Forget the sandwich generation, we are the biscuit generation.

McDonalds makes a great little breakfast snack and they serve millions and millions of them every day. It’s called a Sausage Biscuit. You may have had one or two of them.. or possibly a few thousand… in your lifetime if you enjoy it.   It’s got to be a high profit item because my local McDonalds will have sales where they sell it for a dollar which is the same price as the plain biscuit without any sausage in it.

Well standing in line at McDonalds I noticed the calorie count. 430 calories. I happen to know that the calorie count for a plain biscuit at McDonalds is 260 calories.. Which means that little piece of sausage in between the folds of that biscuit is approximately 170 calories, or 1/12^th of an average person’s daily healthy calorie allowance. The biscuit by itself is approximately a quarter of the daily healthy caloric intake. We aren’t talking about a large scale 8 course breakfast meal here, we are discussing a single McDonalds sausage biscuit.. and we aren’t even including a small hash browns (150 calories) or orange juice (140 calories) which when added would bring the total meal to 720 calories or over 1/3^rd the daily allowance.

How does this relate to the Professional Individual Contributor? Well I’ve discussed health care in the past.. and putting different types of food into your body over time definitely impacts your longer term healthcare needs.   It strikes me as obscene (and no I’m not mad at McDonalds or think they need to change their menu or be socially aware) that a little convenient and inexpensive breakfast snack for a busy PIC running to work, picking up the kids, or doing any one of a thousand other tasks in their daily routine is so heavy in terms of its calorie count. Let’s be honest here, most people could easily eat two of them in a single sitting and then be hungry a couple of hours later, you know when you walk into the break room and there is a big box of peanut brittle sitting on the table, or the ever present vendor supplied box of doughnuts.

McDonalds sausage biscuits and similar fast foods are the equivalent of a pipe leak.. a couple of drops of water out of a pipe is no big deal, but over time, wood rots, mold grows, and huge repair bills have to be paid, but water pipes, like McDonalds biscuits are part of our daily routine.. and we have to be aware of both. It’s simply another landmine we have to avoid daily, and apparently we aren’t doing a very good job of it.