Dairy Queen Exposed

Dairy Queen would like to have you believe that when you walk into their old-fashioned style restaurants, you're taking a step back in time; that you're about to eat something hearty and nourishing, like your grandmother used to make. Great pains are taken to create an old-timey atmosphere; country music or "oldies" are often played in the lobby. The commercials are almost deliberately cheesy; they want to seem local.

What Dairy Queen wouldn't have you know is that they are one of the few fast food chains that have not given up the practice of cooking with trans fats. If you don't know what a trans fat is, you should. Let me explain: trans fats are a result of the treatment with hydrogen (hydrogenation) of polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fats to make them behave more like saturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats are like olive oil, palm oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil; they stay liquid at room temperature. Saturated fats are like butter; at room temperature, they are solids. "Saturated" and "-unsaturated" refer to the hydrogen bonds in the fat molecule. Hydrogenation forces extra hydrogen into the molecule, making unsaturated fats behave more like saturated fats at room temperature.

This is what gives many pastries their light and flaky texture. It wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that trans fats are completely new to the human body. (Actually, they occur in small quantities in the meat and dairy of ruminant animals, but primarily in the "cis" form, which the human body can digest.) These artificial fats are not readily used as fats in the body; the body doesn't know what to do with them. This is why they contribute to heart disease; they accumulate and cause plaque buildup.

So what at Dairy Queen contains trans fats? That "old-fashioned" peppered country gravy, for starters. A 99g serving (a small cup that you'll get with your chicken or steak basket) contains at least half a gram of trans fats. If you get extra gravy, it's double the trans fat, of course.

Did you let them toast your hamburger buns? Add another half a gram of trans fats. When your buns are toasted, they are rolled through a little machine that is lubricated with what is called on the Dairy Queen website "buttery flavor oil".

Did you order breakfast? If you got eggs, they were cooked in vegetable shortening, which contains a whopping two grams of trans fat per tablespoon. The bacon is also cooked in the same oil. So how much trans fat did you get at breakfast? Here's a hint: the ladle used to pour melted shortening onto the grill in order to cook your food is more than a few tablespoons.

I hope you didn't ask for grilled onions on your burger. They're cooked in the same vegetable shortening.

Maybe you'll get a chicken salad, and try to be "good". Maybe you'll even use the grilled patty, because it's healthier for you. Actually, that grilled patty is cooked on the same grill as the bacon, the grilled onions, the eggs, and the burgers. The grilled chicken patty will also contain small amounts of trans fats, or large amounts of it starts sticking to the grill and needs to be lubricated. The lubricant of choice is always shortening. The burgers, of course, are, also, a source of trans fat, though, paradoxically, the frying-off of fat from the meat would also involve some degree of preventing much new trans fat from entering the meat. If you have to eat something from Dairy Queen, just get a burger.

But you may want to check to see if the cheese you've asked for is what you think it is. There is, believe it or not, such a thing as imitation cheese. Slices contain sometimes two grams of trans fat per slice, and quarter-cups of the stuff also two grams.

After all that eating, it's time for dessert. What will you get? Perhaps you'll indulge in a dipped cone. Maybe you'll make it a large. Maybe you'll have it double-dipped. Remember what I said about the hydrogenation process making unsaturated oils solid at room temperature? That's what makes the chocolate harden over the ice cream. The chocolate is kept warm to keep it melted; when it touches the ice cream, it rapidly cools off, hardening around it, and giving you the delightful treat with a gram or two of trans fats per cone.

"Well," you say, "I'll just get a different dessert." I hope you don't get a waffle cone or waffle bowl sundae, especially not a dipped waffle bowl sundae. The same thing used to coat the waffle bowl in chocolate is used to dip the cones, so it also contains trans fats. But even if you go for the plain waffle bowl, you're still ingesting trans fats. The waffle iron non-stick cooking spray is partially-hydrogenated as well, making it, too, a source of trans fats. And the partially-hydrogenated oil is the main ingredient. For legal reasons, companies are allowed to say that a product contains no trans fats if it contains less than half a gram of them; for that reason, in part, the "serving size" of the non-stick cooking spray is a quarter of a gram, or a half-second spray. Do you really think that anyone uses only a half-second spray to coat the waffle iron? Think again. Tack on another half-gram (at least) for any waffle product.

What else could there be hazardous about Dairy Queen food? In the breading of every fried product (chicken fingers, steak fingers, the crispy chicken patties) is a chemical called sodium aluminum phosphate. The thing is, the body doesn't know what to do with aluminum. It has no biological role whatsoever. Aluminum intake has been associated with a wide range of neurochemical illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder, ADD, ADHD, and more.

One should also be aware that many of the ice machines in use by Dairy Queens (and other fast food restaurants, of course) have mold problems. You may want to skip the ice.

Think the tea tastes a little off? It could be old, since typically tea is made in the morning, or it could be that someone didn't clean it out properly. Bleach is very good at removing stains from inside of the tea containers... but it's fairly difficult to rinse out. You've gotten bleach on your fingers before; it takes a fair bit of working with soap and water to get the bleach smell to come off, and that's because there's still a little bit of bleach there. Bleach isn't really something that you want in your body, but the other detergents used to clean dishes aren't all that great either.

Do you know why high-quality vegetable oils are frequently stored in dark bottles? It's because vegetable oils, like all polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, is highly susceptible to oxidation. Every time you order something fried, you can be assured that the oil isn't fresh. It has, in all likelihood, been there since that morning. That is: it's been left out in the open, in the heat, to oxidize. What does oxidation mean for you? It means that not only have the oils probably gone rancid (which is a complaint more frequently heard than you might think, about rancid-tasting fried foods), but the beneficial qualities of vegetable oils are diminished, and, in consuming them, you're introducing a load of free radicals into your body (highly reactive oxygen which causes DNA damage).

I invite you to reconsider your choice in going out to eat. In these trying economic times, the last thing you need is to spend eight dollars and forty-three cents to poison yourself: the price of a four piece chicken basket combo with a medium drink a medium fry, after tax, in Texas. Here's to your health, America.