What fast food burger is the
least likely to kill you? On a list of obviously unhealthy choices, which
option is technically the healthiest of the bunch? Because let's be honest, not all
fast food is created equally. Is the Burger King sitting atop that throne? Is everyone gonna be clowning on McDonald's? Or are regional favorites like In-N-Out
and Whataburger gonna take the day? You know what they say, a cheeseburger
a day keeps the cardiologist in pay. That's a thing that they say, right? Well, I just said it. And one of these burgers is gonna keep that
paycheck out of his hands a little bit longer. We looked at the data, crunched the numbers, and
I suspect our findings today will forever change which drive-thru you choose when
you're out for a late-night bite. Spoiler alert, you're just never
gonna want to go to Burger King again. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Food Theory,
the show with quality you can taste. So, recently a study came out that went through and ranked all the fast food
cheeseburgers on the market. Not in terms of deliciousness, but
in terms of their nutritional value. And when the numbers came back, the Texas
native Whataburger came out as the top spot, followed closely by California's
golden child, In-N-Out. And that right there kind of sucks, because California In-N-Out stands
are already a bit high and mighty. But now, they have an article
to prove their superiority. And oh boy, did they lean into that one. Like clockwork, local California news agencies
began spreading the article around like wildfire, printing and reprinting the fact
that they were a proud number two, and how their burger technically
deserved the top spot because all their ingredients are locally sourced and grown. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, let me be honest. Normally, that
sort of thing wouldn't bother me. Normally, I'd silently tolerate
the gloating and the preening. Normally, I wouldn't dedicate an entire episode to tearing down something that
has made other people happy and teaches them ways to be healthier. But the closer you look at this particular
study, the more suspicious it seems. And my first clue was this. Gambling.com. This healthy cheeseburger article
was published by Gambling.com, clearly the most trusted purveyor of
healthy eating and scientific rigor. So today, you know what? We decided to analyze
their study and then do our own analysis to see if we can mathematically
agree on America's healthiest burger. Get your buns toasty there, loyal theorists,
as we serve up some healthy fast food burgers with a side order of science
and make it animal style. First off, let's just address the
casino-sized elephant in the room, because, surprise, surprise, Gambling.com? Yeah, it's not really the dominant
authority in the food realm over here. Michelin ain't exactly quaking in their boots wondering if people will
stop caring about their stars and start judging restaurants with
Gambling.com's poker chip ratings. Uh, that one isn't a real thing, by the way, but probably should be a real
thing in the near future. Consider that your free consulting
session there, Gambling.com. Anyway, I didn't want to just make a bunch
of blanket assumptions about this website, so I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. I decided to look a bit more
closely at their numbers, only to find red flag number two immediately. The study is just gone. When I went to the source to start working
on this episode, I couldn't find it anywhere. Poof! Absolutely vanished into thin air. And sure, I found a bunch of articles
from local news agencies in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco all citing the survey, even
providing links back to the website, but clicking on those links just diverted
me back to Gambling.com's homepage. I even tried using Google and Gambling.com's
search feature and the Wayback Machine to try and find the original
article, but still, no luck. All that seems to be left of this healthy
burger study is this table right here. Helpfully screen-grabbed by CBS 8 San Diego
and Chris 6 News in Corpus Christi, Texas. So, we've got ourselves a questionable source creating a study that's largely been
wiped from the face of the internet. Already, it's not looking too great there, Bob. And things don't get better once you start
poking at the actual design of the survey. Basically, the way it worked was by analyzing each
cheeseburger across four different categories: sugar content, fat content,
amount of salt, and calorie count. Each burger was given a grade from 0 to 10 for
each category, with 10 being the healthiest. At which point, they averaged the scores
across categories to find one overall number. And while that certainly seems like a pretty
intuitive, easy-to-understand measuring system, is that truly the best way to
evaluate a cheeseburger's healthiness? Should calories and sodium be weighted the same? Are all fats equally bad for your heart? The answer, in short, is no. When rating something for healthiness,
there's a lot of nuance to all those numbers. More fat, for instance. Honestly, it depends on the types
of fat that you're rating there. Certain fats are far worse than
others for your heart health. Just lumping them all into one category
isn't enough to tell relative healthiness. But even worse, just look at the burgers
that they're choosing to compare. Is it really fair to compare a Five
Guys cheeseburger with two patties to this thin slice of nothing that
you're getting from McDonald's? Sure, on the menu, they both
share the name cheeseburger, but they're fundamentally different sandwiches. Of course the burger with double the patties is gonna have the higher fat and
caloric content than anyone else. And that is absolutely
reflected in the scores here, based on the zeros that Five Guys got,
both in terms of fat content and calories. And while, yes, Gambling.com
did try to normalize for this by taking measurements like sodium per gram, a burger with extra beef patties
just fundamentally weighs more, which is gonna throw off the
proportions of this burger relative to every other contestant out there. If they truly wanted to get themselves
a closer-to-fair comparison here, they should have looked at a
Five Guys little cheeseburger, which has one patty to match
the rest of the competition. It's also not reflective of how
people actually consume the product. I don't know about you, but
when I go through a drive-thru, I don't ask for a specific amount
of grams of a certain burger, I ask for the entire burger to eat. So while a burger may seem healthier
when you look at it by gram, when you look at the serving
size, meaning the whole burger, it's telling you a completely different story. Whataburger may have scored
well in sodium per gram, but when you look at just how much a person
would normally eat in the whole burger, things aren't looking that great for the
quote-unquote winner of this competition. And yes, I'm using massive air quotes here. Why would you care if per gram Whataburger
is healthier than the rest of the competition if it's actually the least healthy when
you're planning on eating the entire burger? In short, if you want something done
right, you gotta do it yourself. If we really want to get a full picture of which burgers will or will not
clog my arteries the fastest, we're gonna need to do our
own deep dive into the data. And that's exactly what we did. In order for us to do this burger
battle royale with cheese right, we first need to figure out what burgers
are gonna get the food theory treatment. For the sake of comparison, we actually went with the same 11 restaurants
that gambling.com looked at. Though I gotta admit, buying a burger from a
place called Del Taco, it felt objectively wrong. On the list, you've got your big
national chains that you'd expect to see, Mickey D's, Wendy's, Five
Guys, Carl's Jr.'s / Hardee's, as well as both the Burger
King and the Dairy Queen. We also have those regional favorites in there,
like Whataburger, In-N-Out, Culver's, and Rally's, or Checkers for all us East Coasters. And lastly, there's Del Taco, for some reason. Maybe just because they wanted an 11th contestant, or maybe because they wanted representation for the one restaurant chain brave
enough to offer tacos for 50 cents. Or are we the brave ones eating the 50 cent tacos? Huh, I don't know which way that one swings. Anyway, now that we got
our locations squared away, we need to decide what item
from the menu we're gonna grab. Obviously, we're gonna want
to grab a cheeseburger, but as I mentioned earlier, what each restaurant calls a cheeseburger
varies quite a lot from place to place. To make things as fair as possible, we
decided to go with the most substantial single patty cheeseburger at any given franchise. Think of it as the equivalent of the
McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. Our next big question was, what
do we put on that cheeseburger? We decided to go with whatever
the default was for that burger. For example, if you order an In-N-Out
cheeseburger and don't ask for anything else, you'd expect to get a beef
patty, two slices of cheese, lettuce, tomato, onions, and
that signature In-N-Out spread. But if you order the Quarter Pounder
with cheese from Ronald McDonald, you're gonna get yourself two slices of cheese,
onions, pickles, mustard, and a dollop of ketchup. Obviously, they're gonna be slightly different. So we're comparing these burgers as is, because
that's the way they're intended to be eaten. Of course, you could always customize your
cheeseburger to get it as healthy as possible, but then again, who's going to Dairy
Queen to play it safe with their food? To be fair, who's going to Dairy
Queen for the burgers at all? Must be the same mad lads
who are going to Del Taco. So, there you have it, we have
ourselves the cheesy competitors, but how are we gonna know
which one's the healthiest? Well, by comparing the nutrition facts, of course. That big ol' beautiful box with all
the numbers and percentages that are supposed to give consumers the tools
they need to make better life choices. But in reality, they're just making
me come to terms with the fact that in one spoonful, I ate ten servings of ice cream. With the exception of bottled water, every piece of packaged food in America is
required to sport one of these bad boys. And while they're obviously more
associated with packaged food, since May of 2018, they're actually required
for all restaurants with over 20 locations. While they may not appear in your big Mac box, they are required by law
to be available on request. So, next time you're cruising through every
drive-thru in America or raiding the secret menus, feel free to ask for one and see if they have it. And as much as I'd love to spend
the next 25 minutes going through all the intricacies and history
of the Nutrition Facts label, we've got ourselves some burgers to judge. So, let's just do ourselves a
Nutrition Facts informational speedrun. And... start the clock. Serving size. How much of this food a normal person
is meant to eat in one sitting. But honestly, who's gonna limit
themselves to 15 Lay's chips at a time? Calories. Self-explanatory, we need calories to power
up our bodies, but too much is no bueno. Percent daily value. How much of a nutrient you're expected to
have over a normal 2,000-calorie-per-day diet. Less than 5%, that's low. Over 20%, that's high. Fats. Too much fat is bad for you, but
some are gonna be worse than others. Saturated and trans fats, they're the bad kinds and have to be specifically
marked on the Nutrition Label. In fact, trans fats are so bad that the U.S.
banned artificially adding them to the food, and it's basically not recommended
to be in your diet at all. If you want more info on that one,
go watch the Macadamia Nut episode. Sodium. Cholesterol. Too much of them leads to heart disease. Fiber. That's gonna help you poop. Other types of carbohydrates, especially
sugars, those are gonna be best in moderation. And lastly, protein is needed
to make you feel swole. TLDR, fiber and protein good. Everything else bad in high
amounts, but especially trans fats. And time! Whew, how'd I do? It was alright. So, after gathering the data and
doing some careful calculations, we've found that the healthiest
fast-food cheeseburger in America is... Rally's! Yep, their All-American Cheeseburger was
far and away the winner of this competition. Of all 11 burgers that we looked at, it
had the fewest calories, at 330 per burger. Rally's tied for least fat overall, including the least amount of saturated
fat and absolutely zero trans fat, which is just great to see. Cholesterol, just 40 milligrams. And carbs, just 31 grams. I mean, they're not exactly what
I would call healthy numbers, but those still smoke the cheesy competition. One thing to note, though, it did
have the least fiber and protein, so you might not like how
it comes out the other end. Now, you may be looking at the
All-American Cheeseburger and saying, eh, I feel like I could eat
two of those no problem. Well, that would actually be a healthier option
than most of the other options on the list. We'll get to that in a minute. Broadly speaking, there was a clear divide between the really, really bad ones and the
quote-unquote healthy cheeseburgers. And I use that term healthy generously. In terms of better for you, we
have Rally's, Del Taco, shockingly, Culver's, Dairy Queen, and every
Californian's pride and joy, In-N-Out. In-N-Out decided to take the role of the
jack-of-all-trades in this competition. While it wasn't the healthiest option in
any of the categories that we looked at, it did score near the top in almost
every single metric that we measured. Fourth fewest calories, tied for
third in least saturated fat, and only losing to Rally's when it came
to the least amount of cholesterol. So, as much as it pains me to say it, it looks
like gambling.com did kinda get something right. Go ahead, all you Los Angelinos, continue
bragging about your best-in-class burger. I guess with all that marketing about how your
ingredients are fresh and locally sourced, the burger isn't just good,
it's also good for you. But please, please, can you do
something about those damn fries? Now, one name you'll notice is absent from our
list of good burgers is actually Whataburger. The supposed healthiest burger,
according to gambling.com, is actually among the worst in our sample. How'd that happen? Well, look at the categories. It was the most caloric at 680 calories, putting it higher in calories than
both the Big Mac and the Whopper. And remember, this is just a cheeseburger. Also, don't forget about the
62 grams of carbohydrates and the insanely high 1,650 milligrams of sodium. To put that in perspective, that is the
equivalent of four large McDonald's fries. I mean, the food is delicious, don't get me wrong,
a mountain of salt is gonna do that for you, but Whataburger, more like,
what an unhealthy burger. Tip your waitress, friends. Rounding out our bad tier fast foods
is Wendy's, Carl's Jr., Five Guys, and McDonald's, and kind of the middle ground. That said, based on our numbers, the absolute worst fast food cheeseburger
to put in your mouth is Burger King. It was dead last in the gambling.com survey,
and it's also dead last in our calculations. But honestly, the numbers here don't lie. While other burgers may have had themselves a
bit more fat here or a bit more calories there, Burger King's single quarter
pound king with cheese will clog your arteries just by looking at it. This thing has a massive
1.8 milligrams of trans fat, nearly double that of anyone
else in the competition. In fact, looking across BK's entire menu, it seems like they don't really care how
much trans fat they're putting in your food, which is an interesting stance to take. The quarter pound king was also
the only burger in our study that had over a hundred milligrams of cholesterol. It also also came in dead last for
sodium, considering it has a whopping... See what I did there? A whopping 1,800 milligrams of the stuff. 82% more than what you're getting at in In-N-Out. So, it was dead last in trans
fat, cholesterol, and sodium. When it comes to heart health, that
might just be the trifecta of fail, which just goes to show, sometimes being
the king ain't all it's cracked up to be. Finally, after combing through all the data, I wanted to do one last thing to make sure
I wasn't being unfair with the research. To be extra safe, I decided to even the
playing field by reordering all the burgers, but this time keeping the toppings and
condiments consistent across the board. I ordered all the burgers with one patty, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onions,
pickles, ketchup, and mustard. A pretty standard cheeseburger that
you might order from a restaurant. So, did the results change? Yeah, a little bit. The healthy cheeseburgers came out looking
better, and the unhealthy ones just got worse. Specifically, Whataburger. With the toppings now standardized, Whataburger fell to dead last in almost
every single category that we looked at. Hey, Burger King, looks like someone
might be vying for your throne. You know what they say,
everything is bigger in Texas. Including your heart, if you
eat a lot of Whataburger. So, what is the takeaway
from this takeout episode? Number one, if you're kidnapped and forced to eat one fast food cheeseburger
for the rest of your life, the best choice is clearly Rally's. But if you're looking for a burger
that'll fill up your belly with food, and not your heart with plaque, then In-N-Out's a really solid second choice. While In-N-Out fans might be a bit extreme for
their animalistic love of the animal style, there are a lot of worse
cheeseburgers out there for your body. Second biggest takeaway,
stay away from Burger King. The only thing scarier than their mascot
are the nutritional facts for their burgers. And finally, the biggest lesson of them all,
don't take health advice from gambling sites. Leave that one to the semi-professional
food YouTube channels. But hey, that's just a theory. A food theory. Bon appétit. By the way, while we're
here dunking on Burger King, if you wanna see the absolute train wreck
that was their Twitch marketing campaign, that video's on the left. Hoo boy, that is peak cringe. Or if you wanna understand why you should
never order a medium soda from a Burger King, that video's on the right. As always, my friends, I'll see you next week.
