Fast food - Consumer Beware

Fast-food and take-out restaurants are everywhere. According to food industry statistics, fast-food restaurants serve millions & millions of youngsters worldwide every day.


In 2003, junk food restaurants including McDonald’s, Kraft and Coca-Cola announced that health and nutrition was  high up on their agendas, in response to worldwide teens packing on the pounds. This was supposed to change  how they approach fat content, menu choices and marketing to promote healthier lifestyles. (Yahoo News, July 19, 2003)



So then fast-food establishments added salads, grilled foods, baked potatoes, soups, whole-grain buns, fruit cups, low-fat frozen yogurts, and juices to their menus. Some also provide a nutrition analysis to help diners eat healthfully. (Foods that Harm, Foods that Heal,  Reader’s Digest Canada)


However, the basic message with even these supposed healthy choices is – consumer beware. Recently, several of the  big, fast-food restaurant chains have increased exposure to their healthier menu items such as salads, with a series  of soft and fluffy television commercials. Some of their ingredients are interesting, to say the least. They include  high fructose corn syrup, liquid margarine, preservatives, corn syrup solids, and all kinds of nasty things that you  really don’t want anywhere near your body.


As an example: McDonald’s Canada says it buys and serves the same wholesome foods their customers use at home (cough, cough). That silly notion aside, few of us use liquid margarine or propylene glycol alginate in sauces or glazes. This chemical is considered  “GRAS” for human consumption, but when you consider that it is also used as “the killing and preserving agent in pitfall traps,” usually used to capture ground beetles, it would not be surprising to get a little ill. (Elizabeth Vliet MD, Screaming To Be Heard: Hormonal Connections That Women Suspect and Doctors Ignore”. M. Evans and Company, Inc. New York 1995)


“The chili lime tortilla strips included in their southwest salads have several ingredients used to hide MSG. They also contain two ingredients that advertise  the presence of MSG: disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate. The chicken has sodium phosphates (of an unspecified variety). It could be trisodium phosphate (a cleanser), monosodium phosphate (a laxative), or disodium hydrogen phosphate.


Burger King’s salad dressing (Ken’s Fat Free Ranch) is low in calories, yes, but it also includes titanium dioxide (an artificial color, or sunscreen, depending on use), preservatives, and the ingredient seemingly mandatory in all ranch dressings: monosodium glutamate.” (NewsTarget.com – Surprise Ingredients
 in Fast Foods, Nov. 2007).


Most restaurants and fast food chains use iceberg lettuce in their salads, which really has no significant utritional value anyway. But this type of  lettuce has the most pesticide residues of all vegetables, which makes thorough washing all the more necessary.


But if health experts and nutritionists were under the impression that a vast majority of world seem to be appreciating all the healthy food choices available today… they may have another thing coming.


According to a vice president with NPD Group (a company that keeps track of consumer eating habits), consumers have always had the means to eat healthier, they just lack the will. Clearly, even in a society where people are aware of the need for healthy habits, most consumers still appear to have one major goal  when they eat out: overindulgence.


The overwhelming majority continues to eat burgers, fries, hot dogs, fried chicken, and pizza—all loaded with fat, salt, and calories, and very little fibre. Thus they vote with their forks, and the desire for tasty food continues to defeat concerns about health and nutrition. (USA Today May 13, 2005)

If you continue to subsist on fast foods, you are accelerating the aging process and compromising your health. I don’t have any way to sugar coat the truth –  if you want to reap a healthy life, either you, a family member of someone paid by you will need to spend some serious time in the kitchen preparing your own food.


Excerpt frm http://healthinmotion.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/the-truth-about-fast-food-restaurant-health-claims/