McDonald's Happy Meal survives one year, doesn't decompose

EX: I don't think they use antibiotics to preserve food, however if they did it would prose a problem to complete digestion.

Essentially a McDonalds fry is sanitized on the inside, sealed and coated with enough salt that microbes won't develop on the surface. Salt is used in antimicrobial rinses for mouth infections and is regularly recommended by dentists and doctors for oral issues, so somehow a food preservative known and used for as long as human civilization appears to remember is now synonymous with inediblity?

The burger again is made with highly salted meat and is fried not grilled, which has the same effect as with the fries. Not to mention protein and fat has a much longer decomposition cycle than carbohydrates.

Simply put it isn't anything to do with the edibility of McDonalds foods its a testament to the preservatives used in their main consumables.

I'm sorry, there's hardtack in museum pieces that have been fully unpreserved and stored to the open environment for going on a century that would still be edible and fully digestible - and it's mostly carbohydrates!

The McDonalds food would not still be suitable for human consumption, if it was the author should have eaten it. The bread doesn't look dehydrated it looks like its probably saturated with penicillium, which likely aided in the preservation of the meat it encases. Again the meat is highly discoloured compared to the original photo (golden brown originally to a near black) and has also shrunk considerably (in the original it is to the edges of the bun, in the new photograph it is considerably smaller than a shrunken bun). The fries also are considerably dehydrated, which again only has a preservative effect.

Exceptional use of a combination of preservatives does not mean a food is inedible or non-nutritious.

As for their assertion that flies wouldn't touch it, that is likely a combination of two reasons. The first they attest that it had no odor, which is a key navigation system for flies to reach food (like flies to cow shit isn't a saying because cow shit is odorless, you can smell most from half a field away). The second reason is that insects, especially their larvae, are relatively unprotected against the environment and any becoming in contact with the salt would rapidly have succumbed to salt poisoning.

If they wanted to argue that nothing other than humans are foolish enough to eat these products then they obviously have never left a city. When virtually every city in England has signs posted everywhere against not feeding the pigeons/seagulls isn't because people are feeding them bread or a nice piece of sirloin steak, no they're being fed fries. Go to any coastal city in England and you'll see entire flocks of seagulls fighting over leftover fries from fish and chip shops. These animals wouldn't be thriving to the order of thousands over inedible and indigestible foods.

The author obviously wants to sell a book about nutrition for infants and is trying to do so by arguing that feeding your child a Happy Meal is bad for the health. However a Happy Meal isn't bad for your babies health, it isn't poisonous and it isn't going to kill them, perhaps its not nutritionally the best you can supply for your child but then neither is Kraft Dinner, hot dogs, bacon or any other of a long list of foods that children are routinely given that aren't nutritionally ideal.

Excessive quantities of anything is harmful, including supposedly healthy foods. Polyunsaturated fats whilst apparently heart and brain healthy have been linked with marked increases in skin cancer when not consumed in proper quantities (IE when not from eating actual fish). The holy grail like treatment of polyunsaturated fats led directly to a monumental increase in trans fats when it began being used and advertised as a healthier baking/frying medium when the healthiest is actually saturated fat as it is heat stable. Companies are now returning to saturated fats to remove the trans fats that the misguided health Nazis introduced into our diets as being HEALTHY for us. They swapped a fat with a minor link to heart disease with a fat with a major link with heart disease.

Simply put: Eat the burger or don't fucking buy it.

(Basically intense heating for a very short period of time)

All the shit in the food in the US is really unhealthy. The reason it could happen is because of corporate interests meddling with regulatory bodies. The US government is letting it happen.

addendum: it's entertaining to see the rabid downvoters in action on this and the post below me. I think it speaks a loud and clear message.

The concerning issue is the amount of artificial preservatives in fast food. And do all of those artificial preservatives leave our body or do some get absorbed?

Picky eaters are people who use food the way an alcoholic uses booze. For the picky eater, food's purpose is to help regulate one's emotional state. Picky eaters choose food based on utility, not taste.

You can't get a food high off of broccoli, spinach, or asparagus. You can however get high off potato chips, french fries, pizza, macaroni and cheese, cheeseburgers, and chicken fingers. Therefore these foods are useful. Asparagus and friends are not useful. They don't ping your pleasure sensors. They do not address the picky eater's problem: some mild to major emotional distress.

Many picky eaters don't like their food to touch, and don't like odd ingredients in their dishes because it creates a risk that the food won't deliver the sought after high.

Once when visiting my cousins, their mom made macaroni and cheese for lunch. I got pretty excited when I heard that. However, when I heaved the first spoonful into my mouth and bit down on a piece of onion, my whole body tensed up, my eyes started to water, and I felt myself getting angry. What had she DONE to my reliable drug? Basically, I freaked out. I was 7-8 at the time I think, and yes, I am embarrassed by this story.

A picky eater doesn't want carrots to touch his/her mashed potatoes. The contact might ruin the potential potato high, like mixing baking soda in with your cocaine. When the picky eater puts something on his plate, he puts it there because he knows how it will affect his brain chemistry. If it touches something else, who knows if it'll still get the job done?

When a picky eater goes to a restaurant, they look for things they recognize on the menu and order those. They do this because their relationship to food is different from the average person. The picky eater is dependent on specific foods that create the food high. A new dish might fail to create the food high, leaving the picky eater with a serious problem on his/her hands.

As a kid I learned that junk food made me feel good while vegetables and stuff like it tasted funny and didn't. To my kid brain, it seemed logical and efficient to not waste time eating stuff that didn't make me feel good. So I embarked on a life of "picky eating," aka, not eating vegetables. This continued through college, where I began experiencing negative social consequences.

I've gotten a lot better in the last 4-5 years. I still can't stand Caesar salad's and anything with iceberg lettuce in it, but quite like leafier, greener ones that aren't so crunchy. I no longer detest broccoli but appreciate that it kind of tastes like beef if grilled properly. There are still a lot of vegetables I have a strong aversion to, but I manage to hide it well in social settings.