There's nothing wrong with food being fast. To walk into an
eatery, order a meal and get it in five minutes is great. But there's a
trade-off when commercial pressures come into the story.
Here are the seven evils of fast food. Avoid them if you can -- it IS possible if you buy with care.
1. Substandard Ingredients
No,
not everywhere, nor all food in a particular outlet. But large chains
and the wholesale suppliers to smaller places have a grand opportunity
to offload low-quality ingredients processed to make them acceptable,
especially in highly-flavored food (see #2 and #3 below).
The
worst 'offenses' involve mechanically reclaimed meat and using
emulsifiers and polyphosphates to retain processing water in meat. How
can you tell? When you can see a nutrition table, look for the protein
to fat ratio. Lean meat will be around 3:1 protein, depending a little
on the animal and breed. Highly-processes ground meat products such as
sausage and kebab meat can vary from 1:1 to 3:1 fat, with a third of the
weight added water. Without printed evidence, you'll have to educate
your palate!
So be aware, and look for better quality food; most
Indian places use good, fresh ingredients, for example, whereas a lot of
Chinese outlets buy in highly-processed partly-prepared ingredients to
go with the fresh stuff. That's not a hard-and-fast rule; use common
sense to choose your store. Burger joints vary from fastidiously pure
food to utter garbage in both meat and sauces -- and Macdonald's and
Burger King are better than most for purity. But their desserts, shakes
and soft drinks are another matter -- read on!
2. Fat and Sugar For That Blobby Feeling
These
are the staples of most quick preparation foods. This is particularly
because frying is speedy and sugar is the core of desserts and
drinks. At least the oils used today are healthier than the old
saturated animal fats. You'll already be aware that a high fat, high
sugar diet is unhealthy. An occasional fast food meal should be no
problem nutritionally -- your body is great at dealing with infrequent
overload. But do you fool yourself that your take-away every lunch and
every night is 'occasional'?
Both fat and sugar are addictive (see
#7) and combine to make the best way to pick up atherosclerosis,
arthritis, diabetes, heart attacks and cancer -- if that's your choice
of future.
3. Salt Can Lead To Hypertension
To most
punters, tasty equals salty. But salty equals hypertension equals high
blood pressure equals collapsed arteries and heart failure. Eating less
salt is impossible if you major on fast food, because you don't control
salt addition and if a fast food joint left it out, most of its
customers wouldn't come back.
The result is that a fast food diet is almost always a high-salt diet.
4. Low Fiber Equals Gut Problems
By
customer demand, most fries are skinless and bread, pasta and rice are
white. The fiber is stripped away to give you what was once a luxury
food, but now is the cheap, health-free option. Fast foods rarely
include much fruit or vegetables by weight -- they tend to be
garnishes. When most of the other calories come from refined oils and
sugar, fast food meals as a whole are very low in fiber.
This
is the cause of sluggish digestion, dyspepsia and poor food absorption
and poisoning from inefficient waste elimination. It's also reckoned to
seriously increase some cancer risks (especially that all too common
colon cancer).
If you eat a lot of fast food and other low-fiber
stuff, you'll be liable to the usual constipation and dyspepsia. If it's
an occasional treat and you usually eat plenty of vegetables and other
fiber-rich food, no problem.
5. Additives Can Mess Up Your Body
Many
food additives are fine, but that's not always the case with fast
foods. Preservatives are often mild poisons, artificial flavorings can
mess up your digestion's signaling system and many commercial colours
promote allergies in a large minority while they disguise bad
ingredients. Watch out for places that use all of these to boost bad
food.
You'll probably know already if you are particularly
sensitive to any of the more dire additives, like azo dyes or benzoates,
and you'll have the problem of finding out whether the fast food you're
looking at is free of your particular horror. Tough! The friers and
counter staff usually haven't a clue what's in their food. If it's a
large chain, you just might find that they have a recipe book for
inspection.
6. Nutrient-Poor -- You get Sick
This
evil is maybe the worst problem with fast food, as well as other ready
meals from supermarkets and those cheaper restaurants that buy in
chilled and frozen meals ready to microwave, grill and and fry for you.
Many
ingredients, from oils and flour to sauces and pickles, are given a
long shelf life for convenience. This involves removing the part of the
food that spoils quickly and adding artificial preservatives. Problem
is, the preservatives are mostly bad for you and the stuff removed is
the fiber, plant sterols, vitamins and other natural ingredients that
you need to eat to stay healthy.
That's why most people today are
sick in body and listless, prone to illnesses and body breakdown like
diabetes, arthritis and cancer. Being like this is, for most people, a
choice, not inevitable. If you choose this kind of food as your staple
diet, you choose the consequences, too.
7. Addictive -- You can't Stop The Gorging
A
key reason so many people major on fast food is its addictiveness --
I've given the reasons for that above. It's similar to that for nicotine
and can have similar withdrawal symptoms. The usual result is that you
eat far more food than you can burn up for energy, and it gets stored as
fat. We're a society of fatties, as you can't avoid knowing. Type II
diabetes, heart problems, rheumatic diseases like arthritis, bodily
breakdown from the load you have to permanently carry and cancers are
the usual consequence -- and the age that the trouble begins is steadily
coming down.
Be aware, and you can reduce your dependency on this kind of food, wherever you buy it.
So In Summary...
Overall,
then, fast food can be a seriously quick way to Bad Health, with an
unpleasant long-term future for you if you make this kind of food a way
of life. But if you choose your outlet and meal carefully, fast food can
be a delight and at least fairly healthy. Even the most fastidious
foodie can indulge once in a while!
I ought to finish, though, by
reminding you that Fast Food isn't the only kind that has these Seven
Evils! Most people in the West have sick bodies because their whole diet
is based on prepacked, processed food with (as we say) all the goodness
taken out. Government agencies all through Europe, North America and
Oceania have been flagging up these problems for decades, yet public
health steadily gets worse. You can't have missed those Public Health
campaigns, nor the media fuss over every new medical report all
governments produce on 'The State Of The Nation's Health'.
Yet if
you're a 'normal' member of Western Society, you'll have spent little of
your attention on these 'scare campaigns', and a lot more on believing
the thousands of adverts promising a wonderful lifestyle if only you'll
eat their heavily-advertised junk food. It amounts to, "Indulge
yourself, and you'll be happy," with the suggestion that you can eat
treats many times a day without any consequences to your health.
Our
ancestors knew better. They called this kind of eating 'gluttony', and
told their kids exactly what the consequences would be. And they were
right.
