Introduction
McDonald’s is committed to providing nutrition information to enable you to make informed choices. Our Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) Counter can help you make the best choices for you and your family.
Many of you have told us that it’s only really useful to know how many calories or how much protein and other nutrients are in your food, if you have a good idea of how much you are supposed to eat every day. We think the link to the Guideline Daily Amount Counter on this website can help.
What are Guideline Daily Amounts?
Guideline Daily Amounts, or GDAs, are guidelines for the approximate amount of calories and nutrients that we all need for a balanced diet. These include:
- Fat
- Protein
- Carbohydrates
- Salt.
Our GDA Counter lets you know what percentage of your guideline daily amount, of each key nutrient, is in our main menu items and their calorie content.
Our GDA counter is based on a woman aged between 20 – 30 years old who has a low physical activity level.
For children, the GDA counter is based on a young girl aged 4-7 who has a normal physical activity level (at least 1 hour of physical activity every day).
GDAs are also on the packaging of many of our foods
Labels on food can sometimes be confusing. So we have worked with a European Nutritionist Steering Group* to develop new easy-to-read GDA charts that you will now find on much of our packaging.
The icons and bar charts represent the key nutrients and let you see at a glance the percentage of your GDA in your menu items.
We hope this new information will help you make more informed choices about what you eat so you can enjoy all your McDonald’s favourites as part of a balanced diet.
Nutritionist Steering Group*
McDonald’s takes the subject of health and well-being extremely seriously, so when we established the European Nutrition Task Force (ENTF) in 2002, we asked a Nutritionist Steering Group to advise us.
The Nutritionist Steering Group is comprised of three external food specialists from the UK, Germany and France, who meet and advise on menu choice, consumer information and physical activity.
We created ENTF two years before the World Health Organisation published its landmark Global Strategy on diet, physical activity and health, with the aim of responding to customers’ changing tastes and lifestyles.