When McDonalds is your only choice

Yes, there are some meals you can eat at McDonalds. Willie had this experience the other day and made the same choice that I did a year ago - he ate the Chicken Caesar salad without dressing. McDonalds has three salad choices that are all pretty nutritious - if you skip the dressing and the croutons. Avoid the Crispy Chicken versions - no telling what oils were used (and reused and reused) to make it. All three salads have enough fat in them without the dressing to make them Zone! I find that cutting up the chicken into smaller pieces and eating a piece of chicken with each fork of lettuce gives you plenty of flavor without dressing. The biggest problem I had with the salad was that it was not as fresh as my homemade salad would have been. All three seem pretty equivalent to me, so order the version that sounds best to you.

Bacon Ranch Salad with Chicken - 250 calories and 30g of protein. This provides lots of A and C, plus reasonable amounts of B vitamins, iron and calcium.

Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken - 210 calories and 28g of protein. This provides lots of A and C, plus reasonable amounts of B vitamins, iron and calcium.

California Cobb Salad with Chicken - 270 calories and 33g of protein. Same amounts of A, C, etc as the Bacon Ranch Salad.

I find the RDA amounts suspicious, since they are such round numbers. But then, there is probably enough variance between actual servings that this is accurate enough.

If you just have to eat breakfast there, the least objectionable thing is the Egg McMuffin. This is not something that I would recommend every day, but it does have 17g of protein in 290 calories and provides 10% of A, 30% of calcium and 15% of iron. It claims to have no transfat. To make it a little more nutritious and less caloric, throw away one of the 1/2s of the muffin.