OF A GOLDEN AGE

Marty beat me to the punch with a post on gross food secrets, in his case calories and fat content at chains. It’s my own fault, I bullied him into posting. He even took my hamburger study link LIKE A JERK.

McDonald’s restaurants nationwide are throwing a “recession buster” deal today, so if you want 49c hamburgers and 59c cheeseburgers, make your way to a nearby location. (Even 15 years ago a hamburger was 59c and a cheeseburger 69c. I have no idea what the prices are now.)

On the surface this sounds like a good deal, but then I remembered this study (links to PDF) from December 2008′s Annals of Diagnostic Pathology. Of course, all fast food restaurants want to upsell you on beverages* but the study highlights that the meat content of fast-food burgers is low enough that they likely turn a profit even on the cheapest dollar-menu burger item:

Meat content, as evidenced by the presence of skeletal muscle, occupied a small amount of the cross-sectional area (median, 12.1%; range, 2.1%-14.8%) as determined by light microscopic examination; most of the content of the hamburgers were made up of other tissue types and water.

OH BUT WAIT, there’s more!

The water content, as determined in this study, comprised nearly half (median, 49%) of the weight of the hamburger. [ . . . ] Some of the other tissue types [ . . . ] adipose tissue, blood vessels, connective tissue, and peripheral nerve . . . are not unexpected findings. Bone and cartilage, observed in some brands, were not expected [ . . . ] Plant material, observed in some brands, was likely added as a filler to give bulk to the burger.

The upside was that none of the eight burgers contained brain matter, which would move beyond gross findings into palpable health risks like mad cow disease. All of this leads me to believe that even the fattiest ground beef you buy at the store (note: I did not say the cheapest) is better for you in terms of identifiable, likely fresher foodstuffs. When you grill a burger, you also don’t add any fat beyond what’s already in the meat, unlike the mystery-greasy flat top in fast food land.

After all . . . the burgers from one of these chains contained only 2.1% meat.

* When Hank Venture‘s yard-sale grinder business fails, he castigates Dean for going easy on lemonade sales.

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