Even when fast food companies offer healthy options, it’s the grease that sells:

The enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items cost $1, has helped stimulate 36 consecutive months of sales growth at stores open at least a year. In three years, revenue has increased by 33 percent and its shares have rocketed 170 percent, a remarkable turnaround for a company that only four years ago seemed to be going nowhere.

McDonald’s has attracted considerable attention in the last few years for introducing to its menu healthy food items like salads and fruit. Yet its turnaround has come not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, from the Dollar Menu.

Almost to the point of cliche, the New York Times scurries to the “minorities hit hardest” angle:

While that may have helped many low-income customers save money, there could be a heavy health cost. McDonald’s has marketed the Dollar Menu to teenagers, young adults and minorities who are already plagued with an especially high incidence of obesity and related health problems like diabetes.

[...]

“The problem here is that you’re dealing with a segment where you have these huge obesity issues and you’re making eating Big Macs and double cheeseburgers look like it’s fun and exciting,” said Jerome Williams, a professor of advertising at the University of Texas, Austin, and one author of an Institute of Medicine report last year on the marketing of junk food to children and teenagers.

David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston, calls marketing fast food to blacks and Hispanics a “recipe for disaster.”

“Fast-food consumption has been shown to increase calorie intake, promote weight gain and elevate risk for diabetes,” Dr. Ludwig said. “Because African Americans and Hispanics are inherently at higher risk for obesity and diabetes, fast food will only fuel the problem.”

God forbid we market to blacks and Hispanics. Obesity activists also fail to point out that if you look at mortality tables, blacks are actually better off carrying about 10 percent more body weight than whites, and even whites have lower mortality rates at weights the government considers “overweight” than they do at weights the government calls “ideal.”

Note also the Catch 22. If McDonalds were avoiding advertising to blacks and Hispanics, they’d almost certainly get flak for not being inclusive. Because they are, they’re poor corporate citizens for advertising bad food to minorities (never mind that the restaurant’s salads are among the top three food items it promotes in terms of dollars spent).

I’m not really sure what the criticism is, here. McDonalds has healthy options, and it promotes them. People still opt for the less healthy stuff. How exactly is McDonalds to blame for that? Should McDonalds just stop serving burgers and fries altogether? Should it price salads artificially low, and burgers artificially high, even if that means the restaurant will lose money?

Much of this I think is a backlash against the obesity warriors. When Hardee’s introduced its Monster Thickburger line, sales soared. Same with Burger King and its gluttonous “Ultimate Omelet Sandwich.” Healthy options are out there. Some consumers choose them, some don’t. It’s hard to understand the criticism, unless the health activists don’t want anyone to even have the option of unhealthy food at all.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 6:29 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.