McDonald's CEO Won't Eat His Own Product, and Now I Know Why

Chris Kempczinski gets paid over twenty million dollars a year to run the biggest fast food chain on the planet. A few weeks ago he posted a video of himself trying a Big Mac, and he called it a "product" multiple times instead of food. He took the smallest bite anyone has ever seen, the camera cut before he swallowed, and he told us he'd finish the rest off camera.

The internet did what the internet does. An Irish comedian's breakdown of the video got over 10 million views, a parody got 21 million, and major news networks ran full segments on it. Then every rival chain on earth lined up to take their shot. Burger King's CEO Tom Curtis remade the exact video with a Whopper, took a real bite, and said "only one thing missing, a napkin." Wendy's president posted his own video demolishing a burger with the caption "This is what it looks like when you don't have to pretend to like your product." KFC's president jumped in eating a chicken sandwich. Even Mini Cooper, a car company, commented "gonna start test driving our cars one metre at a time," and that comment alone got 105,000 likes.

This may be the biggest self-own in fast food history.

Then the internet went digging. They found a video from two years ago of Kempczinski eating a McDonald's chicken sandwich, where he takes a bite and reaches straight for a napkin. They found him doing the McCrispy Strips taste test, where he takes a bite and continues to talk with the chicken sitting in the side of his cheek, never swallowing on camera.

Now, here's the thing that got me. If the man who gets paid twenty million dollars a year to sell this food won't actually eat it on camera, what is actually in it?

I went deep. Every single ingredient in the most iconic meal at McDonald's, a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate milkshake. What I found, in my opinion, should be illegal.

What's in a Big Mac

According to McDonald's own website, the Big Mac is made up of seven components. The bun, the beef patty, lettuce, the special sauce, processed American cheese, pickle slices, and onions. That doesn't sound bad. I picked the word "components" deliberately though, because between those components there are 80 ingredients. To be clear, that is eight zero. 80.

Folic acid is in the bun. It is marketed as a B vitamin and sounds healthy. The problem is folic acid is entirely synthetic and doesn't exist anywhere in nature. What exists in nature is folate, which your body converts into methylfolate, the form your brain actually uses. An estimated 40 to 60 percent of people carry a gene mutation called MTHFR, which means their bodies physically cannot convert folic acid into usable methylfolate. The result is a functional folate deficiency, which is why so many people report dramatic improvements in mood, focus, and anxiety when they cut folic acid out of their diet.

The pickles contain potassium sorbate, a preservative. A 2019 study by Hrncirova found that the gut bacteria most vulnerable to food preservatives were specifically the ones with anti-inflammatory properties, while the bacteria linked to chronic inflammation were significantly more resistant. Every time you eat this stuff, you are shifting your gut toward a more inflammatory state. A 2010 study by Mamur also found potassium sorbate caused DNA strand breaks in human cells at every single concentration tested, after just one hour of exposure.

The Big Mac sauce and the buns contain soybean oil. Soybean oil is made by soaking crushed soybeans in a petrochemical solvent called hexane. The EPA classifies hexane as a hazardous air pollutant, and it is used in rubber cement, shoe glue, and industrial degreasers. Because the FDA calls hexane a "processing aid," it never has to appear on the label of any food you buy. A 2020 study out of UC Riverside found soybean oil dysregulated roughly 100 genes in the brain's hypothalamus, including genes tied to appetite, metabolism, and social behaviour. The lead researcher, Poonamjot Deol, said it plain: "If there's one message I want people to take away, reduce consumption of soybean oil."

The cheese contains an ingredient labelled "colour added," and that is the entire description on the label. It could be annatto, which comes from a plant. It could also be Yellow #5, an artificial dye made from petroleum. The EU actually requires a warning label on Yellow #5 because it may affect activity and attention in children, and a study published in The Lancet by researchers at Southampton University found artificial food colourings increased hyperactivity at a population level. The FDA lets McDonald's just write "colour added" and you do not get to know which one is in your cheese.

Of those 80 ingredients in the Big Mac, only about 10 are actual foods. The rest are additives, emulsifiers, preservatives, and chemicals. At least 9 are derived from or extracted using petroleum.

The fries are worse

McDonald's fries contain 11 ingredients. Only two of them are real food, potatoes and salt. The other nine are processed additives, including four different oils and one ingredient with a ten million dollar lawsuit behind it.

That ingredient is the "natural beef flavour." Back in the 90s, McDonald's was cooking their fries in beef tallow without explicitly disclosing it, so vegetarians and Hindus sued. McDonald's paid out ten million dollars and switched to vegetable oil, but they added this "natural beef flavour" to keep the taste. People have been asking for years what is actually in it. According to McDonald's website, it contains hydrolysed wheat and hydrolysed milk as starting ingredients, which really could mean anything.

Then there is sodium acid pyrophosphate. This exists in the fries for one reason, so they don't turn grey. Phosphates like this are absorbed at nearly 100 percent, and Americans already consume two to three times the recommended phosphate intake, mostly from additives exactly like this. Research published in EMBO Molecular Medicine found that elevated phosphate levels act as a toxin that accelerates ageing.

The biggest problem with the fries, in my opinion, is the oil. They are cooked in a blend of canola, corn, and soybean oil, all seed oils high in polyunsaturated fat. People will tell you these are safe to cook with because they have a high smoke point, around 230 degrees Celsius. Here is what they don't tell you. Polyunsaturated fats don't wait until the smoke point to break down. They begin oxidising and producing toxic aldehydes well below that, and after just 30 minutes of sustained heating, the toxic byproducts increase tenfold. McDonald's cooks at 170 to 190 degrees, so the oil is not smoking, which makes everyone think it is fine. According to McDonald's employees, this oil is only fully changed every 7 to 10 days. Filtering it daily removes food debris, but it does not remove oxidised fat molecules. So your fries are getting dunked in oil that has been heated and reheated for up to ten days straight, accumulating toxic breakdown products with every batch.

The shake

The chocolate shake used to be my favourite thing from McDonald's, so it pains me to write this. There are three components, vanilla reduced fat ice cream, chocolate syrup, and whipped cream. Between them there are 26 ingredients, and the real foods are milk, cream, cocoa, water, and salt. You can count them on one hand.

A medium chocolate shake contains 85 grams of sugar, which is over 21 teaspoons. The American Heart Association recommends no more than 9 teaspoons of added sugar per day, and one medium shake is more than double that.

Both the ice cream and the whipped cream contain carrageenan, extracted from red seaweed using a hot alkaline chemical process. In 2024, researchers at the German Diabetes Center published the first ever human trial on carrageenan, and they found it weakens the lining of the small intestine, letting undigested food, bacteria, and toxins leak through into the bloodstream.

They also contain mono and diglycerides. The FDA banned trans fats in 2018, declared them not generally recognised as safe, and cited overwhelming evidence they raise the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. But the FDA only recognises fats in triglyceride form, and mono and diglycerides are a different molecular form, so the ban does not apply to them. Mono and diglycerides can legally contain up to 60 percent trans fatty acids. The thing the FDA banned six years ago is still in your milkshake under a different name.

How any of this got approved

You would think there is a regulator somewhere making sure none of this slipped through. Well, no. The FDA has a loophole called GRAS, which stands for Generally Recognised As Safe. In 1958, the government started requiring FDA approval for new food chemicals, and they exempted about 700 obvious ingredients like salt and pepper. That was reasonable. By 1997, the FDA could not keep up with the backlog of new ingredients being submitted, so they replaced mandatory approval with a voluntary system.

Under this system, a food company can hire its own panel of experts to review their own safety data, and if that panel says the ingredient is safe, the company can put it in your food immediately. They do not even have to tell the FDA they did it.

A 2013 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at 451 of these GRAS safety determinations. Every single one, all 451, relied on expert opinions from either manufacturer employees or consultants hired by the manufacturer.

Of the roughly 36 chemical additives in that Big Mac, fries, and shake combo, at least 6 entered the food supply through this self-affirmation pathway. The FDA has never investigated them.

How they keep you coming back

Here is the part that really got me. McDonald's spends an enormous amount of effort making sure you start eating their food before you can read.

McDonald's is responsible for over 70 percent of all fast-food TV commercials viewed by children, and the average preschooler is watching nearly three McDonald's ads every single day. They distribute 1.5 billion toys per year through Happy Meals, which works out to 4 million toys a day, making McDonald's the largest toy distributor on earth. 40 percent of parents say their child asks to go to McDonald's at least once a week.

In 2007, Stanford researchers gave 63 preschoolers identical food, the same fries and the same nuggets. One group got plain wrappers and the other got McDonald's packaging. 77 percent of the kids said the McDonald's-wrapped fries tasted better. The researchers also put baby carrots, which McDonald's does not sell, in McDonald's wrappers, and the kids preferred those too. The branding alone is so powerful it changes how children perceive taste.

Then there is the food itself. Ever notice how you can eat an entire large fries and still not feel full? That is engineered. The texture is designed to dissolve so quickly your brain does not register the calories, and the industry calls it vanishing caloric density. The flavour layering, savoury and sweet and salty and acidic, is designed so your palate never fatigues and you never get the "I am done" signal. The exact ratio of sugar, salt, and fat that triggers maximum dopamine release, what the industry calls the "bliss point," was developed by a Harvard psychophysicist named Howard Moskowitz, and it activates the same reward pathway as cocaine.

According to McDonald's own financial statements, they spend zero dollars per year on food research and development, every single year. Does anyone actually believe that? What they do is outsource it to third-party flavour companies, part of a 30 billion dollar global industry employing thousands of chemists whose entire job is to find the formulation that makes you unable to stop eating. By funnelling the work through suppliers, McDonald's keeps zero on the books, so there is no paper trail and no accountability. Industry estimates suggest 50 to 100 million dollars a year goes into engineering their food to be as addictive as possible, and none of it shows up in their public filings.

McDonald's defenders will say the ingredients are all FDA approved, that everything in moderation is fine, and that people have a choice. The first one falls apart the moment you understand GRAS, because at least 6 of the additives in your Big Mac meal were never actually reviewed by the FDA. The second one ignores that the food is precision-engineered to override the moderation signal in your brain. And "people have a choice" is a hard sell when the marketing starts at preschool age and the bliss point hits the same dopamine pathway as cocaine.

Every meal at McDonald's is a hundred-plus ingredients sliding through a regulatory system that gave up on regulation in 1997. Roughly half of those ingredients are designed to keep food shelf-stable for absurd amounts of time, and the other half are designed to override the part of your brain that tells you to stop eating. The reason Chris Kempczinski did not actually swallow his Big Mac on camera is not a mystery. He knows what is in it, and at twenty million dollars a year, he just does not want you to.

Eat real food.