Fast Food And Its Inability To Be Healthy

Fast Food and its Inability to be Healthy

In America, fast food is extremely popular due to the excessively busy lifestyles of Americans. Many Americans are not concerned with calories when it comes to fast food; they are more concerned with the taste. The long term effects of fast food are only experienced if someone consumes it on a regular basis. An occasional Big Mac is not going to kill anyone, but it is impossible for fast food to ever be a healthy choice. If someone wants to eat healthy, he should choose to eat at home. People must realize that fast food's purpose is convenience Ñ* not nutrition.

Obesity has been a growing problem in this nation over the past few decades. It is a known fact that Americans love to eat and are not particularly concerned with nutrition. Fast food industries do not help with this obesity issue. With the busy, on-the-go lifestyles of Americans, fast food is usually the quickest and most convenient way to consume food. When people go to a fast food restaurant, regardless of their dietary standards, they do not have the intention of eating healthy. They want something that is fast, easy, and more than likely, greasy (Horovitz). They believe that if they are eating outside of their homes, they should be able to reward themselves with food that is unhealthy, but tastes delicious. Of course it is allowed to indulge in unhealthy foods occasionally, but it is when someone consumes fast food two or more times a week that it becomes a problem and weight is gained (National Institutes of Health).

The weakness that many Americans face is that most all unhealthy foods taste the best. Many times it is difficult to maintain self control and resist these types of foods, especially when they are so convenient. This is why fast food restaurants aim to have extremely unhealthy foods that Americans crave the most. Fast food restaurants have attempted to make their menus healthier by adding items such as salads and Mandarin orange slices (Boyl). There are three major problems with fast food restaurants adding seemingly healthy food choices to their menus. The first problem is that the healthier food options are much less popular than the unhealthy options. This coincides with the fact that when Americans visit a fast food restaurant, they are not intending to eat healthy Ñ* they want the Big Mac. Another problem with including healthy food options is that it is harder to keep these items fresh. Fresh foods spoil easily because unlike burger patties and fries, they cannot be frozen. The last major problem with including healthy food choices on a fast food menu is that many times these items are just as much, if not more, fattening than the obviously unhealthy foods. The most common food choice that many Americans consider to be healthy is a salad. For example, a "Wendy's Chicken BLT salad with honey-mustard dressing and garlic croutons has more calories (710), more sodium (1,610 milligrams), and more cholesterol (120 milligrams) than Wendy's Classic Single burger, and twice as much fat (47.5 grams)" (Boyle). This evidence proves that even if someone attempts to order the "healthy" food option on a fast food menu, he is still going to consume a large quantity of fats and calories.

If people still do not believe that fast food is an unhealthy choice, they should stop and observe the famous documentary Supersize Me. In this documentary Morgan Spurlock only eats McDonald's for 30 days in a row for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If he is asked to Supersize a meal, he has to agree. He gains an average of about a pound a day and experiences "a fatty liver, asthma, chest pains, heart palpitations, sugar/caffeine highs and lows and sexual dysfunction" (Clark). This proves that it can take as little as a month for fast food to take a toll on someone's body and cause them to become unhealthy.

It would be impossible to deny Americans' love for fast food. Many individuals live busy lifestyles that can often make fast food seem inevitable. It has been proven that most fast food is high in fat and cannot be healthy. In order for Americans to keep off the pounds