Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in fast food: signatures of corn and confinement.

ABSTRACT: Americans spend >100 billion dollars on restaurant fast food each year; fast food meals comprise a disproportionate amount of both meat and calories within the U.S. diet. We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes to infer the source of feed to meat animals, the source of fat within fries, and the extent of fertilization and confinement inherent to production. We sampled food from McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's chains, purchasing >480 servings of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries within geographically distributed U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Boston, and Baltimore. From the entire sample set of beef and chicken, only 12 servings of beef had delta(13)C < -21 per thousand; for these animals only was a food source other than corn possible. We observed

SUBMITTER: Jahren AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2582047 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature