How does the nutrition of this fast food compare around the world?
We all know that a balanced diet is essential to our own personal health and wellbeing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a few treats every now and then! Fast food can be a nice treat but it’s no secret that the items on fast food menus aren’t exactly healthy.
At NiceRx, we know that making healthy decisions is easier when you are equipped with the knowledge about those choices, so we wanted to take a look at the fast food options around the world to see how they compare when looking at measures such as calories, saturated fat, and sugar content.
We looked at McDonald’s menus around the world, comparing three of their most popular items, the Big Mac, French Fries, and Chicken McNuggets. For these items, we looked at calories, saturated fat and salt.
Taking a total of all three menu items, we found that some countries packed far more calories into their popular items than others. We totalled the calories in one Big Mac burger, one medium portion of French Fries, and one Chicken McNugget. So which countries top the list for their calorie content?
Reducing your consumption of saturated fat can be an excellent way of improving your diet, and these countries seem to make it easier, even when eating fast food.
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Fat content isn’t always the most helpful marker of unhealthy food, but saturated fat is known as a ‘bad fat’, so this is the one to look out for. Saturated fat is usually found in cheese, fatty meats, and butter, but which countries have the highest levels of this fat in their fast food?
Reducing your consumption of saturated fat can be an excellent way of improving your diet, and these countries seem to make it easier, even when eating fast food.
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The sodium in salt can be dangerous in large quantities. If you eat a diet with a lot of salt, it can contribute to high blood pressure and poor heart health. In some countries, you can expect to consume higher levels of salt in fast food than others, so which should you look out for?
While we often expect that our fast food will be pretty salty, there are some countries that use far less salt in their food than others.
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Using the McDonald’s corporate website we were able to navigate to the sites of McDonald’s in all OECD countries where they operate. We then used the nutritional information to find calories, saturated fat and salt for a Big Mac, medium portion of French Fries, and six Chicken McNuggets where available. As portion sizes differed between countries, we used the information provided to calculate the nutritional value of one Chicken McNugget.
In cases where sodium was provided in mg rather than salt, we used the Heart Foundation calculator to convert sodium to salt.
Data was not available for every item, nutritional value, or country, so our data only represents the available data for each factor.
