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 