There were two greasy, artery-clogging items of interest pertaining to McDonalds in my daily reading today. First, the New York Times reports that McDonalds is rolling out a no-transfat cooking oil for its fries:
McDonald’s has selected a new trans-fat-free oil for cooking its famous French fries, the fast-food chain said Monday.
But the company is not saying when the healthier oil will be used in all 13,700 of its restaurants in the United States. It trails competitors in committing to a zero-trans-fat oil.
A spokesman, Walt Riker, said the oil was being used in more than 1,200 American restaurants after extensive testing, but declined to provide details on timing or locations.
Curiously, I recently dared to go through a McDonald’s drive thru at the franchise in Windsor Locks, CT, and noticed that the fries tasted a bit outside the norm of McDonalds’ standard.
I remember wondering whether they had made the change in oil. They didn’t taste bad; but they did seem a bit less addictive than I had been used to.
Meanwhile, yet another rebuttal of the documentary, Supersize Me has been done. Via Marginal Revolution, I came across this Bodyhack post reporting on a Sweedish researcher investigating a “Supersize Diet”:
To his great surprise, [the researcher] discovered that eating mass quantities of junk food affected each participant differently. While one volunteer gained 15 percent body weight after following the high-choleric diet for a month, several others experienced only minimal weight gain. [He] was thus forced to conclude that “some people are just more susceptible to obesity than others.”
Also:
The 12 men and six women were banned from exercising.
While all gained weight, none reported mood swings or liver damage like Spurlock did in the movie.
This jives with a rebuttal to Supersize Me made as the documentary was generating buzz, where a researcher was able to lose weight by living for a month off of selective choices from the McDonalds menu and exercising regularly.
Update: Make that three Mickey-D articles in today’s reading pile. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscriber link) fuels my suspicion that the Windsor Locks McDonalds is one of the chain’s test sites:
After six months, the snack wrap has become one of the most successful new product launches in the history of the Golden Arches. Early sales have exceeded company projections by 20%. The company says that today it plans to add a version with honey-mustard sauce and make both wraps available with grilled chicken.
I should say that although the fries from my recent drive-thru experience tasted odd, the grilled honey mustard wrap was tasty.