> You could do much worse.

How?

Larger portions, fried foods, soda, etc. You are being purposefully difficult if you can't figure this out on your own.

Fried food? Seriously? Do you believe McDonalds has a backroom in their shops where they have a bakery for their apple slices, and in their backyard they are growing apple trees and some lucky cows are wandering between the trees, so they have fresh milk for their chocolate milk?

You are purposely believing all this complete marketing BS so you don't have to feel like a junky if you eat this industrial trashfood.

And I can really not figure out for myself what could be more trashy than McDonalds food. Maybe living solely on peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate, but maybe even that would be better, as they are not full of flavor enhancer.

And actually I am not a McDonalds hater, I love to eat their hamburger. But it's like drinking beer, it's a drug, not food.

Given you basically said "what could be worse than a cheeseburger, apple and chocolate milk?" here's an easier answer - swap the cheeseburger for a double cheeseburger. There's a nice simple example of "could be worse", for you, without even thinking about different menu items available.

The apple: it's raw apple cut into slices... not fried, nor from a fictional bakery that their marketing apparently makes you think they want people to believe.

What does where the cows are milked matter, judge nutritional value between chocolate milk and sugar-filled soda. Maybe your judgement of chocolate milk is negative (sure, it's not the healthiest drink in the world) and I can't say I've ever looked up it's nutrional information, but... it's flavoured milk. It comes from cows, somewhere.

If you can't understand the logic that McDonalds serve lots of types of food and that some of them are more healthy and less healthy compared to each other then I'm not sure how to explain it better.

Sorry to disturb those dreams about fresh cut apple slices. They are not freshly cut, they are cutted and treated with chemicals in a factory, packed into plastic and might be lying around for up to two weeks before some parents give them their kids to alleviate their guilty conscience for taking their kids to a drug food shop.

Same for the chocolate milk. But I leave it up to you to find out what great inventions of the chemical industry enable this always same creamy taste without clumped together cacao.

And the argument about bigger portions has something to do with eating habits, but not with healthy food.

I feel like you're playing to the knee-jerk reaction crowd that will decide you've won the argument through buzzword bingo, the buzzword in this case being "chemicals".

Saying a foodstuff has come into contact with a chemical somewhere in the process means nothing without more information, yet you expect it to be taken as an automatic negative.

There isn't a big conspiracy at McDonalds, the sliced apples are real food:

http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.snacks...

> Ingredients: Apples, Calcium Ascorbate (a blend of Calcium and Vitamin C to maintain freshness and color).

Scary stuff! I guess the wax that is on apples at the grocery store is missing, but hey it still seems like real food to me.

I never said the apple slices were fresh. Of course they're not, they come pre-packaged, who would think they were fresh? That doesn't change the fact that they are slices of apple, and that they're not fried or baked. I'm replying to your delusion that you can't get worse than that meal, I'm not claiming it's the best or most nutritional meal in the world.

> I'm replying to your delusion that you can't get worse than that meal,

And that is wrong, it doesn't matter what you eat at MacDonalds. You can swap the coke against "chocolate milk" to reduce sugar, therefore you get more emulsifier and more preservative. You can swap french fries for apple slices to get less fat, but therefore you get another mix of chemicals without any vitamins left. And all this discussion when the Deli around the corner sells fresh apples ...

> You can swap french fries for apple slices to get less fat, but therefore you get another mix of chemicals without any vitamins left.

That's quite an amusing statement, given that the "mix of chemicals" you're criticising is Vitamin C and Calcium.

I don't like McDonald's either, but they're not the personified evil you insinuate them to be.

The apple slices are literally raw, unsweetened, sliced apples. Not a baked item.

Certainly you could do worse. But you could also do better. Teaching young kids to avoid the high-sugar, high-salt, brightly-colored food trap is hard, but I have seen first-hand families that have done it.