Short answer: If you’ve had a mentally or physically demanding day, feel hungry or depleted, eating a reasonable McDonald’s meal is likely better for you than skipping food. This is particularly true if you don’t have much experience with fasting. However, if you’ve eaten enough, feel well, planned a fast, and are confident you can handle feeling hungry, skipping one meal can be a good option. However, neither is perfect, and neither will determine your long-term health. What you do on a daily basis is more important.
No AI was used to write this article.
I recently found myself in a tricky situation when travelling. Despite having a decent lunch earlier in the day, by 6pm I was quite hungry. Originally, I wasn’t planning to eat out but unexpected delays left me no other option (I can hear you playing a violin for me).
What’s even trickier is that the list of available restaurants looked like this:
Then after a serious analysis, I managed to make the list much longer. It looked as follows:
I hesitated. What’s best for my body? I could order a Big Mac and hope for the best or take advantage of the apparent benefits of fasting.
Is McDonald’s still food (or not)?
Despite its popularity, people often complain about the quality of food at McDonald’s. Typical complaints sound like this: “It’s not real food”, “It’s full of chemicals” or “you’re eating plastic mate”.
But McDonald’s is still food.
Yes, you’re not getting the fibre, plants and micronutrients you would expect from a well-balanced meal, but you’re still getting calories with carbohydrates, protein and fats.
For example, a Big Mac offers 509 kcal, 41 g of carbohydrates, 27 g of protein, 25 g of fat, 3.4 g of fibre and 2.0 g of salt
As much as it might be heavily processed, it still contains beef and cheese, so describing it as “empty calories” or “no nutrition” isn’t really accurate. Its nutritional content is far from perfect, but it’s still doing something for your body.
You’re still “benefiting” from the macronutrients. Benefiting may be a little too optimistic a word to use though, but yes, McDonald’s is still food.
Can McDonald’s ever be good for you?
My natural instinct is to tell you McDonald’s is bad and you should never eat it. But this kind of all-or-nothing thinking is exactly what can contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food, particularly for people vulnerable to eating disorders.
I think our bodies can handle occasional unhealthy food quite well. More on this later.
Did you know that Usain Bolt consumed huge quantities of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets during the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Yes, McDonald’s is unhealthy, but sometimes short-term health choices are less important than other goals in front of us. Reducing the risk of an upset stomach on race day by choosing a familiar meal was much higher on his list of priorities than well-balanced nutrition.
Familiarity is a common reason people reach for McDonald’s on holidays instead of local delicacies. It’s predictable and easily accessible. That’s good for some people in some circumstances.
As bad as it sounds, there are many benefits to eating McDonald’s. Some are direct and others work by creating a chain reaction that indirectly improves someone’s experience in the moment.
Let’s take hunger as an example.
Fifty shades of hunger
Being hungry is a very subjective sensation. Some people find unhealthy satisfaction in it, and this can contribute to various mental health problems, particularly eating disorders.
For most people, however, being hungry is an unpleasant experience. It can mean a ruined day or holiday. Athletes, particularly bodybuilders, may feel guilty for not meeting their energy needs. Others may experience physical discomfort, low mood, reduced energy, irritability and poor sleep.
Consuming McDonald’s can trigger a chain of events, preventing or correcting many of these negative consequences. One unhealthy meal can mean fewer arguments with family, more energy, improved mood and potentially better sleep.
Contrasting this with feeling tired, grumpy, and not being able to fall asleep due to your stomach shouting at you suddenly makes McDonald’s look closer to the healthy lifestyle you were hoping to protect by avoiding it!
Knowing yourself
I’m not trying to convince you that McDonald’s is healthy. I just think context really matters. I slightly regret asking such a black-and-white type of question in the title of the article, because the answer is:
It depends.
A lot depends on your personal circumstances and goals. How much have you eaten so far today? How much do you typically eat? Have you exercised? When will you eat next? Is fasting something your body is familiar with?
For example, if you’ve never fasted, you’re starting to run out of juice, and your stomach starts hurting, then spontaneously deciding to become an intermittent faster may not be particularly helpful.
But there’s more to think about. Try considering the questions below. It should make it easier to decide.
Was it a stressful day?
How much cognitive load have you had?
Have you exercised today?
What are your energy needs?
What did you eat earlier?
What happens to your mood when you’re hungry?
Are you likely to sleep well?
When is your next opportunity to eat?
Benefits of fasting
You’ve probably heard about intermittent fasting, where people restrict eating to a particular window of the day (e.g. 8h eating and 16h fasting per day). I also recently learned about extended fasting for 24, 48 or 72 hours. I’ve read about cases of people fasting for a few weeks.
The idea of autophagy seems to be quite well established. Basically, it’s a process where your body breaks down and recycles old or damaged parts of cells. Fasting seems to encourage this process, although much of what we know still comes from animal and laboratory research. We don’t know exactly how long humans need to fast to experience the benefits, how much individual variation there is, and what the long-term effects on health are.
I think fasting can be a helpful health strategy for some people in some circumstances. Reducing your eating window may help you eat less overall and lose weight. Many people would benefit from that, but not in a spontaneous way. I think fasting needs to be well planned.
There is also some research suggesting fasting is a questionable strategy for weight loss when compared to regular dietary advice.
Planned fasting is different from accidentally missing dinner
There is a difference between well-researched and planned experiments with fasting and a spontaneous decision to discover autophagy to avoid eating fast food. Even if the fasting window is exactly the same, the context is not.
Planning might need to include understanding fasting, how to prepare for it and its potential pros and cons, and speaking with an appropriate health professional where necessary.
For some people, it would be important to introduce it gradually to get to know the body’s reactions. Getting familiar with the sensations and how well you tolerate hunger is important.
It’s perhaps also important to highlight that fasting is a form of physiological stress. That’s not always bad. Stress can be good for us. But adding a stressor on top of other stressors can be problematic. If your body is depleted and you completed a hard workout, this may not be the best moment to spontaneously start day one of an extended fast.
Autophagy seems like a helpful and relatively simple idea. Eat less and let your body take care of the rest. But I think it can easily backfire. What happens when you’ve skipped a meal and you’re extremely hungry in the evening? What are the chances you jump at your children’s stash of expired Halloween treats?
Consuming less than your body needs means your body will react, usually aiming to help you restore the energy it needs or is used to getting. If normal symptoms don’t help, they can often intensify and make food increasingly difficult to ignore. So normal hunger, turns into extreme hunger. This includes physical sensations, but also cravings and unexpected emotions.
But what about the downsides of McDonald’s?
I originally planned to write a long paragraph about the downsides of eating at McDonald’s, but then I realised most people are very familiar with this already. So let’s keep it simple.
McDonald’s makes it easy to eat too much too quickly. It is highly processed. It’s high in salt and saturated fat. Most meals contain refined carbohydrates and relatively little fibre, which can cause a rapid rise in blood sugar and leave some people experiencing a noticeable drop afterwards. There is also evidence that a high-fat meal can temporarily affect blood-vessel function after eating.
McDonald’s carries many nutritional disadvantages, but an occasional meal there needs to be seen in the context of your overall diet.
It isn’t actually McDonald’s versus nothing
Asking a binary question often ends with the answer “it depends”. Especially in a blog post with a wide audience.
But even when we stick to only two options, each has multiple variables. You can choose to fast yet shorten it with an early breakfast. Likewise, choosing McDonald’s doesn’t have to mean overeating topped up with two litres of Coca-Cola and a McFlurry. You can drink water. You can skip fries. You can eat chicken pieces and no burger bun. You can choose a smaller meal and eat a healthy breakfast earlier.
You have options.
Can your body handle one unhealthy meal?
Ultimately, what you eat on one particular day probably doesn’t matter much to your long-term health. What matters more is what you eat and how much on a daily basis. If fasting is part of your typical routine, then you’re probably familiar with how it feels and whether it’s worth extending it today to avoid a greasy burger.
However, if you’ve not fasted before or you’ve tried it and it backfired, it may be best if you let yourself enjoy Maccy D’s. Of course it carries a number of negative consequences, but it’s unlikely to make much difference to your overall health if it’s an exception.
I think there is something important about trusting your body. There’s so much happening internally. Our bodies are capable of incredible things and processing one unhealthy meal is probably on the “business-as-usual” list, mainly because ultra-processed food is so common in the modern world and so difficult to avoid.
But it doesn’t mean you should go all in. Portion matters and some damage control is available too.
A note about eating disorders
Being a therapist, I’ve observed too many clients with eating disorders turning their body’s cry for food into a reward.
Hunger is a normal biological signal and often feels unpleasant for a reason. If those unpleasant sensations are labelled as “good”, things can go wrong very easily.
This is also why fasting isn’t a neutral health experiment for everyone. Calorie restriction is probably unnecessary if you’re already undereating or if you’re underweight. People with a current or previous eating disorder should be particularly cautious about deliberately restricting food.
Final words
It may be a silly conclusion, but I think ultimately, it probably mattered very little to my long-term health whether I ate McDonald’s or fasted that evening. I have a relatively regular and predictable diet I can trust. I also trust my body and I know it can handle an occasional meal that isn’t particularly healthy.
My preference would be to skip putting unhealthy food into my body whenever I can, but eating McDonald’s was a much better option for me that day. I took part in a heavy workout earlier that day, I was travelling, and I still needed enough energy to function and think clearly. My body, my brain and my psychology all suggested I needed some fuel.
Eating McDonald’s or skipping a meal can both be reasonable choices. Neither is automatically healthier.
It’s perhaps important to enjoy food, even if it is unhealthy, but ideally as part of a wider lifestyle you’re happy with, rather than something you rely on every day.
If you find yourself asking “McDonald’s or nothing?” every day, then it’s a completely different conversation. What can you do to make sure you don’t have to ask yourself the same question tomorrow?
If your choice really is fast food or skipping a meal, neither is automatically healthier. The better option depends on your circumstances, how much you’ve eaten, how hungry you are, the level of stress, whether you’ve exercised, your experience with fasting and when you can eat next.
What are your thoughts about my conclusions?
I’m ready to be wrong.
Tell me what you think!
Thank you for reading.
I’m glad you’re here :)
Here’s a picture of me saying hi to a donkey in Greece.
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I've been travelling for 5 months and this is so relatable. Every country is different and it is not possible to plan for everything. After a long hungry road trip in Japan (with a low blood sugar) when our planned healthy lunch spot was shut for the day, we had two options: soba noodles or a burger from a fast food chain. Buckwheat = emergency department for me, so I believe I made the healthy (smart) decision by taking the burger option. And I did not feel guilty about the circumstances that were outside my control.
Honestly, black and white thinking and the all or nothing attitude is what drives some people crazy, and others hate the health space.
Longevity Rule 1: don't die, don't faint, don't have an allergy attack, don't injure yourself.
So, yeah, I'd always pick some lollies over a very very low blood sugar.
I agree that one meal probably isn't going to make or break your health. What you do consistently matters a lot more than the occasional fast food meal.