I'm Bryan Marcel. I've beendoing a series on how to eat healthy, if you're going to eat fast food. So far I've been to Subway, Wendy's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell. Today I'm at McDonald's. What I'm trying to do is to find the best items to eat atthe fast food restaurants, if you're going to eat fast food, knowing the limitations,that fast food is not really quality food. With any fast food restaurant a lot of thethings that I recommend are the same. For example, avoid the sodas. The sodas are eithersweetened with high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners, neither are good foryou. Also avoid the French fries. The French fries are typically fried in an oil that containsTBHQ. TBHQ is actually a potential carcinogen that's derived from petroleum and Itry to avoid those. The French fries and most of the crispy chickens are fried in that sameoil. Now with McDonald's a little interesting thing about the French fries here. I justbought these about five minutes ago. These French fries right here, you'll noticethey're a little bit smaller. The color's a little bit different, but there'sno mold, they haven't broken down. These particular French fries were purchasedon June 17, 2010. These are eleven months old and they look almost perfect. That's why I avoid the fried foods all together. Another item that I try to stay away fromare the bread items, because they're simply not high quality. McDonald'suses high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and they also use an ingredientcalled azodicarbonamide in their buns. Azodicarbonamide is a bleaching agent which is a known carcinogen. And that's why I avoid it. Now McDonald's has three different types of buns. Theyhave their regular bun, that you'll find on a McDouble. They have their Big Macbun and they have what they call their premium bun which you'llfind on their premium sandwiches. And I wanted to address that. Every word thatis used in relation to food has a definition. Unfortunately, the word premiumhas no definition. So when you see it assigned to, premium chicken, premium salad, premiumdressing, it means absolutely nothing. The only difference between a regular bun, a BigMac bun and a premium bun are pretty much they have the same ingredients, in a differentorder. There's nothing premium about themOkay. So what do you get? What are the best choices? Well, if I was going to eat at McDonald's I would get any of the burgers, and I would simply not use the bun. I would just throwthe bun away and eat the meat. I wouldn't get the Big Mac though. I wanted to kind of focus on that. The reason is the Big Mac sauce. And that's kindof what made McDonald's famous, as far as the Big Mac, is the sauce. If you lookat the ingredients of McDonald's sauce, it is 33 ingredients, 4 of which are sugarsincluding high fructose corn syrup. But the concerning ingredient for me is that it containspropylene glycol. Have you ever been on an airplane in the winter time? You push backfrom the gate and the de-ice trucks come up to the airplane and they start spraying theice off of the wings and the fuselage. Well what they're spraying on there is ananti-ice fluid. It's actually basically the same as what's in the radiatorof your car. The ingredient in that is propylene glycol. It has a lot of side effects, fromskin irritation, to central nervous system shut down. Now, people say to me, come on Bryan propylene glycol, azodicarbonamide, TBHQ, you'renot getting enough of it to really matter. What does it matter? And I understand thatreasoning, but my take is always the same. Why expose yourself to those chemicals. Becauseif you have those chemicals in your body, your body has to process them. Your body hasto remove them. Your body has to deal with them. And while it's doing that, it's so busy getting rid of all of that junk that it can't focus on your overallhealth. Look at our rates of cancer, disease, leukemia. A lot of that, I think, is tied into all of the chemicals, all of the toxins, all of thecarcinogens in our food. Now we said, back to the beef here, we saidthe meat is actually a relatively good choice. Also what you can do is you can order thegrilled chicken patty. Now this is the same chicken patty that comes on the grilled chickensandwich, for example. But you can order just the meat. You don't even have to orderthe bun. A lot of the cashiers don't know how to do that, but if you ask forjust the grilled chicken patty, they'll find a way and they'll get it donefor you. Always a good choice is the salad. The dressingin this case, I actually chose the balsalmic vinaigerette. And I didn't do thatbecause it's fat free or low fat. That really doesn't matter to me. I didthat because in most salad dressing the number one ingredient is soy oil, which I try toavoid. The problem with soy is that it is very high in Omega-6 fatty acids. And Omega-3and Omega-6 fatty acids are both required by your body. You can only get them from food. But they need to remain in balance and unfortunately in the American diet our Omeg-6's areway up and our Omega-3's are way down. So I try not to consume too many Omega-6'sthat way both stay in balance. The number one ingredient here is water. The balsalmicvinegar, then sugar, then fourth on the list is actually the soybean oil. So that'swhy I like that. The advice I always give if you're going to use the salad dressings,just use half and that actually helps reduce that too. So at any fast food restaurant, just like McDonald's there are some decent choicesthat you can get as long as you understand the limitations on the quality of the food.
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