Nutrition
A balanced diet and an active lifestyle - that’s a recipe for a healthy life.
It’s what most of us aspire to but it’s not always easy to achieve. At McDonald’s, we believe it’s important for us to help you make informed choices about our food and your diet.
Nutritional Information
- We give you full nutritional breakdowns of all of our food on the back of the trayliners in our restaurants and certain specified nutrition information on packaging of our most popular products
- You can see a full list of ingredients for all of our products
- Our Guideline Daily Amount Counter lets you work out how much our food contributes to your daily allowance of nutrients and calories
- If you have special dietary requirements, we give you a list of Allergens in our food. We also update the McDonald's information for the Coeliac society “Gluten Free Food List” each year
- We have introduced more choice to our menu, such as salads and fruit
- At a European level we work with expert nutritionists to make sure you can enjoy McDonald’s food as part of a balanced diet
Physical Activity
In addition to a balanced diet, we recognise that physical activity is an important component of a healthy lifestyle.
At McDonald’s, we try to facilitate this in a number of ways. Where possible we provide safe play areas inside and outside our restaurants where kids can burn off some excess energy and have fun at the same time.
In addition, we are investing in a range of grassroots sports initiatives focused on young people to encourage them to get involved in sport and exercise at an early stage in life.
We try to promote physical activity in our marketing such as our sponsorship of the Olympic Games and the Euro/World Cup Football Championships. We hope that we have inspired some of our customers to discover a love of sport they never knew they had.
Marketing and Advertising
Advertising is a powerful medium and we are very aware of our responsibilities in this respect, particularly with regard to advertising to children. In addition to fully complying with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s Children’s Advertising Code, we have our own stringent set of guidelines covering how we communicate with our customers, both children and adults.
Our Menu Changes in Ireland
McDonald’s is responsive to the efforts of our customers to have a more healthy, balanced diet, especially parents and their children. To reflect this, we have made the following changes to our menus:
- Added Danone Gervais® to the Happy Meal™ in 2002
- Reduced salt in our ketchup
- Removed “super size” portions from the menu in June 2004
- Introduced Salads Plus™ in July 2004
- Reduced salt in Chicken McNuggets™ by 30 per cent in 2005
- Introduced fruit bags as an alternative to fries in the Happy Meal in 2006
- Introduced Oatso Simple® Porridge and bagels to our breakfast menu in a selection of restaurants in 2006
- Introduced raisins in the Happy Meal between 2006 - 2008
- Replaced Ribena Toothkind™ with Tropicana Go® in March 2008.
- Introduced Salads to the Eurosaver Menu in 2010.
- We have moved to Low Fat Milk in all our coffee machines in McDonald's restaurants since 2009.