I am blinking very hard and this image is still staring me in the face. It won’t go away!
Have I been beamed over to the USA?
No, I am very much in the UK, sat on the sofa at home but can’t believe what I am seeing.
This is not just any burger. It is a Hungry Horse extra special burger, recently introduced onto their menu.
It is a Double Donut Burger.
Yes those are donuts, not sesame seed buns!
For £8.99 you get two beef burgers topped with melted cheese, 4 smoked streaky bacon rashers and BBQ sauce served in two grilled, glazed ring donuts.
How can this ever be right?
So I contacted Hungry Horse and asked for the nutritional information for this burger.
Surprisingly I actually got a reply! Wait for it………………………………
This burger contains 1966 Calories!
The nutritional information is now available on their website; are you ready for this……………
This burger contains
- 125g fat (178% over the Guideline Daily Amount: GDA!)
- 53g saturated fat (the type of fat that clogs up our arteries and contributes to heart disease) – that’s 267% of our GDA!
- 8.20g of salt (or 137% of the 6g we should be limited to)
- 53g sugar – over double our daily requirement
And this is without their twister fries (at 637 Calories and 37g of fat per portion). Oh and if you ever had room for a dessert, choosing the cookie dough cheesecake will add another 900 Calories 46g fat, 23g of saturated fat and 41g sugar. Yikes that’s over 3,500 Calories in total!!
Now I get the whole savoury-sweet combo thing; I have a particular liking for bacon with maple syrup but I get the feeling the Hungry Horse is just trying to be quirky for the sake of it. To me, this is simply ludicrous and irresponsible. I am no killjoy (honest!) but why is this sort of food available?
This burger (and much of their menu) is literally a heart attack on a plate. There is no sense of portion control and food is laden with harmful fat, salt and sugar. Basically a recipe for weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancers. Hungry Horse kindly put all the GDA for men, women and children on their nutritional information but then what? The responsibility is then ours to find this information in the first place (good luck with that!), interpret it and then decide if we should eat it (whilst being bribed with vouchers for cheap side dishes, free desserts and gold card points). Why can’t they include on the menu what the customer would need to do to burn all those Calories off? In the case of this DDB, around 3hrs of continuous running should just about do it. I wonder how many people would still opt for this item knowing this? Or perhaps they could colour code their menu using the traffic light system we have for food labels? Hungry Horse obviously have no conscience and no doubt both their wallet and the size of their customers will be getting fatter by the week! Please can we have more food outlets signing up to the Government’s Responsibility Deal?
The Grub Hub 
I read your comments on the BBC news site and thought I’d logged in to the Daily Mash by mistake. I cannot believe anyone could get SO angry from a novelty food item from a chain called Hungry Horse. I could go into a McDonald’s tomorrow and buy a couple of burgers and a couple of donuts….I KNOW that this meal isn’t good for me if I ate it every day, I KNOW that I’d have to seriously hit the running track to burn it off in one go. But you know what? I’d enjoy it and I probably wouldn’t have a heart attack (I might get indigestion which some say FEELS like a heart attack). You really need to get over yourself, stop grandiosing for a bit of publicity, and go get yourself some bacon with maple syrup. Lots of Love.
LikeLike
I love what I do. I enjoy writing and these are my opinions. I am not angry, just passionate and yes, love a burger too.
LikeLike
First, stop using nonsensical hyperbole as an attention grabber. It is not “literally a heart attack on a plate.” That particular phrase is, by definition, figurative language. I expect more from a person in a role of education. Secondly, nobody eats something like this accidentally because they haven’t been provided with the relevant nutritional information. This burger exists as a novelty food item on the extreme margins of the nutritional distribution and everybody is aware of that. Using this as an argument for widespread food labeling is statistically nonsensical; it has virtually no effect on widespread public health. Third, people voluntarily make both healthy and unhealthy decisions everyday. To advocate legislating people into health is not only the patronizing projection of our own crippling self-doubt onto the public, but also ignores the amazing variability of human bodies. There is no cure-all or “optimal” food items; those are fallacies. Things like nutritional awareness take time, not mandates and bans.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks very much for your comments. I am really pleased to see and hear so much discussion on this It means I must have done something right!
LikeLike
You know, the libertarian in me says that there is nothing wrong in what the Hungry Horse is doing. People have to take responsibility for their own intake, must find out for themselves how many calories things contain. Only then will we have a population that accepts that it is responsible for its own health, for its own well-beingand for the fact that it’s choices determine its lifestyle.
That said, if people want to abuse their bodies to that extent then they should be prepared to have to fix themselves up if they get Type II diabetes or any other obesity-related condition.
I don’t think it’s any good mollycoddling people, thinking for them and removing choice from them. How, in the end, will children grow up? Or are we all to be treatedas eternal children by the ‘nanny knows best’ state?
LikeLike
Thanks for your comments. I agree with you to a certain extent but it is also my responsibility as a health professional to help guide and support the public. I accept people should have freedom of choice but it needs to be informed choice. This is why improvements are made and will continue to be made concerning food labels and we don’t complain about these in the same way.
But this is also not normal food being offered. It is extreme in my eyes and no I am not assuming this food will be eaten regularly. But when our diet is far from perfect the Government has a responsibility to intervene. Why can’t eateries such as this tone down their menus; there are other ways of creating a shock factor and drawing in . Other food providers have pledged to reduce the salt, sugar and fat content in their foods (JD Weatherspoons, Subway etc) by joining Public Health’s responsibility deal. If no one takes responsibility for public health (including parents, schools, TV and other media) our future looks bleak. Opting out is not really an option when you look at our current health stats.
LikeLike