Fast Food Chains Are Falling Flat with Their 'Healthy' Image Makeover

In the Slow Food era, fast food is having an identity crisis. It's getting ever more flamboyantly fattening (Cinnabon's 1,100-calorie, 47-grams-of-fat Caramel Pecanbon; AM PM's "Dough Ray Moo" glazed-donut double cheeseburger) while at the same time scrambling to clean up its act (Wendy's low-fat baked potatoes; Jack in the Box's nonfat fruit smoothies).

Fast food is on the defense. If the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gets its way, which it almost surely will, McDonald's can no longer give away toys with Happy Meals in the city unless and until the nutritional content of those meals is improved. Officials in nearby Santa Clara passed similar legislation six months ago, banning fast-food restaurants from handing out promotional toys. Currently the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a national watchdog group, is preparing to sue McDonald's for using toys as lures.

"Dangling a toy in front of a kid in order to get that kid to pressure a parent into buying something is deceptive marketing," says CSPI's executive director Michael Jacobson. CSPI sent McDonald's a strongly worded letter in June offering to settle out of court, charging the chain with "conscripting America's children into an unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers, causing them to nag their parents to bring them to McDonald's."

"McDonald's practices are predatory and wrong. They are also illegal," the letter avowed, citing consumer-protection laws in several different states.

Fast-food chains are being blamed for the 30 percent national obesity rate, and they know it. They're being blamed especially for a national childhood obesity rate that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control breaks down by race and gender: 32 percent of white males and 30 percent of white females; 31 percent of African American males and 39 percent of African American females; 41 percent of Hispanic males and 35 percent of Hispanic females. (According to the CDC, California's obesity rate is 24.8 percent. Mississippi's is 34.4 percent. Maybe the San Francisco Board of Supervisors could have a chat with the Pascagoula Board of Supervisors.)

Faced with those figures and the media backlash, fast-food chains --or "quick-service restaurants," aka QSR, as the industry prefers to call itself -- are hastening to at least look chastened, adding trendy/boutique and purportedly healthier items to menus that also boast 1,100-calorie Triple Whoppers, 1,000-calorie Volcano Nachos, and 963-calorie Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburgers (sporting 75, 62, and 67 grams of fat at Burger King, Taco Bell and Jack in the Box respectively).

So lo and behold: Burger King now offers Morningstar Farms veggieburgers.

"They don't sell," says CSPI's Jacobson. "But they have to keep them on the menu in order to defend against people like you and me."

McDonald's, Popeye's, Wendy's, and Burger King now serve salads and wraps. Even KFC, whose notorious Double Down sandwich comprises bacon and cheese between two fried-chicken slabs, now offers wraps.

We've been here before. McDonald's introduced its 330-calorie, reduced-fat McLean Deluxe burger in 1991. (Carrageenan in the patties was its slim-down secret.) After dismal sales, it was discontinued in 1994. Was the McLean simply ahead of its time -- or proof that fast-food patrons are precisely the porkulent oil-guzzlers that research reveals them to be? "Diet foods don't work," warns a QSR feature in the industry journal Restaurant Report. But fast food's fast-forwarding isn't just about weight loss. It's about wooing an educated, ethical, environmentalist demographic that might otherwise spend its money at Whole Foods or Starbuck's. That's why McDonald's poured $100 million last year into advertising McCafe, its line of European-style frothy drinks made with 100 percent Arabica coffee.