Eat Healthy. Stay Healthy
You are what you eat. The most important consideration for all of us is good health. Good health is more than simply absence of illness. To stay healthy, our body needs a variety of foods in the right proportion.

Here are 3 golden rules that will help you to choose the right kind of food:

1. Balance - have the right mix of nutrients in your daily diet. Don’t compromise one for the other.
2. Moderation – eat neither too much nor too little of any one nutrient.
3. Variety – include a range of food types in your meals.

Food as Fuel
Similar to other machines, your body as a machine also requires fuel. Fuel is energy. Its fuel is food. Energy is measured in calories. Hence our body needs calories in order to function. Any food that we eat is most often a combination of different nutrients rather than only just one.

• 1 gram of protein contains 4 calories of energy
• 1 gram of any carbohydrate contains 4 calories of energy
• 1 gram of fat contains almost 9 calories of energy

Each individual requires a certain amount of calories [body fuel] to function as per the individual’s weight, height and activity level. E.g. an athlete who is 6 ft. tall and weighs 70 kgs requires more calories than another person of the same weight and height but who has a desk job. Similarly, growing children will need more calories than an adult, e.g. a 16-year-old girl who weighs around 50 kgs requires 2060 calories, while a female adult of the same weight leading a sedentary lifestyle requires only 1875 calories. [Click here for the RDA for Indians]

As a thumb rule, each person needs 33 calories per kg of body weight per day. Remember, of the total daily calories needed by each person, 10-15% should be obtained from proteins, less than 30% from fats and the balance from carbohydrates.

If you end up consuming more calories [fuel/energy] than what your body needs or consumes, it gets converted into body fat to be utilised at a later point in time when your body needs it, e.g. while recovering from an illness or accident, or when you are fasting.

Balanced Diet
A balanced diet is essential to maintaining good health. Your diet should be a combination of macronutrients [nutrients which give us energy in the form of calories] like proteins, carbohydrates and fats, and micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. Don’t forget, to include water and fibres, which are also important nutrients that our bodies need!

Enjoying a meal at McDonald's means enjoying a variety of items from the basic food groups: breads, fruits, vegetables, chicken [meat] and fish.

Leafy vegetables: Like our iceberg lettuce, are high in fibre, minerals and vitamins.

Fruits: They are full of the wholesome goodness of vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Breads: These high carbohydrate foods are packed with energy and fuel the body.

Milk & Cheese: Big source of calcium that is needed for stronger bones. You can enjoy the goodness of fresh milk in all our milk products.


Chicken & Fish: Both of these are high in protein.

Oils: We use 100% vegetable oil in all our preparations at our restaurants as well as our suppliers’ plants. Vegetable oil contains essential fatty acids [EFA] necessary for growth, and unsaturated fats and does not contain cholesterol.

For example, the patty in our McVeggie™ is made up of peas, carrots, beans, red capsicum, potatoes, onions and rice. You can find a salad mix of iceberg lettuce, carrot, red cabbage and celery in our Wraps. We use only high quality boned breast and leg chicken meat and our fish is 100% pure whole white fillets, which is found around the southwest coast of India.

Our products are sourced from the highest quality ingredients, prepared hygienically and treated to regular quality checks such as the McDonald’s Quality Inspection Programme (QIP). At McDonald’s, we try to conserve their nutritive values as much as possible so that you are served a meal that is simply great to eat.

Get Active!
Making the right food choices is just one part of leading a balanced lifestyle. The other, equally important bit is including some kind of physical activity. A physically fit person is like a finely tuned car engine.

Here are some tips that can help you achieve your objective of a balanced and healthy lifestyle:

• Use the stairs, not the lift.
• Commit to walking 10 minutes in the morning & 20 minutes in the night.
• Park your car some distance away from your destination and get that little exercise.
• Take up yoga.
• Before you even get out of bed in the morning, do stomach crunches while lying flat on your mattress. Begin with 10 and work your way up gradually.
• Group activity - encourage friends and family to join you and plan one special physical activity event, like walking or jogging or bicycling, with a group each week.