Fast food often uses fortified ingredients. Perhaps the most common is fortified flour. Some chains use iodized salt. Preservatives like ascorbic acid or vitamin E effectively provide fortification.

Other than a lack of fiber and ease of consuming too many calories, one could do much worse than fast food--McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc. I think it's easier to get it wrong using a so-called whole foods diet. The ingredient diversity of fast foods makes it more fail-safe, particularly if you're disposed to repetitively eating the same kinds of foods.

I mean, obviously you can't subsist on french fries, but if the issue is laziness, lack of time, access to good groceries, or lack of money, it can make sense. It's difficult to beat a McDonald's Double Cheeseburger for dietary money-value!

Granted, the removal of trans fats has helped. And note that I'm not arguing a whole foods diet can't be better. I'm not recommending a fast food diet ;) But we sometimes underestimate the effort involved in following a good diet and discount the benefits of a good-enough diet.

Did you know if you only ate McDonalds for every meal of every day... you'd be underweight?

A burger, medium fries and diet drink is 588 calories apparently. So three of those a day is only 1764 calories! A massive deficit for almost everyone.

Not really. I would file this under misleading-but-true (although when I checked your numbers I came up with 630, not 588, still a bit shy of 2000cal/day so a little low for most people.

However, it really relies on two things (three, if you count "no snacks at all or other drinks")

1 - diet drinks only. If you change your diet code to a medium coke you are now at 2500cal/day. So instead of a deficit, you have a surplus for most people.

2 - you picked the basic smallest burger. Even if you only change that to a 1/4 pounder, you're up at 2300cal. And it mostly goes (way) up from there (with some exceptions, but even the fillet-of-fish or mcchicken are >100cal more than the basic burger.

So if you change it to "if you only eat from a severely limited subset of the McDonalds menu 3x a day and nothing else, you might be underweight". Sure, that's true. I'd hate to be your GI tract with that severe lack of fiber and vegetables, but you could do it for a while.

If you eat anything like a "typical" order for breakfast/lunch/dinner there, you are likely to have a pretty severe surplus. Hardly surprising, really. Hell some of the breakfast offerings are > 1000cal by themselves.

I thought their hamburger as signature item would be what most people would get, but maybe not. I don't actually go to McDonalds myself so I was just going off their website.

> I thought the hamburger would be their signature item

In the general “hamburger” class (and overall, because hamburgers are their signature category) the Big Mac and Quarterpounder are their signature items.

I can understand how you would get there, and the McDonald's site (intentionally?) doesn't make it easy to see comparisons and product lines.

Their signature item is the Big Mac

Semi-frequent McDonalds eater here who wears size 30 - 31 jeans here.

I agree with the sentiment, but your numbers are somewhat off - a Double Quarter Pounder on its own is 750 calories, and a medium fries is 340 calories. You can get a cheeseburger at 300 calories, but I don't think that would feel filling.

If you're having McDonalds regularly, it works better if you just have one main meal a day. So you can have your 750 calorie burger, 340 calories fries, diet soda / water, and still have room for small snacks at other times of the day.

And personally, I'd be putting on weight at 1764 calories a day. I need to stay around 1500 - 1600, unless I put in a ton of extra exercise. I'm shorter than average.

[Edit: FWIW, not actually recommending others do this, do your own experiments. I've been keeping weight & body fat logs for 14 years, so I've got lots of personal data to track & measure against.]

> your numbers are somewhat off

I used the McDonald's calorie calculator on their website. I picked the hamburger 250 calories (it's their main item and I guess most people get it), medium fries 337 calories (so not even picking the smallest items), and Diet Coke 1 calorie (maybe that one is bending over backwards to be low calorie) = just 588 calories. A very light lunch!

As someone who spent literal years working at a McDonald's as a teenager, the basic hamburger is perhaps only eclipsed by the Filet of Fish sandwich as one of the least ordered regular lunch menu items. The Big Mac probably outsells all other regular lunch sandwiches 3:1, at least.

Of course it's been almost 20 years since I worked there, but I don't imagine it has changed all that much.

In many locations, the basic hamburger isn’t even on the menu. When I keep to the published menu and order a cheeseburger with no cheese, it only shows up on the receipt as a hamburger about 25% of the time.

How did the seasonal McRib fare?

Not sure but I had as many as I could.

   (it's their main item and I guess most people get it),

I suspect this assumption is pretty far off. I'd guess the single burger doesn't even crack the top 10 in sandwich sales for them. Not even close if you exclude sales to kids. At least in the US.

If for arguments sake a more typical lunch was 1/4pounder w/cheese, medium fries, medium (regular coke) you are something like 1100 calories - well into heavy lunch territory.

It's not a main item, it's the dollar menu smallest item. Have you ever been to a mcdonalds?

Highly variable. As a 5"4" woman I would gain a pound a week on that diet (until it leveled out and ~1700 calories was my new maintenance).

My experience with this is that those 588 calories will satiate you less than a 588 calorie meal elsewhere. (Cooking at home is ideal, but restaurants other than McDonald's will often do better too. Varies a lot with ingredients.)

I also know that 1764 calories is not a huge deficit for me.