The Taste Bud: I Will Never Eat McDonald’s Breakfast Food Again
A McDonald’s sausage patty. Wikimedia Commons/Doereakai Takranasz
I will never eat McDonald’s breakfast again. Why? Because my body hates it. My taste buds aren’t terribly fond of it, either.
So why would I ever eat it, you ask? My father loves it. He eats breakfast from McDonald’s at least a couple of times per week, including our ritual of having breakfast together every Thursday morning before I start working and he participates in his bowling league. He always gets us McDonald’s and we catch up on our week.
And then I get indigestion. Usually for the rest of the day, which means I often don’t eat anything else until Friday. And I feel terrible. And I am not doing it anymore. Oh, Thursday morning breakfast will continue – I just won’t be eating McDonald’s as part of the ritual.
Don’t get me wrong, I have wonderful memories of stopping at McDonald’s for breakfast on Saturday mornings when I was young. We went out on adventures most Saturdays, and that was part of our morning. That’s how our Thursdays became McDonald’s-centric starting about three years ago. But I had a much different digestive tract when I was 10, it would seem.
So, what is it about McDonald’s breakfast food that makes me sick to my stomach, makes me feel generally sluggish and takes away my appetite? (And that’s not to mention the incessant burping.) Doing a little light reading, the obvious was handed to me: McDonald’s food is simply fatty and high in sugar. We already knew this.
For example, the breakfast sausage, which usually is the central part of my McDonald’s breakfast, is made with added dextrose, a corn sweetener. Throw in cheap, processed pork, lots of sodium and lots of sugar to go along with the dextrose, and for my money, that’s a ready-made stomachache. And one patty contains 18 grams of fat.
In addition, look at the ingredients list for a McDonald’s biscuit which I swear is real: “Enriched Flour (Bleached Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Cultured Nonfat Buttermilk (Cultured Skim Milk, Nonfat Dry Milk, Modified Food Starch, Salt, Sodium Citrate, Mono and Diglycerides, Locust Bean Gum, Carrageenan), Palm Oil, Palm Kernel Oil, Water, Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Sugar, Modified Cellulose, Wheat Protein Isolate, Natural Flavor (Dairy and Plant Source), Modified Food Starch, Xanthan Gum, Soy Lecithin.”
I’m not even going to look up what Locust Bean Gum is.
“It’s almost as if you asked an AI platform to make you breakfast, and it cranked out something sort of like breakfast, but not quite breakfast. ”
A mildly disturbing AI rendering of a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich. Dream AI
In addition, a number of articles and studies, such as this one from Eatthis.com, remind us that all the fat in McDonald’s food drags us down – fat is tough to digest, so it takes longer. And that can bring gas buildup, indigestion as well as sluggishness.
"Foods with a high-fat content slow stomach emptying,” Allison Gregg, RDN, LDN, told Eatthat.com. “This means they spend more time in your stomach which can result in bloating, nausea, and stomach aches. You may experience these symptoms within a 24-hour window after consuming a hamburger or milkshake, especially if you consume multiple high-fat items together.
And honestly, that McDonald’s breakfast food just doesn’t seem like food to me. It never really has – the sausage is … spongy in a weird way, and nothing like the sausage you would buy at the butcher or grocery store and fry at home. I promise you my grandmother never served me anything like that. It’s almost as if you asked an AI platform to make you breakfast, and it cranked out something sort of like breakfast, but not quite breakfast.
“I must have a cast iron stomach,” my Dad told me when I informed him that going forward I would be eating breakfast at home – likely Cheerio’s, with blueberries – before I come over on Thursdays. But he promised to continue buying a sausage biscuit for my dog, Atticus every week. Hey, they don’t seem to bother his stomach.
