Everyone knows that fast food is bad for you, and if you take a look at some of the menus out there, you'll see that fast food calories can really, really add up. And it's not just the big macs and whoppers of the world that will kill you, but the fries and the fish filet and just about everything else on the menu. Even salads are packed with fast food calories, since they come with packs of dressing that are loaded in saturated fat and the like. So yeah, you're being smart by ordering a salad. But if you use the dressing they give you, you might as well just be dumping a Snickers bar on top of it.
Take, for example, a salad from McDonald's with Newman's Own Creamy Caesar Dressing. Salads are good for you, and Newman's Own has a great reputation for using only fresh, natural ingredients and even organic products. So if you don't know exactly what to look for, you might find yourself fooled into eating something that's not very good for you.
Anyway, the salad with Newman's Own Creamy Caesar Dressing has 190 calories. On the face of it, that's not too bad - about a tenth of what you need on a given day. But a whopping 170 of those calories are fat calories, producing 18 grams of total fat and four grams of saturated fat. Ouch.
The Crispy Chicken Bacon Ranch Salad is even worse, registering three hundred fifty total calories and one hundred eighty fast food calories from fat. That's 19 grams of total fat and six grams of saturated fat as well, not to mention a thousand miligrams of sodium.
So don't be fooled: fast food calories can be hidden even in something as ostensibly healthy as a salad. And the fish filet is even worse.
McDonald's standard Filet-o-Fish has a total of 410 calories. Combine it with a large fries and soda, and you have more than half of your daily recommended intake. And of those 410 fast food calories, one-hundred eighty of them are from fat. You'll also end up with twenty total grams of fat, five of which are saturated fat.
The only solution to avoiding fast food calories is to avoid fast food all together. While it's a bit of a sacrifice, especially in the name of convenience, it's a worthwhile one in the long run.