements that now exist for packaged food products. A Solarz spokesman said that, though the bill did not come up for a hearing in 1986, the legislation’s 33 co-sponsors expect to reintroduce it this year. A similar measure also is pending in the Senate.

Through a spokesman, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it has periodically considered expanding its regulations to include fast food but that the agency has concluded such rules would be impractical to enforce. “Historically, we have felt it (labeling requirements) wouldn’t work even if we had a regulation,” a spokesman said.

The Competitive Advantage

But in San Francisco, Erik Schapiro, an aide to Supervisor Nancy Walker, sponsor of the new ordinance, said Bay Area chain outlets decided to make the best of the ordinance once they realized the local measure would pass. Fast-food stores there, said Schapiro, have begun to use ingredient and nutrition information to gain competitive advantage--which, according to both the American Heart Assn. and American Dietetic Assn., is developing into something of a national trend.

The emergence of heavily advertised salad bars at Wendy’s and Burger King outlets was the beginning of this development, noted Pat Moriarty, a Washington spokesperson on fast-food issues for the dietetic association. She said the group hopes to convince consumers that, if they indulge in fast food occasionally, they can balance the rest of their daily food intake to compensate for the comparatively high levels of fat and salt.

Consumption of fast food has become a way of life, said Moriarty and dietitian Sandy Morreale, at least in part because family units where both parties or single parents work and try to raise children, too, have inevitably led to a need to provide prepared food quickly.

“I think what’s happening and will happen more,” Jacobson said, “is that health and nutrition and ingredient quality will become a factor in fast-food (advertising) wars.”

Change, Jacobson said, needn’t disrupt the taste expectations of consumers. For children, he said, a standard meal could be changed from a burger, fries and a soda to a burger on a whole wheat bun, carrot sticks and orange juice. The alteration, he contended, would be readily accepted by youngsters and raise prices only by a few cents.

At the Dallas headquarters of the American Heart Assn., nutrition expert Mary Winston said Arby’s, which made its reputation as a purveyor of roast beef sandwiches, has qualified for participation in an association program that officially recognizes restaurants that offer some dishes designed with medically conservative nutrition in mind. Arby’s, Winston said, has developed a beef sandwich that features unusually lean meat and has dramatically reduced the salt content in many of its menu items.

The association had hoped McDonald’s would join the program, Winston said, but after an initial meeting with the heart association two years ago, she said, the Oak Brook, Ill., company did not follow up on the discussions that could have led to heart association certification. The chain, Jacobson and other nutritionists have noted, still uses animal fat--rich in harmful cholesterol--for some of its deep frying.

McDonald’s spokesman Stephanie Skurdy said the chain’s basic frying grease, which McDonald’s calls “I-47,” still contains 50% beef fat (the rest is vegetable shortening) because the flavor the animal residue imparts to French fries is responsible for a marketing advantage enjoyed by the product. She said McDonald’s switched in August to pure vegetable shortening to fry chicken and fish items.

Skurdy said McDonald’s new director of nutrition is expected to renew attempts to be involved with programs like that of the heart association.

“The Fast-Food Guide” is actually a compendium of ingredient and nutrition information obtained from fast-food chains themselves, provided by other sources or gleaned from chemical analysis of food items. The book lists both good and bad examples of fast-food cuisine, rating some by what Jacobson calls the “gloom index,” or a weighted scale that takes into account calorie totals, cholesterol levels and amounts of salt, sugar, calcium, questionable food additives and dyes, iron and other substances.

By that standard, the 1,040-calorie Wendy’s triple cheeseburger gets the worst rating, though Jacobson gives the chain as a whole high marks for its salad bar, plain baked potato and chicken sandwich on a whole grain bun.

Linda Packer, a Wendy’s spokesperson in Dublin, Ohio, said the triple cheeseburger, which contains three-quarters of a pound of beef that has a 20% fat content, has recently been removed from the menus of all company-owned outlets. Of the 3,700 stores in the chain, Wendy’s itself operates about a third and the remaining two-thirds are franchises, which, Packer said, may still offer the triple cheeseburger.

She said Wendy’s was unable to respond in detail to Jacobson’s book. “Mr. Jacobson certainly did not send us a copy,” she observed.

Labeled ‘Sensational’

Skurdy of McDonald’s said that “the wording (of the book) tends to be very sensational . . . (it’s) meant to scare people. Frankly, that’s not the way we would choose to go with our customers.” But she said the Jacobson book performed a service to readers by listing ingredients in every chain’s menu items.

More specific rankings in “The Fast-Food Guide” included these:

- Calories. The Burger King double beef Whopper with cheese weighed in with 970, just behind the Wendy’s triple. But the Wendy’s regular burger on a multi-grain bun had only 340. Dairy Queen’s small French fries has 200 calories, but Hardees’ larger size has 406. A chicken leg at the regional Roy Rogers chain has 117 while Burger King’s chicken sandwich has 688. A small roast beef sandwich at Arby’s has 218 while the company’s dressed-up version of the sandwich, with cheese and bacon, has 561.

- Sodium. The Wendy’s triple cheeseburger was second highest, with 1,848 milligrams of salt--nearly double the 1,000 daily maximum recommended by the American Heart Assn. in newly revised dietary guidelines. Other top rankings were the Jack in the Box Jumbo Jack with cheese (1,665 milligrams) and several offerings from the otherwise virtuous Arby’s. A Jack in the Box spokesman at the firm’s San Diego headquarters declined to discuss details of the book or its rankings, but contended that Jacobson’s observations “are unscientific and deceptive.” The USDA’s recommended daily allowance for sodium--somewhat more generous than the heart association recommendation--is between 1,100 and 3,300 milligrams a day.

- Sugar. Dairy Queen’s large chocolate malt got the top rating, with 40 teaspoons. Dairy Queen captured the top nine positions on the list, with a sugar content ranging from 16 to 29 teaspoons. The chain’s president, Harris Cooper, said he has obtained--but has not yet read--Jacobson’s book. He said he was uncertain of the total sugar content in the shake in question, but said Jacobson chose a menu item that is far from the chain’s top seller for the comparison.

The USDA and the heart association list no dietary recommendation for sugar, though carbohydrates common in sugar and other foods are necessary to the diet.

- Fat. Wendy’s triple tied with Burger King’s double beef Whopper with cheese--both of which have the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of fat. Closely following was the Burger King double beef Whopper without cheese (13 teaspoons). A second good-news listing of food items lowest in fat content included 23 items ranging from the Arby’s roasted chicken breast (2 teaspoons) to the Arby’s plain baked potato (none).

At the American Medical Assn., Dr. A. Harold Lubin noted that the AMA’s policy-making House of Delegates several months ago officially backed greater disclosure of ingredients in fast food and efforts to cut down on fat content and to offer low-fat alternatives to some menu entries.

“We need to get the American public to understand they need to eat a variety of foods and a good total diet throughout life,” Lubin said. “At one point, they (the chains) were trying to say, ‘We shouldn’t be selling this (items like salad bars and plain baked potatoes).’

“Now, they are joining in grading what is better and what is not as good.”