Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Soybean Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Leavening (Calcium Sulfate, Ammonium Sulfate), May Contain One or More Dough Conditioners (Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Azodicarbonamide, Mono and Diglycerides, Monocalcium Phosphate, Enzymes, Calcium Peroxide), Calcium Propionate (Preservative). Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders.
Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper). Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Water, Salt, Natural Flavors (Plant Source). Distilled Vinegar, Water, Mustard Seed, Salt, Turmeric, Paprika, Spice Extractive.
Whoa, that’s an impressive list of potential dough conditioners…
“I feel like the FDA is a very political organization and I have no faith in them whatsoever.”
Actually, the least political organization of them all. Otherwise, it would have been easily bought out by pharma and squished into non-existence by the cosmetics and supplement industry (although the latter both were given freedom to operate as long as they don’t make any health-related statements).
Let’s clear up some misleading info. When it comes to meat, poultry, eggs, the FDA has almost no jurisdiction over those products. The USDA is the one to blame if your hamburger tastes like crap. 
The FDA “approves” and sets the limits for hormones, additives and other chemicals beef contains. It is FSIS - Food Safety and Inspection Service - a branch of the USDA- which monitors beef for the chemical content.
IF the FDA didn’t approve it, it wouldn’t be in there.
The problem with that is that safety depends on the dose, route of administration, etc. … what happens after that is out of the FDA’s hands because it has no jurisdiction over what the end users, ie farmers and meat processors, do with the “approved” stuff.
Why do I want or need antibiotics or nitrates in my meat? It is for the convenience of the food producers who lobby to get the amounts they need to extend shelf life or justify whats already in their product at point of sale. Europe bans many of the substances that the FDA approves. How can the research be so different?
I’m no fan of McDonalds (except the French fries), but that list of ingredients is mostly for the bun. Any commercially made bun you get at the grocery store will have a similar list. Same with the ketchup and mustard ingredients listed.
@harvestmoon:
The answer to your question is that the USDA , which determines what farmers can and cannot use, is more a cheerleader for the industry than being a regulator. One of the things that is well known is that we have strains of superbugs out there, that are antibiotic resistant, and one of the reasons is the overuse of antibiotics by the meat producers and ranchers. They don’t just give it to sick animals, they routinely give animals antibiotics on a regular schedule, in part because of the conditions in feedlots and factory farms, but also because the animal grows bigger with regular use of antibiotics. Likewise, hormones allow the animal to grow fatter faster, which equals more profit for the rancher and the wholesaler. They have been trying to get use of antibiotics limited to treating disease, but the farm state congressmen and senators have screamed, and the best the USDA could do last I heard was to issue statements asking farmers and ranchers to voluntarily stop the practice.
The USDA and the FDA both have another problem, they have had their budgets slashed, and more importantly, the pro business/anti regulation types have made clear they don’t want businesses interfered with. For example, did you know that many meat processing facilities in this country are now self inspected, that basically the regulators leave it up to an honor system to comply? It is very similar to the cosmetics industry or the supplement industry, where powerful congressmen and senators have made sure that industry can pretty much do they want, cosmetics for example allows the cosmetic industry to decide what they use, and the only way that something can be banned as an ingredient is if they have some kind of epidemic, like when people got sick from dietary supplements. You compare it to Europe, and there is no comparison, the European Union is a lot stricter with what can go into food or cosmetics (though there are ironies, the EU is also a lot better at approving new compounds and such that can be used, often European versions of products have compounds that work better and are safer than what is allowed in the US).
The research isn’t different, the political climate is. The Europeans tend to put food safety and the safety of people above commercial profits (which should be evident, ever notice the loudmouths in certain quarters who claim Europe is ‘anti business’ and ‘radical socialists’ because of their regulations?) whereas in the US everything is about 'not hindering business". For example, in Europe, supplement makers (vitamins, herbal supplements) have to show that what they are producing contains exactly what they claim it does, if it says that there is 50mg of stuff per capsule, they have to prove it. Meanwhile, in the US when they pull stuff off the shelves of GNC and drug stores and supermarkets, what they often find is that the product has little or none of what it claims it has. The reason? Orin Hatch and other congressmen refuse to regulate the supplement industry, in large part because the supplement makers are in their districts and are big $$$$ firms. The attitude is if someone is making money off of it, hands off, and it leads to what you see. From the outbreaks of E coli, to problems with contaminated meat, to issues with poultry or salmonella, the food industry in this country is regulated the least it has been in generations; we may not be China, but we aren’t as good as the EU either.
And the reality is people don’t care, they mouth about wanting to eat healthy food, cast evil eyes at McDonalds but still eat there.
Good post, musicparent.
Just wanted to add that nitrates in food predate the FDA by at least a century and are actually present in many European cold cuts. 
http://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nchfp/factsheets/food_pres_hist.html
(Corrected the info per link)
Exactly. And I came across this piece of information in an article in IFL Science that gives me even less faith in the FDA:
HarvestMoon, you will not be able to convince folks who actually work in the FDA-regulated industry by quoting some lawyer and a scientist turned politician belonging to a litigious organization that is against nuclear energy and has a clear agenda.
Who do you think runs these safety studies in pharmaceutical industry? An independent agency? Who do you think does it in Europe? Yup. That’s what I thought. The big evil pharma does it. However, those folks you quoted are not saying the whole truth. First, the the FDA by law is limited as to what and how it can regulate. So there, food industry is off the hook, although it would love to see the FDA gone completely. Second, protocols of a study that conforms to the FDA standards has to be approved by the FDA, and those standards are nothing to sneeze at, including multiple controls and checks and balances.
To add to my post: it does not matter how “safe” anything is if the end user has a full license to abuse the use and keeps shoveling it into the products.
@Bunsenburner I am not trying to “convince folks” of anything - just stating my opinion.
Not sure what litigious organization you are referring to. But if you are talking about the NRDC it is a very well funded environmental organization founded almost 50 years ago with a $400,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Take a look at their board of trustees which is an impressive group. They do a lot of good work and of course ruffle the feathers of some corporations.
Yes, I am talking about them, and while they have done some good, here they are barking up a wrong tree.
BTW, the food additive that kills us is completely GRAS… Wiki lists it as (2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol.
What food additive “kills us all?” Hoping there is no such additive.
Others may be tastier or cheaper than Subway, but here in the northeast, Subway is everywhere. Not many Quizno’s at all. Still better than burgers, though.
For what it’s worth - I’m glad there is an FDA.
For perspective, read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Anyway - I hope to try the McWhopper!
I would try it too @Nerdyparent - but only once!
@BunsenBurner :
What you are saying is true, but what HarvestMoon says is true as well, the FDA is very politiicized. Yes, when the pharmaceutical industry develops new drugs, there is a strict testing protocol they have to follow, with clinical trials and double blind studies and the like, it is pretty heavily regulated. However, what you are leaving out is that the political climate around the FDA has changed. There have been drugs the FDA approved that there were serious questions about safety, that got approved because of political pressure, then the FDA was slow to force them being removed from the market (anyone remember the Fen Fen diet pill?). Drugs the FDA should have approved appear to have been denied, or that things like RU 486 and the morning after pill were not approved, not because of safety or effectiveness, but because of pressure from the religious right and their conservative political allies. The FDA has actually more than a few times gone against the recommendation of its own panel deciding the fate of a drug, often because of political pressure (I thought the best was when the FDA during the Bush administration had stuff on FDA websites that claimed things like abortions lead to the risk of cancer, side effects and statistical information on birth control pills that among other things claimed a high rate of infertility and other things that were clearly politically motivated).
There is another area where the FDA has gotten into trouble. The FDA insists that the only tests for effectiveness are the double blind studies/clincial trials, even though statistical studies of effectiveness have been proven to work. Where this has come into play is with things like, for example, claiming that drinking pomegranate juice has health benefits from the anti oxidants. The FDA told Pom they couldn’t make those claims, even though statistical studies showed that drinking pomegranate juice in fact did have health benefits (and in court,a judge ripped the FDA on their refusal to accept statistical studies. This is especially true with health supplements and the like, double blind statistical studies cost a lot of money to do, and only the big drug companies can afford to do them.
We aren’t talking safety, since supplements involve compounds considered generally safe (when big pharma does its clinical trials, it is both effectiveness and safety, since these are not existing compounds, and thus their safety is unknown). The reason for this? Big pharma doesn’t want competition, and if supplements are going to be sold, they want to be the ones doing it, at tremendous markup, and the FDA regulations on effectiveness studies are politial, they are designed to protect the pharm industry (it is what is known as as protectionist regulation).
One of the reasons that supplements are not regulated by the FDA is for much the same reason. When things like vitamins and other health supplements became a pretty big business, the FDA made moves to try and regulate them, and part of that was insisting on double blind clinical trials and the like, and allowing supplements that were basically composed of items generally considered safe to become prescription, with the huge cost markup of cost. As a result, they passed the act in the 1990’s that has basically left the supplement industry unregulated as food, so instead of having something that is regulated in terms of the content of what they are selling, and allowing supported methods of effectiveness testing that aren’t as intensive and expensive as for new drugs, the FDA left it a wild west. And there is proof of that, memos and such from the pharm industry were releases where they talk about their strategy to tap into the supplement market and in effect use the FDA rules to achieve their aims.
Big pharma are powerful, and they own a lot of politicians, and the FDA in many ways has been turned into an agency designed to help the industry, much as the USDA has become a marketing arm for the farm and agribusiness industry. Want further proof? The FDA has done absolutely nothing about the abuses in the prescription drug industry. For example, the massive advertising of prescription drugs, that among other things has resulted in more than a bit of the huge increases in drug costs. There was a study done of the arthritis drug Celebrex (anyone remember the ads, showing older people dancing and chasing their cute boarder collie and so forth, with the catchy jingle?) and what they found is that because of the advertising, patients were going into doctors and demanding the ‘miracle drug’, even though it is likely that current drugs, including generics, would do as well, yet advertising has exploded. Likewise, they have done nothing with the way that pharm salesmen get doctors to prescribe their products, which is basically bribery, yet it is allowed.
The FDA if it truly were non political would be a lot better, I think in general they try to do a good job, but given the political climate I firmly believe that they are often the handmaiden of the companies they are supposed to regulate, in a sense there is a lot of political blackmail, the FDA knows that powerful politicians, who get a lot of money from the pharm industry, can use their budget as a form of blackmail to play ball and that is a big problem.