It is lunchtime and you are starving so you and your 
friends go to McDonald’s. You check out the menu and 
your friends order Big Macs. You’re hungry but you 
want to eat healthy so you order a bacon ranch salad 
with chicken and ranch dressing. Did you make the 
healthier choice? Well, according to Mc Donald’s 
nutrition facts, the chicken salad you thought was 
healthy has almost the same amount of calories and 4 
more grams of fat than the Big Mac your friends 
ordered. Therefore, I think to myself, “If I knew the 
salad had the same amount of calories as the hamburger 
I would have gone with the Big Mac instead.”
Have you noticed that many of the fast food 
restaurants have started serving “healthy” choices 
like salads and fruit cups? Soon after the 
movie “Supersize Me” came out, many fast food 
restaurants such as Burger King, McDonald’s and 
Wendy’s started getting “healthy” conscious, selling 
bottled water, fruit salads, and grilled foods. But 
the trend doesn’t seem to be fooling teenagers. 
According to Beto, a junior at Soquel High, “The 
salads are not that great. I would rather make my own 
at home. Those salads are not even that healthy for 
you because all of those dressing, croutons, bacon 
bits. When McDonald’s serves salads they put chicken 
which has probably been processed and added dressings 
which has 190 calories, which has just as much fat as 
a small order of french fries.”
At Wendy’s, the Homestyle Chicken Strips Salad, eaten 
with one pack of ranch dressing, has 670 calories and 
45 grams of fat, which is more than any hamburger or 
sandwich on the menu. Burger King now sells a veggie 
burger. When I looked it up on the Internet, it was as 
bad as a Jr. Whopper so I didn’t bother eating it. 
Plus, a Burger King restaurant will sell just four or 
five veggie burgers a day, but at least 300 to 500 of 
any other sandwich or burger on the menu, according to 
an article in the Washington Post. The article said 
that the grilled chicken sandwiches added to the menu 
last summer disappeared in less than a year because of 
poor sales.
If you consider eating at a fast food restaurant, 
probably the only real healthy thing on the menu is a 
fruit cup, which usually has about 160 calories and 2 
grams of fat. Plus it tastes good. 
The fact of the matter is that eating at fast food 
restaurants is not that healthy. A real meal takes a 
while to make right. Yes, fast food does taste good 
but if you eat too much, it’s not good for your body. 
If you decide to eat at fast food restaurants anyway, 
check out the “healthier” alternatives above.