11 Ways to Ruin Oatmeal
In what should come as a surprise to no one, McDonald's self-proclaimed "bowl full of wholesome" is anything but.
This week, Mark Bittman's NYT column focused on the the fast food giant's Fruit and Maple Oatmeal. As Bittman notes, the oatmeal itself contains seven ingredients, the "cream" that's added contains an additional seven ingredients, only two of which are actually dairy, and a single serving of the menu item contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and more calories than a McDonald's hamburger.
McDonald's is hardly at the forefront of the "Eat Real Food" movement. The fact that they've managed to take something as healthy and basic as oatmeal and turn it into chemical-laden garbage is hardly newsworthy. After all, this is the company whose salads are loaded with saturated fat, sodium, and mega calories.
I agree with Bittman in that the problem here is McDonald's marketing tactics. They've taken something that the population considers healthy, and they market it to the hilt as healthy and "wholesome."
But it's not.
Yes, it's our job as consumers to read labels and research the nutritional components of the food we eat. We have the choice not to eat at McDonald's, or Burger King, or their many counterparts.
And yet some don't. And many of these people do not have the food education necessary to arm themselves against the ubiquitous giant of McDonald's, of which there are four within five minutes of their home. These are the people most harmed by deceptive marketing techniques aimed at making them believe they are making a healthy choice when they are not.
In an ideal world, we would all be label-savvy. We would all eat real food. We would all eschew McDonald's and live hip to the fact that when they say "wholesome" what they really mean is "wholly addicting and bad for you."
But that's not the world we live in. The obesity epidemic, to which fast food is a contributor, is not going anywhere, and when people make poor food choices (either because they don't care about their bodies, or because they believe what they're eating is healthy because McDonald's told them so), we are all affected from the strain placed on health care costs.
So why not place limits on deceptive advertising? Why not make it illegal for a company like McDonald's to use words like "wholesome" (whose Merriam-Webster definition is "promoting health of the body") to describe their oatmeal, which contains, as Bittman says, "11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen."
What do you think about McDonald's marketing techniques? Have you tried their oatmeal? I promise, I won't tell a soul.