If your curiosity hangs in there, and you begin to learn about those things called nutrients and the human requirements for healthy intakes of them, it won't be long before you realize the term "fast food nutrition" fits the definition of an oxymoron—you know, like pretty ugly, head butt, and commercial art.

Calorie-Counters.net and FastFood.com have gone to great lengths to detail what is optimistically termed "nutritional" information on hundreds of food items. Each site offers a one-stop god-awful-truth guide to such categories as burgers, deli sandwiches, egg dishes, hot dogs, pies, cookies, and fountain drinks. The nutrition numbers are surely sobering, but so are the sheer numbers of marketed items available. And you don't have to be a meat eater to be shocked by the information. What I read left me cold as a McDonald's Vanilla Reduced Fat Ice Cream Cone.

Indeed, one in four people eats fast food fare every day in America, collectively racking up sales of $144 billion per year—up from $3 billion in 1972. The truth is, while no one was looking, a fast-food industrial complex grew up in the national back yard!* Meanwhile, a lot of people are starving these days, not for calories of course but for nutrients.

My look at Calorie-Counters.net and FastFood.com is probably long overdue. It behooves me to be up on things having to do with this industry, for no other reason than the fact that I was born precisely on the day that fast food came into existence. I was born the day Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's restaurant: April 15, 1955. And wouldn't you know it, this, yes, tragic event happened just 12 miles away from the place of my 2-p.m. birth. When I was popping out and into the world, Ray Kroc was surely shaking a lot of hands, smiling a lot of smiles, and worrying if the local papers were adequately taking notice... Boy, that day sure did usher in an era. Unfortunately, it now makes me want to curl up in a hole or perhaps go back into the womb again.

Anyway, about those Web sites: I realized that in order to pull out some general trends about the numbers, I needed to export them to a spread-sheet program. Once I did this, I found that one of the more dastardly items on the list at Calorie-Counters.net is the Jack In The Box Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger. It has 1,020 calories (63 percent from fat), 26 grams of saturated fat, 210 mg. of cholesterol, and 1,740 mg. of sodium. I tried to plug the name of this item into the USDA's calorie/nutrition counter, which has even more detailed information than either of the above two Web sites, but it wasn't listed. A similar item, however, the Burger King Deluxe Double Bacon Cheeseburger—I kid you not—with mayo, tomato, on bun, showed the following:

According to USDA figures—the positive ones first—this mega-fat burger gives a person his or her full requirement for protein, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, zinc, and selenium. It nearly fulfills an average person's requirement for phosphorus and iron. Additionally, the Burger King Deluxe Double Bacon Cheeseburger with mayo, tomato, on bun offers a person a respectable amount of riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6, and calcium, and is so-so on folate (25 percent of an average person's daily requirement).

Now the bad news, which essentially wipes clean anything good you can say about this food-abomination. One Burger King Deluxe Double Bacon Cheeseburger with mayo, tomato, on bun tips the scales of sanity itself. It contains:

• 988 calories (nearly half an average persons requirement over the course of an entire day)
• 65 grams of fat (edging up to twice the amount a person should have for an entire day)
• 25 grams of saturated fat (about twice the amount a person should have for an entire day)
• 194 mg. of cholesterol (the human body needs exactly zero cholesterol from food, although the USDA "allows" 300 mg. per day so people can, within the agency's guidelines, eat any animal-based foods at all, because animal-based foods are the only source for cholesterol; plant foods are devoid of cholesterol)
• 1,698 mg. of sodium (74 percent of the upper limit the USDA allows in the day)

Finally, the Burger King Deluxe Double Bacon Cheeseburger with mayo, tomato, on bun falls short on the following vital nutrients. It has (again, according the the USDA):

• 2 (pathetic) grams of fiber (a negligible amount of what a person should have in a day)
• 3.4 mg. of vitamin C (a negligible amount of what a person should have in a day; vitamin C is necessary for a person to use iron intake)
• 1.6 units of vitamin E (only 11 percent of an average person's daily requirement)
• 67 mg. of magnesium (only 21 percent of an average person's daily requirement)
• 781 mg. of potassium (only 17 percent of an average person's daily requirement)
• 124 units of vitamin A (only 18 percent of an average person's daily requirement)

What makes all of this even more sad? The person who would order this item probably would also order a nutrient-void king-size cola (430 calories) and a calorie-intensive king-size fries (600 calories) at the same time. And he or she probably eats like this on a regular basis. Marketing people in the industry have dubbed these people "heavy users." Seventy-five percent of McDonald's customers fit this category, with 11 percent actually eating at the fast-food chain about 20 times per month.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the industry cannot afford to lose these inveterate food addicts. It would, however, take a genius to figure out why anyone out there is still wondering why we have an obesity epidemic.

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