Saturday, January 23, 2010

Food dyes and fast food

We stopped at McDonalds while out shopping with the kids today. I don't think we had any accidental food dyes, but I did find some surprises while I was checking their ingredients.

You can download the ingredients from their website
http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/ingredientslist.pdf

If you don't have time to read it all, or because you might be upset to see how many additives are in there, here are some highlights:

Their pickles are dye free ?!
Stay away from the shakes! The chocolate syrup has red 40, vanilla syrup has yellow 5 &6, and strawberry syrup is an obvious red 40, so all the shakes all dyes
That means the hot chocolate and many coffee drinks also have red 40
The fries have TBHQ--my kids definitely wind up on that one
Honey mustard sauce has yellow.

I guess we should just eat at home.

4 comments:

Violets said...

Gave up on fast food long ago! I thought maybe it was all the oils triggering dd's headaches/stomach aches. But dyes make more sense!

Just a heads up, at least one variety of Girl Scout cookies (dulce de leche) have food dyes, too. (Of course, none meet our other allergy requirements, anyways)

Sherry C. said...

I'm glad you wrote this. I've been checking all sorts of restaurant websites to find ingredient lists.

Carla Cozort said...

Just found out crisco shortening has TBHQ in it...now all the from scratch rolls and biscuits I've been making have been for naught...I looked at the shortening in the organice section and it's just way too expensive, at least at Kroger...have to try other stores and maybe try using butter instead of crisco and see how they turn out.

Melissa said...

The cheese says "artificial color" too. And the cookies have Vanillan, which we also had to take our son off of. No more McDonalds, there just isn't any point. The idea of it hurts my stomach.