Rock and Roll McDonald's: How to Eat Healthy Fast Food

*Wesley Willis

Ok so I'm really upset at how hard it is to eat out healthy, especially at fast food restaurants. Just today, I was enjoying my Market Fresh sandwich from Arby's. Whole grain bread, romaine lettuce, deli style turkey, swiss cheese, spicy dijon mustard. Delicious. Only, halfway through my lunch, I realized that there was a ton of mayonnaise on the bread opposite the mustard. I couldn't even taste it! Why was it there?

We all love fast food restaurants. They're cheap. They're quick. They're all-American. And they're fat! Anyone who has seen the documentary Super Size Me knows what this kind of diet can do to a person. What is the health-conscious customer to do? How can we too take part in this tasty tradition?

This is a difficult problem because it's not always clear what will be on your burger, or chicken, or turkey sandwich before you receive it. And by then all you can do is file it away in the old memory bank and hope to remember this information next time you order. Too, unless you're a highly informed customer, you can easily be decieved into ordering something that's cleverly disguised as healthy when it, in fact, is not. With that said, here are some tips I've gathered from my fast food experiences.

• The easiest way to knock off calories and sugar when you eat fast food is to forego the soda, tea or fruit drink, and have water instead. Many places will even have bottled water, so you don't have to worry about what it tastes like out of the tap. Although, the extra good news about the tap is that it's free. Save yourself some green!
• Be informed. It's required by law that restaurants provide their customers with nutrition information on all of their menu items. Some, will have this information on the internet, and some, such as McDonald's, offer a way to pre-select your food so that you can figure out exactly how many calories your lunch will cost you. You can also find the nutrition facts by asking the restaurant associates for a nutrition pamphlet.
• If you don't know exactly what comes on your sandwich, ask. This way you can avoid having condiments you don't like, and condiments that will add more fat and sugar than you want to consume at one meal.
• If your restaurant of choice offers alternate sides, check them out. For example, Subway, among other things, offers low-fat yogurt, apples and raisins to replace chips and cookies. McDonald's has apple wedges to replace fries, and Wendy's offers two side salads and a baked potato.
• Don't be fooled into thinking that all salads are healthy. It all depends on your meat and dressing. If the chicken is fried, that adds fat. And any creamy salad dressing is most likely high in both fat and sugar.
• Gravitate toward grilled chicken, rather than fried, and whole grain breads.
• Avoid mayonnaise and similar spreads. If you can't live without them, ask for them on the side. This way you decide how much goes on your sandwich.
• Try to leave as many vegetables in your grub as you can stand. That's where you're getting your vitamins for the meal, and you need all you can get.
• Finally, if you have the option to super size it, DON'T! Portion control is not a skill exercised in American cuisine.

Of course, it's best to limit your fast food intake. Most of it is prepared with large amounts of sugar and fat, and a good deal is highly processed. And let's face it, even as cheap as it is, you could probably still eat for less at home. But since you're going to eat it anyway, the good news is that you can control how much of what lingers on your lips settles on your hips.

"Prepared and fast foods have given us the time and freedom to see cooking as an art form - a form of creative expression." -Jeff Smith

"We were taken to a fast food café where our order was fed into a computer. Our hamburgers, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been broiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents." -Jean Michel Chapereau