3 min read
Written by Kim Bretz
On today’s lazy snowy day, I was watching tv and saw a commercial for McDonalds explaining how their eggs are the same Canada Grade A large eggs that your family would serve at breakfast. Very wholesome, happy families — cooking, painting Easter eggs, playing hockey and drinking coffee…nothing different than at our homes.
So I went to the website to check it out — they have a very helpful page discussing their eggs and the inspection they go through as well as why they have the round shape used in their Egg McMuffins.
Then I went to the nutritional calculator — if you select an item and look to the first column there’s a little ‘i’ symbol. Click on that you’ll get a full ingredient list of the items in a product.
And what I found was that in the Egg McMuffin sandwiches, the egg is simply that — a Canada Grade A egg. Cooked in a dubious oil and served with a white bread product, processed cheese, bacon and trans fat free liquid margarine — but the egg was what they said. But all their other non-McMuffin breakfast items with eggs were very very different.
Many of the other products included something called “folded egg“. And this is what is included in that egg product: whole eggs, modified corn starch, soybean oil, egg flavour, sodium phosphate, carrageenan gum, flavour enhancer (salt, maltodextrin, natural flavour), spices, tumeric (added for colour), citric acid. Cooked on a grill lightly seasoned with trans fat free cooking spray (Canola oil, water, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, monoglycerides, potassium sorbate, artificial flavour and colour (annatto, tumeric), citric acid, Vitamin A, Vitamin D3). Their product called ‘egg mixture’ is equally as high in added chemicals, colourings, salt and flavours.
With these products they don’t advertise them as being Canada Grade A eggs but rather ‘fluffy eggs’. If they aren’t, what are they? And even if they did start out as what you might have in your own refrigerator, they have become something that we could never ever make at home. And would never want to make at home.
I find it sad that companies are using our fears about health and the food supply chain and using those fears to mislead us into thinking we’re doing something good. While McDonalds didn’t say that any of their products other than the egg McMuffin were simply a Canada Grade A egg, I didn’t really get that impression from the commercial or even the website until I started looking at all their products individually. I just thought that they used Canada Grade A eggs in their breakfast products. They didn’t lie, they just shared only a small part of the story.
Remember, McDonalds’ job is getting you to eat their food. Ours is to do our homework and educate ourselves and our families on what healthy eating really involves.