This is crazy, and I had to share it. One chocolate muffin from McDonalds contains 515kcals! For most males with little activity throughout the day, this equates to around a quarter of your RDA, and for females its about a third. Even if you are pretty active, this muffin contains a hell of a lot of your daily calories!

It would take me about 5 miles worth of running to burn this off!

Whats more, is muffins are generally a snack; something to eat in-between meals, this is a meal in itself! And it goes without saying, that these are packed full of all the wrong types of calories, and offer no nutrition to the consumer. It is no surprise people are getting fatty if they are eating these as snacks.

Crazy.

Oh but it doesn’t stop there, because this was also on display (see right). I’m pretty sure that one of those products is a bag of carrots, which I can’t really pick fault with, but the other 2 are fruits based snacks chilled targeted at children, which claim to be 1 of you 5-a-day. This claim is ridiculous. Ok, so maybe 80g of fruit did go into making one of those snacks, but after all the mashing, filtering, extracting, heating and pressing, how much of that fruit is actually left in the product? Not much I would bet. Certainly no fibre or pulp which contains lots of the nutrients found in fruits. On top of this they add a shed load of sugar to it, and somehow, this sugary vague resemblance of a fruit is classed as 1 of your 5-a-day?

Crazy.

These things (especially the muffin) should come with similar health warnings as cigarettes do, or at least they shouldn’t be able to advertise them as healthy.

Image courtesy of jeepersmedia