IF you need another reason to kick the junk food habit this should do it. David Whipple is the proud owner of a 14-year-old McDonald’s hamburger. And it looks exactly the same as the day he bought it.
Mr Whipple had been hoping to demonstrate the high levels of preservatives in fast food. But he could not have imagined his experiment to go quite so well.
He bought the hamburger from a McDonald’s outlet way back in 1999, originally planning to keep it for a month to show friends the worrying power of preservatives.
But he forgot about it, finding it two years later in an old coat pocket. He then decided to continue the experiment, but admits even he was amazed that, 14 years on, the hamburger remains unchanged.
It has no signs of mould, fungus or even a strange odour. The only thing that has changed over the years is that the pickle has disintegrated.
The 14-year-old McDonald’s burger. Picture: Screengrab, The Doctors
Mr Whipple, from Utah, explained that he never meant the experiment to last this long.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he told TV show The Doctors.
“I was showing some people how enzymes work and I thought a hamburger would be a good idea. And I used it for a month and then I forgot about it. It ended up in a paper sack with the receipt in my coat pocket tossed in the back of my truck and it sat there for, I don’t know, two or three months.”
The coat was then hung up in a closet at his home.
“My wife didn’t discover it until at least a year or two after that,” he said. “And we pulled it out and said ‘oh my gosh. I can’t believe it looks the same way’.”
Mr Whipple, who still has the original receipt for the burger, said he now shows it to his grandchildren to encourage them to eat healthily. “It’s great for my grand-kids to see. To see what happens with fast food,” he said.
The 14-year-old McDonald’s burger. Picture: Screengrab, The Doctors
In 2009, nutritionist Joann Bruso decide to keep a McDonald’s Happy Meal uncovered on a shelf for a year. Apart from a few cracks in the bun, it remained unchanged. “Food is supposed to decompose, go bad and smell foul eventually,” she wrote on her blog.
“The fact that it has not decomposed shows you how unhealthy it is for children.”
Disgusting aint it?… Jeez man that’s just awful.
Full of decay!?!?!? The burger hasn’t even decayed!!! Oh the insanity of someone eating Mickey D’s!!! Too many people have way too much time on their hands these days.
if the burger was inside of a colon after passing through stomach, acid, and intestine…it would be in like an everlasting decay mode, creating more and more disease as it decays, but never being able to fully decay or pass from the body o_O
what about the kids who are being raised on that stuff…their insides must be full of decay already at the age of 15, smh.