The modern food labels present on processed food products give a great deal of nutritional information. There is little information that is not readily apparent if the consumer reads the label carefully. The total amounts and percentages of fats, carbohydrates, and protein are provided as well as Calories and Calories from fat.

A common activity for students is to keep track of their diet and calculate the percentage of calories from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. When food is consumed from processed foods with the the nutrition labels, the task is relatively easy. Most food consumed today is either prepared in restaurants or from basic food stuffs. These products come without nutritional information. A number of sites can be found that have searchable databases of foods with nutritional information. These exist for basic foods and for the most popular fast food and other restaurant foods.

You will use some of these databases to compare the nutritional three meals from a popular national fast food chain. To help you with this activity make sure you have the basics of the national nutritional guidelines by using the following sites.

• Understanding the food label [local]
• Interpreting food labels and nutrition guidelines [local]
• Guidelines for Americans [local] (pdf file, Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
• Nutrient content definitions [local]
• An online energy calculator
• Foods database [local]

Using the Fast Foods database link above, analyze the following three meals from McDonald's® for total fat, carbohydrate, protein, Calories from fat, and total Calories. Record your information and be prepared to compare the information to the Guidelines for Americans information. Box 17 on page 32 of the pdf file will be especially helpful as well as text before and after that box.

Meal 1:
Garden Salad plus ranch dressing
Big Xtra® with cheese
Fries - Super size
Coca Cola Classic (recall that a gram of carbohydrate gives you 4 Calories, find their error)
M&M McFlurry

Meal 2:
Garden salad plus Red French reduced calorie dressing
Big Xtra®
fries - regular
Diet Coke

Meal 3:
Garden salad with herb vinaigrette dressing
Grilled Chicken Deluxe plain W/O mayo
Vanilla reduced fat ice cream cone
water to drink

From the pdf file of Guidelines for Americans compare each of the above meals to a 2000 Calorie diet. Calculate the total calories, calories from fat, mass of fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

Prepare a histogram for each meal showing the above information for each meal and calculate the percent of daily recommended Calories that each meal provides.