Will Full Disclosure Kill Big Mac Attacks? : Health: The firm’s menu frequently draws fire from nutritionists. So McDonald’s will post signs with nutrition information in all its outlets.
The typical meal at a McDonald’s restaurant may be loaded with fat, salt and cholesterol, but by the end of July customers should at least have fair warning.
McDonald’s Corp., the Oak Brook, Ill.-based fast-food chain, said Friday that it will post signs in all of its more than 8,200 restaurants nationwide with “complete nutrition information” on all of its permanent menu items. The decision to post the information, including all ingredients and nutrient values, is a “natural step in our long-standing commitment to provide our customers with this information, which we began offering nearly two decades ago,” Ed Rensi, president of McDonald’s U.S.A., said in a statement.
A McDonald’s spokeswoman said the information is already available in booklet form, but the company decided to make it more readily available to customers when they enter the restaurants. McDonald’s agreed to distribute the booklets after the attorneys general of California, Texas and New York pressured the five largest fast-food chains to provide nutritional information.
The signs to be posted will show the serving size of each menu item and give an accounting of calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and cholesterol.
“We think the simpler it is for our customers to learn the facts about our products, the easier it will be for them to see how well McDonald’s fits into their balanced diet,” Rensi said.
McDonald’s said in its statement that nutrition experts praised the decision. But it failed to satisfy one of its most vocal antagonists.
“My reaction is one of disappointment,” said Phil Sokolof, a wealthy Omaha manufacturing executive and self-styled consumer health advocate. He has attacked the chain in a series of major newspaper ads titled “McDonald’s, Your Hamburgers Are Too Fat!” Sokolof called the signs “window dressing.” He added: “Instead of reducing saturated fat, they’re posting signs.”
McDonald’s said its announcement was not related to Sokolof’s ad campaign. Sokolof and McDonald’s have sparred over the precise saturated fat content of the chain’s hamburgers and have traded barbs over the inclusion of beef tallow in the oil mixture for cooking french fries. Sokolof said he had hoped the company would at least remove the tallow.
Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition for the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, said merely posting the signs is not inherently good for consumers. The question is how prominent the signs will be displayed, and whether they will be graphically designed to highlight the most important information in time for consumers to make a good decision, she said.
“If the information is going to look like a page from the telephone book and you can’t read it until you get to the cash register, it is not helping anyone.”
Additionally, Liebman said, a long ingredient list isn’t necessarily the best information. “The most important information is the calories, the total fat, saturated fat and sodium in large size type that can be read without a magnifying glass,” she said. A lot of nutritional information is also not useful unless the consumer knows what percentage of recommended total daily intake is represented in the food item, she said.
BACKGROUND
As Americans have become more health conscious, the food industry has been under increasing pressure to disclose not only the ingredients in items on the grocery shelf and on restaurant menus but also to disclose the presence and amount of such potentially harmful substances as sodium, saturated fat and cholesterol. Even the federal health officials have joined the chorus calling for clearer, more precise food labels. McDonald’s in the past year has come under fire for two reasons. Its restaurants are in practically every neighborhood in the nation. And its mainstay products--burgers and fries--are the kind of foods that most often raise fears of exposure to a harmful diet.
