The placemats covering fast food restaurant trays don’t do much other than hide the accumulated crud of billions of uses. Once in awhile there will be a discount offer for an amusement park or free cup of coffee, but the majority of the time it just promotes the restaurant’s newest cholesterol-accumulating invention. That being the case, these paper placemats are largely ignored.
Being a writer in search of material for the increasingly popular Fast Food Generation these placemats are actually a gold mine. For instance, while dining at my local Burger King I came upon an interesting tray cover. Seems that the home of the ‘Have It Your Way’ sandwich wants to keep your business while you’re trying to lose much of that Christmas-Passover-Flag Day weight. They’re even going so far as to present some meal suggestions keep you slim and trim.
The program is called BK Positive Steps. Six meals are displayed on the placemat that can be chewed and digested for under 650 calories, with the lowest at 410 calories and the highest at 615. Save for one breakfast and one lunch meal, the others are variations of Burger King’s chicken sandwiches and salads. Missing from these meals, which would probably up the calorie count significantly, are BK’s french fries.
This isn’t all that the home of the Whopper is doing to promote healthier eating at their stores. If you go to their Positive Steps website you can see a listing of all of the items they offer, broken down into calorie categories (and downloadable into PDF format). At the lowest level, under 100 calories, are the beverages like coffee, apple juice, and the diet sodas. At the highest level are, obviously, the restaurant’s top sellers: Whopper, Tendercrisp Chicken Sandwich, and Double Crossan’wich.
If you look at all of the sandwich selections you’ll notice something is missing — mayonnaise and cheese. In order to get these selections down to manageable caloric levels they needed to exclude the one condiment and one topping that many people enjoy (well, over the last few years at least. I’m sure folks would give you the evil eye if you put mayo on your burger a few decades ago). It’s a small thing; however, when the sandwiches normally come with mayo it’s hard to remember not to ask for it in order to get it down to levels for normal human digestion.
This is a good effort on Burger King’s part. And yet, it’s not quite complete. As everyone who is trying to lose weight and eat healthy knows, watching calories is not the only factor to take into consideration when choosing a meal. There’s also fat, sodium, cholesterol, and carbohydrates to consider. As these aren’t listed on the website it’s hard to take their efforts seriously. Sure, you could have Apple Fries with Caramel Sauce for under 100 calories, but factor in the sugar content of the caramel sauce and it isn’t as healthy as first seemed.
So, should you decide to take advantage of these ‘under 650 calories’ Burger King meals, eat with caution. They may taste good, and it may make you feel healthier, but it could be doing other things inside you that will come back and beat you up later in life.
Clacked by Richard Keller 
on Jun 24, 2009 @ 14:00 EST5EDT
