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.
