The profits of giant fast food
chains hit billions of dollars every year as hungry consumers all
around the world continue to line up to get hamburgers or pizzas
with French fries and sodas. Fast-paced citizens of
the 21st century spend their money and risk their
health to eat junk. Mainly composed of fat and salt, fast
food is nothing but that. Americans eat it to enjoy its delicious
taste and to save their time and effort; non-Americans, especially
Arabs, consume fast food to imitate the American behavior and to
be cool and trendy. Both groups of people are gravely harming
their health.
Fast
Food=Processed Food
Basically,
fast food is processed food; but what is processed food to begin
with? Processed food is simply food that has been altered in
a factory from the way in which nature presented it, as part of a
bulk process where natural and chemical food additives are added.
This leaves the final product without its naturally created
nutrients like vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Besides
giving the food its delectable taste, food additives keep it
lasting unspoiled for a long time, which means that processed food
is usually stored for a long time before it is purchased and
eaten! The oldest natural food additives are salt, sugar,
and vinegar; and although these are natural, an excess in their
amounts seriously endangers the health.
Junk
foods characteristically contain high amounts of salt (sodium
chloride). Sodium is necessary for various metabolic functions;
too much of it, however, is associated with an increased risk of
hypertension (high blood pressure). Hypertension is a known
risk factor for heart disease.
If
this is the case with natural food additives, then how about
artificial ones? With the advent of processed foods in the past
thirty years, there has been a massive explosion in the chemical
adulteration of foods with additives.
In
his best seller, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser reveals
to the American public very interesting facts about what they eat.
He talks about his experience in a factory in New Jersey where he
discovered how the flavors of McDonald's food products are
fabricated.
Current
food processing methods gather many parts of many animals into one
burger. The burger's beef has to be deep-fried in oil at high
temperatures over 300° C, and this goes for almost all the
popular fast foods that have to be deep-fried, consequently, they
become denatured and possibly even carcinogenic.
Moreover,
there is a very interesting story to tell about the popular
McDonald's French fries exposing the way they are processed, and
the flavors that distinguish them. For decades, McDonald's
cooked its French fries in a mixture of 7% cottonseed oil and 93 %
beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavor and
more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger. In
1990, amidst a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol
in its fries, McDonald's switched to pure vegetable oil. This
presented the company with a challenge: how to make fries that
subtly taste like beef without cooking them in beef tallow. A look
at the ingredients in McDonald's French fries suggests how the
problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a
seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural
flavor". That ingredient helps to explain why the fries taste
so good.
Food
additives interfere with what we drink as well as what we eat. Let
alone the dangers posed by the chemical ingredients of soft
drinks, additives put in the most popular beverages in the world
are quite unsafe. Brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is used to keep
flavor oils present in soft drinks in suspension thus giving the
well-known cloudy appearance to these beverages. Small residues of
BVO are trapped in body fat, and it has not yet been
scientifically proven that BVO is safe. Bromate, the main
ingredient of BVO, is a poison. Just two to four ounces of a 2
percent solution of BVO can severely poison a child.
Another
very ironic fact about soft drinks is that diet Coke and diet
Pepsi are considered the way out for those who care to have a
healthy diet. These people are unaware that instead of sugar, the
artificial sweetener in the diet sodas is acesulfame K. This is
linked to depression, insomnia, neurological disease, and a
plethora of other illnesses; doctors even warn that acesulfame K
may be carcinogenic.
We
thus see how the mouth-watering tastes of the much popular
American fast food diet are all about chemicals, artificial
flavors and food additives that are added to the food in the
course of a hi-tech manufacturing process.
Fat and Sugar: Obesity Has Become A Phenomenon
Simply
put, fast food is high in fat and sugar – that is to say high in
calories – and low in its nutrient value. Fast food is
particularly high in saturated fats, generally preferred by the
food industry because it is cheap and can withstand high cooking
temperatures.
It
has been scientifically proven that saturated fats are correlated
to cholesterol levels in the blood, and can therefore cause heart
diseases.
While
experts state that a healthy meal should have less than 30% of its
calories from fat, with 9 grams of fat and 270 calories, a
McDonald's hamburger just breaks the 30% ceiling. Burger King's
hamburger has 15 grams of fat and 320 calories, i.e. 42% of its
calories are from fat. Other famous restaurants' hamburgers have
more calories and larger percentages of fats. Thus, hamburgers
give us much more calories than we need and their calories come
mainly from fats.
When
it comes to sugar, it is enough to say that the typical can of
soda contains an equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar.
Fast
food thus offers much more calories than our systems can digest;
and these extra calories are stored in our bodies in the form of
fats. Excessive storage of fats in the body leads to obesity,
which does not merely prevent people from looking slim, but it
furthermore predisposes them to many disorders, such as
insulin-dependent diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and coronary
artery disease. More fatally, obesity has been linked to an
increased incidence of certain cancers, notably cancers of the
colon, rectum, prostate, breast, uterus, and cervix.
If
fast food and soft drinks mark the American way of life, then it
is easy to understand why more than half of all adult Americans
are overweight. Actually, both scientific studies and common sense
indicate that fast food is the primary reason for obesity.
Consuming
junk food does not only mean eating the chemical food additives
that are added while the food is being processed, nor is it
limited to looking fat and getting exposed to obesity-related
illnesses. The problems of fast food are far more diversified.
"No
two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war
against each other," says Thomas Friedman, the well-known
globalization theorist, and the Foreign Affairs columnist.
According to Friedman's McPeace theory, McDonald's might prevent
wars; but can McDonald's prevent the diseases caused by the junk
it serves, such as obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, and even
cancer?
Sources:
-
ABCNews.com,
"Obsessed
by Fast Food: Will Fast Food Be The Death Of Us?"
-
Better
Health Channel.
-
Kate,
Siber, "Expansion of the Fast Food Industry,"
commonsense, www.commonsense.com
-
Hansler,
Kathryn, "Think Fast: Surviving the Fast Food
Jungle," San
Bernardino County.
-
www.infoplease.com
-
"Processed
Food and Junk Food."
-
Schlosser,
Eric, "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good," The
Atlantic Monthly, July 1, 2001.
-
Friedman,
Thomas, "Turning swords into beef-burgers." The
Guardian, December 19, 1996.
*
Sara Khorshid is staff writer for IslamOnline. She holds a BA in Political Science from Cairo University and is currently studying for an MA in Political Theory. You can reach her at
sarakhorshid@islam-online.net. 
