Healthy Eating For Kids Essential To Your Children's Wellbeing

Teach your kids to eat healthfully and they will learn healthy eating habits that will reward them with a lifetime of good health. All kids can be taught to be healthy eaters. The best time to start is when they are infants. But even older children, with the proper encouragement and motivation, can learn to eat healthfully and enjoy healthy food. More...

McDonald's New Marketing

McDonald's is starting a new marketing campaign, emphasizing their "healthy" foods... their salads.

Let's take a look at one of their salads, the Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken and see how healthy it really is. This is a good representative example of the salads on their menu.

Ingredients:
Salad Mix, Grilled Chicken Breast Filet, Southwest Vegetable Blend, Cilantro Lime Glaze, Shredded Cheddar/Jack Cheese, Limes, Chili Lime Tortilla Strips, Liquid Margarine.

Just looking at these ingredients, you might say, not bad, except for the liquid margarine.

Let's take a little closer look at the individual ingredients:

Salad Mix. This is the best part of the salad. It contains a variety of different lettuces and greens.

Grilled Chicken Breast Filet. It's amazing that grilled chicken could have so many ingredients. It contains a variety of ingredients that are hidden sources of MSG, like maltodextrin, spices, autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed proteins, chicken broth and natural flavors. It also contains the heart "unhealthy" trans fats from hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated soy and cottonseed oils. There's a few other chemical food additives, artificial flavors and preservatives too.

Southwest Vegetable Blend is good. It contains corn, black beans and a few other ingredients that are fine.

Cilantro Lime Glaze contains sugar, soy, spice (potential hidden MSG) and some nasty food additives, including propylene glycol alginate and sodium benzoate.

Shredded Cheddar/Jack Cheese has various different cheeses, un-named enzymes and natamycin, an antifungal drug to prevent mold.

Limes. Plain and simple lime wedges.

Chili Lime Tortilla Strips contain various hidden sources of MSG. They also contain two food additives, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate, that are used ONLY when MSG is added to food. In addition, they contain soy.

Liquid Margarine contains both hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated soy and cottonseed oils, artificial flavors and preservatives.

The Salad dressing choices are Newman's Own. Although I think that the concept Paul Newman uses in donating the profits from the sale of his products to charity is wonderful, I don't like the ingredients he uses. They all contain soybean oil and spices (source of hidden MSG). Some varieties contain even more objectionable ingredients.

So, don't be fooled by McDonald's "healthy" marketing. Their so-called "healthy" selections are still full of MSG, trans fats from hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils, soy and other harmful food additives.

Learn what's really healthy to eat.

Find out why soy is not a healthy food.