Why McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburgers won’t decompose – the real story behind the story

It’s always entertaining when the mainstream media “discovers” something they think is new even though the natural health community has been talking about for years. The New York Times, for example, recently ran a story entitled When Drugs Cause Problems They Are Supposed to Prevent(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/h…). We’ve been covering the same topic for years, reporting on how chemotherapy causes cancer, osteoporosis drugs cause bone fractures and antidepressant drugs cause suicidal behavior.

The latest “new” discovery by the mainstream media is that McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburgers and fries won’t decompose, even if you leave them out for six months. This story has been picked up by CNN, the Washington Post and many other MSM outlets which appear startled that junk food from fast food chains won’t decompose.

The funny thing about this is that the natural health industry already covered this topic years ago. Remember Len Foley’s Bionic Burger video? It was posted in 2007 and eventually racked up a whopping 2 million views on YouTube:

And this video shows a guy who bought his McDonald’s hamburgers in 1989 — burgers that still haven’t decomposed in over two decades!

Now, he has an entire museum of non-decomposed burgers in his basement.

Did the mainstream media pick up on this story? Nope. Not a word. The story was completely ignored. It was only in 2010 when an artist posted a story about a non-decomposing McDonald’s hamburger from six months ago that the news networks ran with the story.

Check out the video link above and you’ll see an entire museum of Big Macs and hamburgers spanning the years — none of which have decomposed.

This is especially interesting because the more recent “Happy Meal Project” which only tracks a burger for six months has drawn quite a lot of criticism from a few critics who say the burgers will decompose if you give them enough time. They obviously don’t know about the mummified burger museum going all the way back to 1989. This stuff never seems to decompose!

Why don’t McDonald’s hamburgers decompose?

So why don’t fast food burgers and fries decompose in the first place? The knee-jerk answer is often thought to be, “Well they must be made with so many chemicals that even mold won’t eat them.” While that’s part of the answer, it’s not the whole story.

The truth is many processed foods don’t decompose and won’t be eaten by molds, insects or even rodents. Try leaving a tub of margarine outside in your yard and see if anything bothers to eat it. You’ll find that the margarine stays seems immortal, too!

Potato chips can last for decades. Frozen pizzas are remarkably resistant to decomposition. And you know those processed Christmas sausages and meats sold around the holiday season? You can keep them for years and they’ll never rot.

With meats, the primary reason why they don’t decompose is their high sodium content. Salt is a great preservative, as early humans have known for thousands of years. McDonald’s meat patties are absolutely loaded with sodium — so much so that they qualify as “preserved” meat, not even counting the chemicals you might find in the meat.

To me, there’s not much mystery about the meat not decomposing. The real question in my mind is why don’t the buns mold? That’s the really scary part, since healthy bread begins to mold within days. What could possibly be in McDonald’s hamburger buns that would ward off microscopic life for more than two decades?

As it turns out, unless you’re a chemist you probably can’t even read the ingredients list out loud. Here’s what McDonald’s own website says you’ll find in their buns:

Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, enzymes), water, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, yeast, soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated soybean oil, contains 2% or less of the following: salt, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, wheat gluten, ammonium sulfate, ammonium chloride, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, datem, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, enzymes, guar gum, calcium peroxide, soy flour), calcium propionate and sodium propionate (preservatives), soy lecithin. Great stuff, huh? You gotta especially love the HFCS (diabetes, anyone?), partially-hydrogenated soybean oil (anybody want heart disease?) and the long list of chemicals such as ammonium sulfate and sodium proprionate. Yum. I’m drooling just thinking about it.

Now here’s the truly shocking part about all this: In my estimation, the reason nothing will eat a McDonald’s hamburger bun (except a human) is because it’s not food! No normal animal will perceive a McDonald’s hamburger bun as food, and as it turns out, neither will bacteria or fungi. To their senses, it’s just not edible stuff. That’s why these bionic burger buns just won’t decompose.

Which brings me to my final point about this whole laughable distraction: There is only one species on planet Earth that’s stupid enough to think a McDonald’s hamburger is food. This species is suffering from skyrocketing rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia and obesity. This species claims to be the most intelligent species on the planet, and yet it behaves in such a moronic way that it feeds its own children poisonous chemicals and such atrocious non-foods that even fungi won’t eat it (and fungi will eat cow manure, just FYI).

Care to guess which species I’m talking about?

That’s the real story here. It’s not that McDonald’s hamburgers won’t decompose; it’s thatpeople are stupid enough to eat them. But you won’t find CNN reporting that story any time soon.
Nathan Scheer
Global Information Network
www.tinyurl.com/GIN1846
Affiliate code:1846

Tell McDonald’s: Stop Using Toys to Push Junk Food on Kids

Tell McDonald’s: Stop Using Toys to Push Junk Food on Kids



If you want to know who is making your kids fat, ask Shrek. Or Barbie. Or Yoda, Darth Vader, and R2-D2. These are all characters that McDonald’s uses to entice kids into its restaurants so they can chow down on Happy Meals. But one non-profit aims to call the company out for using toys to unfairly market junk food to impressionable children.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) recently issued a challenge to McDonald’s: Stop using toys to pimp out unhealthy foods to kids, or we’ll sue you. CSPI claims that using toys to market unhealthy meals to children is a practice that’s unfair, deceptive, and illegal under some states’ consumer protection laws.

And while McDonald’s responded to CSPI’s demands by reiterating its commitment to stocking all Happy Meals with toys, it seems like the company might actually be running scared. In its very public demands to McDonald’s, CSPI highlighted the fact that all 24 Happy Meal combos contained more than 430 calories, the recommended caloric intake for lunches eaten by kids ages four-to-eight. According to the Appetite for Profit blog, just three days after CSPI issued its request to McDonald’s, the Golden Arches updated its Happy Meal nutritional content information on its Web site. The new info indicates that three Happy Meal combos contain fewer than 430 calories. McDonald’s claims it simply noticed an error in its nutritional information, but the timing seems a little too coincidental.

While McDonald’s is hardly the only restaurant that uses kid-friendly characters to market unhealthy foods, CSPI makes a good case against Happy Meal toys. According to CSPI, back in 2007, McDonald’s agreed to only advertise kids’ food that meets certain nutrition standards, an agreement reached under Council of Better Business Bureau’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. But despite the fact that Shrek may only advertise Apple Dippers and low-fat milk on TV, a CSPI study showed that when kids or parents order Happy Meals, they’re given French fries 93 percent of the time. Kids get lured into the restaurant through the promise of a new toy — they’re rewarded with foods high in fat, sugar, calories, and salt.

From the McDonald’s example — and countless others, for that matter — it’s clear that using cartoon characters and other kid-friendly incentives to push junk food contributes heavily to America’s childhood obesity epidemic. Kids beg parents to go to McDonald’s to get Happy Meal toys. When children or parents order Happy Meals, they are
automatically given French fries 93 percent of the time, and offered soda first 78 percent of the time. These sugary and salty snacks give kids a taste for unhealthy foods, so the cycle repeats itself, setting children up for an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related disorders.

And sure, it’s up to parents to say no to their kids. But McDonald’s and other junk food purveyors make parental duties exceedingly more difficult. “I try my best to educate my kids about healthy eating, but it’s hard when I am competing against the allure of a new Shrek toy,” Sheila Nesbitt, a mother of two kids, told CSPI.

A Happy Meal toy may make kids giddy in the short-term, but developing obesity and diabetes sets children up for a lifetime of health issues. Support CSPI and sign its petition demanding that McDonald’s stop using toys to market unhealthy meals to children.

Photo credit: Cosmic Kitty via Flickr