Obesity and fast foods – there’s little doubt about the link. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United states. And it’s an epidemic that has grown side by side, step by step with the the fast food industry.

Eric Schlosser in his brilliant and shocking book, Fast Food Nation, describes the US as “an empire of fat,” and he lays the blame for this clearly and convincingly at the door of the fast food industry.

Obesity Fast Food Data

Twice as many American adults are obese today as in the 1960s. More than half of all adults and a quarter of all children are now obese. Over this same period, fast food has become cheaper and easier to buy.
Further evidence for the link between obesity and fast food can be found outside the US. Since the early 1980s, American-style fast food culture has spread like wildfire around the world… And obesity has followed, accompanied by its many unwelcome side effects: heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and other ills.

As people in countries like Japan and China have abandoned traditional healthy diets in favour of fast food, the rates of obesity and associated diseases have soared.

In countries which have resisted the spread of fast food culture, like France, Italy and Spain, obesity is far less of a problem. The good news is that there is now more awareness about the ill effects of fast food than ever before, thanks in part to books like Fast Food Nation and documentary movies like Morgan Spurlock’s popular and punchy Super Size Me.

There also seems to be a genuine change in people’s attituded to to food and how it is produced. As Schlosser says modestly of his book: “its success should not be attributed to my literary style, my storytelling ability, or the novelty of my arguments.

“Had the same book been published a decade ago, with the same words in the same order, it probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention. Not just in the United States, but throughout western Europe,people are beginning to question the massive, homogenizing systems that produce, distribute, and market their food. The unexpected popularity of Fast Food Nation, I believe, has a simple yet profound explanation. The times are changing.”

What can we do about fast food and obesity?

So what can we do to as consumers to tackle the problem of obesity and fast foods?

First, we can stop supporting the traditional, unhealthy fast food chains. Let’s rather buy from outlets that sell healthy alternatives. More and more of these restaurants and delis are opening. There should be at least one near you. Support it!

Another thing we can do is to lobby our congressperson (or MP or some other political representative if we’re in a country outside the US) to ban all advertisements that promote foods high in fat and sugar to children.

As Schlosser points out, prevention is far better than cure. “A ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening.”

Such a ban may sound far-fetched, until you remember that 35 years ago a ban on cigarette advertising sounded equally unlikely. Five years later Congress banned cigarette ads from television and radio. And those ads were directed at adults, not children.

Smoking has declined ever since.

It’s time we did something similar with obesity and fast food

The dangers of fast food come in two types. There are the obvious dangers posed by the high fat and calorie content of fast foods. There are also some hidden dangers rarely considered.

When a person is told that fast food is not good for them from a nutritional point of view, he is hardly surprised. The relationship between fast food and the almost epidemic obesity of the American population is a fairly well known fact. Still, the factors that make fast food so popular still seem to be powerful enough to make the majority of the population ignore the obvious risks of poor nutrition and weight problems. Fast food is easily available, relatively cheap, most people find it tasty and filling and it can be purchased fast.

There are very few alternatives to the high fat and high calorie menus in the fast food restaurants. Although many seem to be making some attempt to offer low cal alternatives, they end up ruining these offerings with sauces and dressings loaded with fat content. Even though these alternatives are offered, it is still the hamburger and fried chicken that is the king of fast food, and little has been done to reduce the impact of these foods on obesity.

One of the major culprits in the fast food is the cooking oil used in the preparation of so many of the foods. This oil is not normal cooking oil, which is full of enough fat, but, is generally special hydrogenated cooking oil that undergoes a process designed to increase its shelf life. This process makes it downright dangerous for human consumption as it produces high levels of trans fats. These fat compounds are barely recognizable as food by the human body and end up getting stored as fat cells or heading right to an artery to start clogging it up.

Beyond the nutritional problems are another set of problems. The fast food industry has changed the slaughter and meat packing industry. The fast food industry needs to produce tremendous amounts of chopped beef for its millions of pre-prepared hamburger patties sold each day. The methods used to produce those hamburgers are creating a situation where meat packing plants are moving away from their former areas where unionized and trained meat packers slaughtered animals in a fairly efficient and humane manner. The new plants have moved to smaller towns where underpaid workers, often immigrants, are slaughtering animals and producing meat in an unsafe manner. The dangers of contamination of this meat are getting higher and higher. The working conditions are dangerous for the employees as well.

The fast food restaurants are staffed by large numbers of underage workers. In many cases, child labor laws limiting working hours are ignored, and studies have shown that despite publicity efforts by the fast food industry to show otherwise, these workers tend to have higher incidences of drug use and do poorly in school. These social costs of the fast food industry are often overlooked. Finally, if we listen to the people in the local food and slow food movements, this whole fascination with fast, fast, and faster is impacting the very quality of human life in a negative fashion.