Fast Food Chain With 41 Illinois Locations Serves America’s Least Healthy Burger

We celebrated National Cheeseburger Day just yesterday, but new research shows that not all burgers are equally healthy.

PlushCare's study on The Most Unhealthy Menu Items in America's Fast Food Chains is quite an eye-opener.

They compared popular fast food items like cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, fries, and chicken burgers to the top 24 fast food chains.

Using each restaurant's nutritional chart, they compared calories, sugar, saturated fat, and sodium.

From there, PlushCare put together an "unhealthiness score" and ranked each item across all surveyed fast food restaurants.

They intended to examine burgers, fries, shakes, nuggets, and chicken sandwiches and assign values to them to better understand which similar fast food items might be the healthiest (or unhealthiest).

I didn't know what to expect while looking at their findings.

Their research found that Culver's Butterburger, a Wisconsin-based fast food joint, is the healthiest.

The Cheeseburger from McDonald's was deemed second most healthy.

The most unexpected finding was that the Cheeseburger from Five Guys, a popular fast food chain, was deemed the most unhealthy burger.

PlushCare gave Five Guys Cheeseburger a 50 on the Unhealthiness Score, 8 points ahead of Whataburger's Jalapeno & Cheese Whataburger.

To top it all off, Five Guys Regular Style fries were also called the least healthy fry option, scoring 28, beating out Steak & Shake by a massive nine points.

It's a common belief that fast food is loaded with preservatives and other unhealthy ingredients. However, this research serves as a stark reminder of the reality.

Folks like PlushCare help reinforce that and, in a pinch, show options that are a bit healthier than the rest.

What's your perspective on this? Does it concern you that a Five Guys burger is less healthy than one from Culver's? We'd love to hear your thoughts.