It's trans-tastic!

The other night after work I was downright starving, so I stopped at the 24-hour Burger King drive-thru to try the new double crispy cheesyburger, an item that makes up for its lack of taste with an abundance of the letter y. I wasn't too impressed with the burger, but for two bucks (I got two of them) you can't go too wrong. After I ate it, though, I started thinking about how bad for me that thing really is. I tried to find the nutrition facts online, but Burger King only has info on their permanent menu and I couldn't find it elsewhere. I'm not going to let that stop me, though.

I figure the two patties are comparable to a double hamburger with no toppings on it (since the only topping on the little hockey puck patties is cheesy sauce and "tiny, crispy onions") which comes in at a modest 400 calories/22g fat/9g sat. fat/1g trans fat/26g protein (good!). So we just need to figure out the sauce and the tiny, crispy onions. I figure if we take the values for the sauce and "angry onions" found on the Angry Whopper, we're going to have a pretty good estimate on those. So, we dress up a regular Whopper with all the other items an Angry Whopper has (pepperjack cheese, bacon, no ketchup or onions) and subtract. That's an additional 130 calories/7g fat/3g sat fat/0.5g trans fat/12g carb/5g sugar. You can figure the cheesy sauce is more oil-based than the angry sauce, so some of that sugar is probably more like fat, but I'll leave it for purposes of this calculation.

So that tiny double crispy cheesyburger has 29 grams of fat, 12 grams of saturated fat, and 1.5 grams of trans fat. And I ate two of them and was still hungry. A growing young man like myself could conceivably have four of those in one meal. I don't think anyone should consume nearly 120 grams of fat in a single meal, even if you're knocking out your caloric requirement for the entire day.

I guess what I'm trying to tell you is don't eat at Burger King. Or maybe just don't get the double crispy cheesyburger. It's not even that tasty. Fast food companies drive me crazy. The dollar you spend on that double crispy heart attack burger could buy you some fresh fruit or a sizable portion of nuts. Organic, even. King Soopers is open 24 hours, too. What I really don't like is that BK and Mackey's are getting so expensive it isn't even worth the health risk to save money any more. Combo meals cost as much as eight dollars if you get cheese on the sandwich. Take your eight bucks to Subway and get a fresh fit meal, or to Chipotle (if and only if sodium doesn't cause you a problem, although there's plenty of sodium in the BK, too). I mean, it'd be better still to make a fresh sandwich for yourself or a nice, fresh salad, but I understand if you're on the go. I don't want to go so far as to say that fast food should be illegal, but I think what we should do is stop buying it. Let's take control of the free market and push it away from this unhealthy crap. There's been some of this already, but now companies have figured out the magic $1 menu rule. People will buy a Tasty Double Garbage Burger if you charge them a buck for it. I want one right now.

Rabbit trail. Wow. Sometimes I get all worked up about things like this. I think I'll stop there. Thanks for reading, and come back soon - and don't try the double crispy cheesyburger.