Barstow Community College Fast Food Analysis Nutrition Discussion

Visit your favorite fast food restaurant and order and analyze your favorite or typical fast food meal. Ask a food attendant where you can find the nutritional information/analysis for their menu items.

Answer the following questions:

1. How often do you consume fast food of any kind? (please include name of restaurant and food/drink items you typically consume).

2. What food and drink items did you order? List them and describe sizes and whether you were offered or prompted to get something different?

3. Do you typically use the drive thru or do you visit the restaurant and order your meal inside?

4. Was your meal hot or at an appropriate temperature?

Part 2 -Nutritional Analysis

Obtain the nutritional information of each food/drink item either at the location or online. Logon to the restaurant website. For example: McDonalds (Links to an external site.); Burger King (Links to an external site.); Arbys (Links to an external site.); Kentucky Fried Chicken (Links to an external site.); etc. If you are unsure of the website, just type the name of the restaurant into your favorite search engine and it should give you the website.

Analyze your meal and note the quantity, quality and presentation of foods/drink served.

Answer the following questions:

1. What is the serving size of each food and drink item? Find this particular item on the published nutritional information. (Note: this information is typically in PDF format so you may have to download this from Adobe (Links to an external site.) first)

2. How many calories per serving?

3. What is the total number of calories that you have ordered or you typically consume?

4. What is the total number of calories that you need per day? Refer to your assignment 1b My Plate my daily plan personal profile.

5. What percentage of the calories in the fast food meal contributes to your total daily needs? For example, if your fast food meal totaled 1290 calories and your needs according to the MyPyrmaid website was 2400 calories then your fast food meal is approximately 54%.

6. Which menu items in your fast food meal contributed the most calories?

7. How many grams of fat does each food and drink contain?

8. How many fat calories per serving? To calculate this: take the number of fat grams and multiply this number by 9 (there are 9 calories per 1 g of fat)

9. What is the percentage of fat in each food and drink item? (For example, if you consumed a “quarter-pounder with cheese from McDonald’s and it has 25 g of total fat. You multiply 25 x 9=225 and divide that by 510 (total number of calories in the burger). This is equal to .44 or 44% FAT). Perform this calculation for each food and drink item. Obviously, if the food or drink contains 0 fat (like sodas) then the percentage would be 0.

10. Does it meet the guideline of <30%of calories fat? If not, are there better choices on the restaurant menu that would lower the fat and calorie of the meal? For example, perhaps the salads or a plain hamburger may be better choices? -How many milligrams of sodium are there in each food and drink item consumed? How does this value compare to the recommended number of milligrams by the American Heart Association?