The Egg McMuffin Is Basically Diet Food
The Egg McMuffin Is Basically Diet Food
While some may argue that you’d actually be a much healthier person if you skipped breakfast entirely, breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. And for those who understand this, but don’t have time to make a healthy breakfast at home, fattening fast food is often the only option.
But as the The Kitchn wisely points out, the Egg McMuffin is surprisingly not that horrible for you! The classic breakfast sandwich (which is now available all-day long) consists of an English muffin, one egg, one small circle of Canadian bacon, American cheese, and butter. It comes in at a meager 290 calories. Pretty benign stuff.
Considering consuming 350 to 500 calories at breakfast is a standard recommendation, this all sounds great! But where those calories come from is of equal importance, so they also asked registered dietitian Lisa D. Harkins what she thinks. “An Egg McMuffin is not the worst thing you can have,” she explains. “It’s much better than no breakfast, a doughnut, or a fatty, empty-calorie Dunkin’ Donuts coffee drink.” But she also goes on to note that at “750 milligrams per pop, you’re getting somewhere between half and a third of your sodium content for the day, based on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation of 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams.” Which means the Egg McMuffin is a perfectly reasonable breakfast… so long as you don’t have high blood pressure.
Of course, none of this applies to the 470-calorie sausage McMuffin with egg. Proceed there with caution. And maybe skip the hash brown.
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