McDonald’s and healthy eating are not synomonous in the eyes of most Americans. This doesn’t stop a good size of our population from eating there, nor does it stop McDonald’s from claiming that the fast food restaurant is actually a  healthy place to eat.  During the Vancouver Olympics in February, McDonald’s ran a series of commercials aimed at Americans who wanted to “eat like Olympians”.

The idea that Olympic athletes eat McDonald’s on a regular basis doesn’t sound right to me and I wasn’t surprised to find that  at least one Olympian is disputing the McDonald’s side of the story. Garrett Weber-Gale is a two-time Olympic gold-medal swimmer who participated in the Beijing games and blogs regularly about food.

In a recent blog post, he admitted that there is some truth to the McDonald’s claim. Namely, he claims that some Olympians do eat at McDonald’s and that food from McDonald’s is available during the Olympics and to Olympic athletes. However, there is more to the picture than that.

Weber-Gale writes:

Olympic athletes do not eat at McDonalds during their competition schedule. In fact many athletes turn their nose up at the thought of it. While training to compete at high levels of sport can and sometimes does include infrequent fast food and junk, generally it does not.

The athlete continues on to rant about social responsibility and McDonald’s and questions the motives of the fast food chain for even linking together Chicken McNuggets and Olympic athletes in the first place, especially in the context of the amount of childhood obesity that is prevalent in the United States.

If the idea of linking McDonald’s, healthy eating, and Olympic athletes isn’t enough to make you want to avoid eating McDonald’s altogether (which I highly recommend), McDonald’s is doing even stranger things in other parts of the world: according to this article,  in New Zealand, Weight Watchers will have their logo next to some McDonald’s menu items including Chicken McNuggest, which definitely does not scream out, “Corporate Responsiblity”.

Why is Weight Watchers endorsing McDonald’s as a healthy place to eat? Is Weight Watcher’s now the official sponsor of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets? And, why are fast food restaurants and junk food allowed to sponsor the Olympic games in the first place? Not only is there no social accountability on the part of McDonald’s, there seems to be no corporate responsiblity in the Olympic sponsorships.

Olympics story via the NYT.

Picture from Creative Commons.