Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 54


     
     1        those numbers to the average consumer are meaningless.
     2
     3        What consumers are told by health authorities and by their
     4        physicians is that they should average approximately no
     5        more than 30 per cent of calories from fat.  That is often
     6        misconstrued by consumers to mean that they should have
     7        foods that are no more than 30 per cent fat themselves.
     8        In fact, the regular hamburger reflected in the chart on
     9        the second page of the leaner ad, presuming it to be made
    10        of the 77.5 per cent lean meat, and there is nothing from
    11        this advertisement that lets me make any presumption
    12        otherwise than that it is either more lean or less lean,
    13        but presuming it is of that leanness, that is not a very
    14        lean meat.  There is much more lean brown beef available,
    15        and if you convert to the relevant percentage which is per
    16        cent calories from fat, you are, according to my
    17        relatively rough maths, at about 60 per cent calories from
    18        fat which is exactly twice as much as your average diet
    19        should contain.
    20
    21        Although you may have a product that is approximately
    22        60 per cent calories from fat, you need to know that you
    23        are not eating a product that is, in fact, only 22 per
    24        cent calories from fat.  It involves some rough
    25        approximations in the diet.  People who are told that this
    26        is below average for the fat will be eating that food in
    27        an entirely different manner than from people who know it
    28        is significantly higher than the recommended intake.
    29        Otherwise, I do not have anything specific to point out.
    30
    31        Do you want me to move on to the general observations
    32        regarding the campaign?
    33
    34   Q.   Yes.
    35        A.  The general observations I have today are the same as
    36        those that were reflected in General Mattox's letter that
    37        went to McDonald's in 1987 which is, for the various
    38        reasons I have only spoken about, McDonald's food across
    39        the menu is not healthy.  As with reduced levels of
    40        sodium, you can hop and skip across the menu and find
    41        items that are healthy, that are nutritious and that do
    42        form part of anyone's balanced diet.
    43
    44        The problem is that most of the foods, the hamburgers, the
    45        Big Mac's, the McDLT's that McDonald's sold at the time
    46        and, as far as I know, sell today, were not of that
    47        nature.  They were of the kind that required you to make
    48        significant changes to your diet in order to consume.  You
    49        can have a McDonald's hamburger and it will not kill you.
    50        You cannot have one unless you make some concomitant 
    51        reduction in your diet elsewhere. 
    52 
    53        In our country, the standard has been, this is since then,
    54        but has evolved into daily reference values, to tell us
    55        what we should be shooting for on a daily basis.  Within a
    56        daily basis that average McDonald's meal that McDonald's
    57        portrays in the advertisements as a McDLT or a Big Mac
    58        with fries and a coke, that one meal will give the average
    59        consumer either at or more than one half of their entire
    60        nutritional allowance for items such as fat and sodium.

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