Comments on: KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar "Mega Jug"

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just a little quibble: Iâ€™m not sure about those figures. Assuming that â€˜spoonfulâ€™ means â€˜teaspoonfulâ€™, 56 spoonfuls would be 56Ã—5 g or 280 g, or more than half a pound in American. At about 4 kCal per gram of carbohydrate, that would be 1120 kCal rather than 800. Either way, itâ€™s roughly half a dayâ€™s calories, in a drink with no other nutritional benefits. Never mind the irony of fighting Type I diabetes by promoting Type II diabetesâ€”this is just something no one should ever drink.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not to be a spoil sport here, but if they link the donation to grilled chicken, they won’t donate nearly as much dough.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cory, when this was posted to FP a month ago, someone pointed out that the signs advertising the program were fakes – ala Cockeyed.com – that a prankster had placed and photographed.

KFC says they’ve never had a program like this.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

PS if you read this and think about cooking your own chicken cordon bleu, skip the chicken and make the better choice of veal.

Quit telling me what to eat you foodie health nazi.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The double down is too salty. If it weren’t so salty, it would be the tastiest, healthiest thing available on the local fast food market here in Right Coast USA.

But it tastes like a damn salt block. So close to goodness… yet such a fail.

By: squeeziecat

squeeziecat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Four of the top-10 high calorie foods served at fast food outlets are drinks: http://www.acaloriecounter.com/fast-food-calories.php

How it is possible for White Castle to create a milkshake with 1680 calories – or 85% of my daily caloric needs – is simply beyond me.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Fill it with unsweet iced tea and you can refill it two or three times with impunity.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Part of me wishes the guy was canny enough to do this to get huge publicity for the cause.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You drink bottled cracksweat and you’re contemptuous of other people’s ingestion practices?

By: kramski

kramski — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think that’s a PR fail at all. It’s actually kind of brilliant.
It’s part ironic acknowledgement and part compensation, like those CO2 compensation offers when flying: doing a bad thing and then doing something to make you feel like you are working on the problem without actually having to work on it at all.
It’s an excuse for people to indulge and if you didn’t want to indulge you wouldn’t be tempted to buy that drink at all, so they seem to be quite aware of whom they are targeting

By: travtastic

travtastic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

These chain food shacks may not have a gun to your head, but good luck finding anywhere else to eat if you’re short on time, or lost, or impatient. Also, good luck ripping two decades of upbringing out of your head, to disassociate this crap with food, mentally.

inb4 everyone tells me about the innumerable mom & pop hummus pop-up restaurants we could all be visiting instead.

By: Rindan

Rindan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

How long will we as a society allow these corporations to prey on our community, our families?

As long as we let them? If you are dumb enough to hand over your money, accept the food they give you, and then eat it… I am thinking that maybe you share a non-trivial portion of the blame. I know, the advertising forced you at gun point, but maybe you could try using your ninja skills to run away.

There is a lot of nasty corrupt abuses of power, and a lot of it is at the behest of corporations that alter and manipulate laws to make people do stuff literally at gun point. KFC offering to give you heart attack on the cheap isn’t one of them. That is just people being stupid.

By: grimc

grimc — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not a fake. A spokesman for JDRF responded to the blogger who broke the story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110615/us_yblog_thelookout/utah-kfc-asks-customers-to-drink-soda-to-support-diabetes-research

KFC corporate might not have known anything about it because it was one franchise in Utah doing it.

By: sockdoll

sockdoll — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The biggest problem I see with it is the delivery system. BIG drinks call for BIG straws – since common sense refutes the practicality of a carbonated enema.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I love giant drink cups at restaurants. then again i fill them with beverages that have zero calories :)

By: Bendin

Bendin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ha ha too much sugar and too much sugar is not good:)

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kinkpedia says that it’s hard to hold a carbonate enema, and they make you fart. Great band name, though.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Profit margin on healty food is at best 20-30%
Profit margin on soft drinks is in the 200-500%

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s always Pepsi Dry. It’s Pepsi, but with half the sugar -as well as half the sweetness- of the regular stuff. I don’t actually really like soda, so I can’t tell you how it tastes, but apparently it’s a little on the bitter side. The label itself boasts that it’s the ç”˜ããªã„ã‚³ãƒ¼ãƒ©, or “nonsweet cola.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Easy answer: Fast food places make the largest profit margin on the soft drinks. This is why when an order is messed up, protocol is to offer a free drink as compensation first.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Uhmmm, you DO have the option of asking them for just seltzer… how likely that is? Not very… i had to walk the poor checkout counterperson through it (proving how little requested it must be). but the option DOES exist.

By: travtastic

travtastic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Do you live in some kind of desert wasteland?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sweet!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That policy’s is in good company. Von’s/Pavilion’s supermarket chain in LA had a huge promotion whereby the swipe reader would ask if you wanted to donate to the particular cancer research fund going on, (we called it the “cancer of the week” special) AND if the cashier didn’t ALSO hound you for a donation, then you got a free 2-liter bottle of any soda you wanted. (couldn’t be seltzer) Of course, the sodas are all sweetened with HFCS; any cancer’s clear favorite nutrient.
This is all ultimately a corporation’s method of getting some easy moral cover, belying a greater collective disconnect about their own complicity. If they truly cared, they would be donating directly instead of eliciting donations from their customers, meanwhile checking their own stocks for causes/catalysts of the epidemics.

By: Crashproof

Crashproof — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The last American Diabetes Association fundraising walk I went to announced that their next event was to be a pancake breakfast at IHOP.

I have Type II, and I do like pancakes, but WTF?

By: smaier69

smaier69 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Me either.

Personally I think it was more media-fueled dipshittery than anything else.

Yes, it’s loaded with fat and it’s a counterfeit sandwich (what, no bread?!? BUUURN THE WITCH!!!). However, fat is a better source of energy than carbs (bread) in that they are more difficult to convert to energy and thus are converted over a longer period of time (similar simple vs. complex sugars with complex being better as they are available for longer before being converted to body fat). This is why the Atkins diet worked for those trying to lose weight. Don’t get me wrong… a strict Atkins diet is TERRIBLE for you in the long run, but as a basic choice of what to eliminate from your diet, carbs are by and large the greater or the two evils. Plus, there’s a fair amount of protien in a double down.

Of course, due to the amount of fat in one, it shouldn’t be a regular source of nutrition, but seriously, there are much more common foods out there that are worse for you and get much less flak from the media (re: chili cheese fries, ice cream sundaes, etc).

By: Razors

Razors — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe they thought that creating more diabetics would help through having more people to research.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

One main reason they tie it to a drink is that it cost them less, and makes them more to sell a drink than almost any food. and almost everyone buys some sort of drink, so it’s easier to upsize one than for a food item.

Anyway, these buckets are so big that it’s obvious it’s meant to be a family sized drink.

one last comment. I’ve always drunk a lot of liquids, it’s just the way some people are made. I’ve been tested for diabetes many times over the course of about 30 years and they said I didn’t have it. so, no, drinking a lot doesn’t mean you have diabetes, it means you MIGHT have it, SHOULD be tested, but not that you definitely have it. Just FYI

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the dose of sanity. As others have noted, you could buy a diet soda in this size, but that doesn’t let internet scolds (who are doing just as much damage to themselves, if not worse, by sitting on their asses in front of computers for hours a day without a break) recirculate a baseless meme.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“You’ll have to pry my Mega Jug from my cold, dead hands!”

“Yes. We know. That’s what we’ve been trying to explain to you.”