Do Your State’s Hospitals Serve Big Macs?
Mother Jones
Would you like fries with your hospital stay? If so, you’re in luck: Many hospitals house fast-food restaurants. Some even offer delivery to patient rooms. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) isn’t wild about this phenomenon and made this map, which shows the US hospitals with fast-food chains inside them:
Image by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
Of the 208 hospitals—most of them public—that PCRM investigated in its report, 43 had fast-food chains inside, mostly McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Chick-Fil-A. PCRM staff dietitian Cameron Wells told me that some of the fast-food joints have contracts that require them to give a certain percentage of their profits to their hospitals, “meaning the more unhealthful food the restaurant sells to patients and their families, the richer the hospital gets,” she said.
Six of the fast-food-serving facilities in the report were children’s hospitals. One of those, Children’s Hospital of Georgia, offers delivery service from McDonald’s straight to patients’ beds. “Seeing this in a children’s hospital—that’s the most vulnerable population,” Wells says. “Fast food is not going to help children get better.”
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