McDonald's Goes Active

In conjunction with their announcement of their balanced, active lifestyles campaign, McDonald's has revamped their Go Active web site to help consumers make intelligent food choices and learn how to get and stay fit.

They have a fitness and nutrition starter quiz (although I am guessing most of you will score 100% as I did); an online, interactive personal trainer that's rather cool if you'd like to come up with a new workout program (and not have to pay a trainer to design one for you); family fitness toolkit; and database of suggested fitness activities.

In addition, they have an "Ask the Expert" section moderated by the American College of Sports Medicine. You can submit your most pressing fitness and nutrition questions, and get answers directly from the folks in the know.

On the main McDonald's web site, they have a really cool "Bag a Meal" utility. You simply select the menu items that you plan to eat, and it instantly computes the nutrition content for you! It's very nifty. For example, I selected:

• California Cobb salad with grilled chicken
• Low-fat vinaigrette dressing
• Reduced fat ice cream cone, because I am sucker for dessert

All in all, not too terribly bad. This meal carries 450 calories, 17g fat (34% of calories... a bit high and most of it comes from the salad which has blue cheese, bacon, and eggs in it), 7g of saturated fat (again, the result of the cheese and bacon), and 36g of protein (go chicken!).

If you switch to Caesar salad with grilled chicken, stick with the low-fat dressing, and replace ice cream with a yogurt parfait (minus the granola), you'll knock it down to 370 calories with 11g of fat and only 4.5g of saturated fat. When I compared this to my usual daily lunch (which I thought was healthy), I found I'm typically eating 60 more calories and 6 more grams of fat!

Who would have thought you could eat this well at "Mickey-D's?"