Mcdonald’s Serves Up Nutritional Education In Schools

To the dismay of many parents, McDonald’s has been providing nutritional education to several schools across the United States. Of course, the information they are teaching relies less on scientific facts – like maintaining a diet low in saturated fats and high in fruits and vegetables – and more on promoting their own business.

In fact, the “nutritional educators” are showing the students the film 540 Meals: Choices Make the Difference – a film about McDonald’s. The film goes against empirically proven advice for healthy diets and instead teaches the children that “there’s nothing wrong with fast food” and “nothing wrong with McDonald’s.”

The film is in response to the 2004 documentary Supersize Me, which essentially follows around an individual who eats McDonald’s for every meal of every day. Their answer to the scathing documentary is having John Cisna, an Iowa school teacher they hired, travel around different schools in the United States and play the students the video they made. Their video, naturally, touts the health benefits of McDonald’s food combined with regular exercise.

As if this were not fictional enough, Cisna also agrees with their claims, stating that he lost 60 pounds while eating 540 McDonald’s meals straight – while capping his caloric intake at 2,000 calories per day. Not surprisingly, Cisna, who weighed 280 pounds at the time, saw rapid results after he limited the number of calories he consumed today regardless of the fact that the food he was eating barely met the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Moreover, in the documentary, Cisna makes it very clear that he did not only eat “boring food” like salads; during his 540 meals, he claims to have eaten everything from Big Macs to ice cream sundaes.

Professionals in nutritional education have since said that Cisna would have lost weight even if he consumed only cake at 2,000 calories per day.
Why, then, would school teachers and administrators think a blatant promotion of McDonald’s to serve as nutritional and alcohol rehab Winnipeg education was a good idea? It all starts with McDonald’s shameless appeal to target children and teenagers by building relationships with schools across the United States. One of their initiatives is called “McTeacher’s Night” – an event in which teachers are invited to “work” at a local McDonald’s for an evening to help with fundraising.

In fact, the McDonald’s Educates website even says, “Parents and children are encouraged to come to their local McDonald’s to see their very own educators serve up hamburgers, fries and shakes! A portion of the sales from a designated time period is donated to the school for its specific fundraising need.”

This not only entices children to come eat at McDonald’s to see their teachers flipping burgers, it also creates a financial relationship between McDonald’s and many schools in the U.S – making it easy to convince school administration that screening 540 Meals counts as nutritional education.