In Supersize Me, Mr. Gorske said that he ate a Whopper once, when in 1984 someone offered him $5 on a dare. After finishing the Whopper, he took the money to McDonald’s and bought some Big Macs.

30,000 sandwiches over 46 years works out to 12.5 per week (slightly less than 2 a day*), and Mr. Gorske says that they account for around 90% of his food intake. Big Macs appear to run $3.99 each these days, so with 5% Wisconsin tax, that totals $52.37 per week. Assuming the 10% balance of his diet is priced proportionately, that brings his food bill to $58.19 per week, which falls between the “Low-cost” and “Moderate-cost” official USDA food plan for cost of food at home, U.S. average, March 2018, for a Male of 51-70 years.

* Insert gratuitous joke about public-service employment examinations requiring a demonstration of at least rudimentary mathematical ability. Remove joke since gratuitous jokes at the expense of public-service employment are more in line here.

According to the company one Big Mac contains 25 grams of protein, so we can estimate his daily protein intake at ~50 grams per day. That’s the least protein nutritional scientists would consider consistent with health.

For the same daily expenditure he could buy about one kilogram of beef containing four times the protein, a similar amount of energy and more vitamins and minerals. And as Rand alluded to, white bread is at the top of the glycemic index whereas beef is not even on the chart.

In Supersize Me, Mr. Gorske states that the patties are smaller now than they used to be, and that a younger version of himself would not be satisfied with two “modern” Big Macs. A quick search does not seem to support this, but instead suggests that they have long (always?) used 10:1 patties (1/10 lb or 1.6 oz), but did shrink the size of the bun in response to Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” campaign, making the overall sandwich smaller, but accentuating the patties.

Yes, though it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek riposte to your jibe regarding Mr. Gorske’s spendthrift ways.

“3 a day” may be satisfactory for an order-of-magnitude estimate, but I would have expected any engineer worth his 1,007 mg of Sodium to observe that 30,000 = 300 * 50 * 2, as in 300 days/year (~ 20% low) * 50 years (~ 10% high) * 2 Big Macs per day (which must be ~ 10% high). Correcting 14 Big Macs / week for that ~ 10% error gives 12.6, quite close to the computed answer. Now that’s an engineering estimate!