The fast food industry has added every possible chemical that they can legally get away with to get people addicted to their food. In fact, if you eat fast food and stop eating it, you actually experience withdrawal symptoms. It’s like a drug. Not only that, condoms are so high in these fast food burgers these days that the product doesn’t even break down. Fast food has been linked to increased obesity in both adults and children. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in our country, particularly in children. Here are some starting stats to consider:
65% of American adults are overweight
30% of Americans are obese
According to the American Obesity Association, 127 million Americans are overweight, 60 million Americans are obese, and 9 million are “morbidly obese” — weighing 100 pounds more than they should.
In the last twenty years, the rate of obesity has doubled in children and tripled in adolescents and adolescents.
As of September 2004, nine million American children between the ages of six and eighteen were obese.
OBESITY:
A KILLER Obesity-related diseases will kill an estimated 400,000 Americans this year, about as many as smoking. Americans have gotten so big their coffins have to be gigantic!
Related diseases caused by obesity:
High cholesterol
high blood pressure
heart disease
breast cancer
colon cancer
Taste
arthritis
Asthma
Diabetes
strokes
In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in three children born in the United States in the year 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes. The life of a ten-year-old with type II diabetes will be, on average , between seventeen and twenty-six years shorter than that of a healthy child. Diabetes can lead to heart attacks, strokes, blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage in the lower legs, which can lead to amputations (82,000 of these cases occur each year). Diabetes is currently the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
fast food is everywhere
The rise of the fast food industry plays a critical role in why our country is plagued by obesity. Fast food is everywhere: in big cities, in small towns, in shopping malls, at the airport, at the bus station, in schools, and even in hospitals.
There are 31,000 McDonald’s around the world, nearly 14,000 of them in the US.
People are eating a lot of fast food
Fast food has become cheaper and easier to buy. In 2004, Americans spent $124 billion on fast food. That same year, The American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a study showing that the percentage of fast food calories in the American diet has increased from 3 to 12 percent in the last twenty years.
Fast food culture was introduced to other countries around the world in the 1980s. In countries like Japan and China, people have abandoned traditional healthy diets in favor of fast food, and as a result, the rate of obesity and other diseases has skyrocketed.
Fast food restaurants serve more
Not only is fast food everywhere, but fast food companies encourage the consumer to eat more by offering super-sized burgers, extra-large servings of fries, and buckets of soda.
Products like The Whopper, The Big Gulp and Super Size contain a high amount of calories, sugar and fat. Let’s take a closer look: the Double Gulp soda at your local 7-11 contains 64 ounces of soda, that’s a half gallon! Contains the equivalent of 48 teaspoons of sugar. A typical hamburger at a fast food restaurant weighs six ounces. In 1957 it weighed an ounce. According to a nutritionist, your average fast food meal is more like three meals.
The average meal at McDonald’s has 1,550 calories.
Fast food is not good for us
We are eating more foods that are not nutritious. Most fast food foods are high in fat, sugar, calories, starch, salt, and low in fiber and nutrients. Because fast food lacks nutrients, after eating it we are not satisfied. That makes us hungry for more soon after.
Why children are at greater risk
Our children are exposed to an avalanche of fast food advertising. Fast food chains spend more than $3 billion each year on television advertising. They intentionally campaign for children to become customers for life. These are known as cradle-to-grave advertising strategies. Researchers have found that children can often recognize a company logo, such as the golden arches, before they can recognize their own name.
In a year, the typical American child sees more than 40,000 television commercials. About 20,000 of these ads are for junk food: fast food, candy, soft drinks, and breakfast cereals. This means that your child sees a junk food commercial every five minutes when he is watching television.
To further motivate kids to eat fast food, companies like McDonald’s have Happy Meals with free toys. McDonald’s gives away more than 1.5 billion toys each year. Nearly one in three new toys given to American children each year comes from McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant.
To combat these calculated advertising strategies, it is paramount to educate our children about healthy eating habits that are easy, fun and tasty. By teaching our children how harmful fast food is and how to eat healthier, we empower them to make the right choices.
Fast food is full of chemicals and preservatives.
Fast food doesn’t spoil. This is because it is loaded with chemicals and preservatives. Of course there is the great video on YouTube called The Bionic Burger that illustrates this in a fun and informative way.
The link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYyDXH1amic
The video is based on a true story. In 1991, this software engineer from Burlington, Vermont (he prefers to remain anonymous) was out with friends in Boston for New Year’s Eve, stopping at McDonald’s on the way home. He bought a couple of cheeseburgers, ate one and put the other in his coat pocket to eat later.
He forgot about the hamburger in his pocket. A year later, she pulled her coat out of the closet, put it on, and discovered the cheeseburger in her pocket from New Year’s Eve. She looked exactly the same. He was absolutely blown away. He told his friends and family, but no one believed him. He then decided to start a hamburger museum to prove to everyone that these cheeseburgers and hamburgers were literally indestructible.
He started collecting hamburgers, one every year. By the fall of 2004, she had amassed quite a collection:
The original ’91 McDonald’s cheeseburger from that New Year
’92 McDonald’s Cheeseburger and Big Mac
Burger King ’93 Burger
McDonald’s ’94 Burger
McDonald’s Cheeseburgers ’95-’03
He kept them on the shelves in his outdoor living room. These burgers look exactly the same. The bun, the meat, the cheese, the special sauce, the marinade, even the lettuce. They have all retained their shape and color for over a decade!
Food is supposed to spoil.
Food is supposed to be the most biodegradable of all products. How come these burgers haven’t gone bad? down? Turn into mold?
My friends Len Foley and Rebecca Gauthier weren’t convinced. They thought maybe there was an exaggeration, or it just wasn’t true. So they went and bought a hamburger at the local McDonald’s in Burbank, CA in February 2007.
They put it in their outdoor garage and left it there. Once a week they would go out and “check out” his burger. He would continue to look and smell exactly the same. No animal, insect or bird touched it. After a year, they began featuring it at various health exhibits along with some of Matt’s burgers from his burger collection. Since then, they have added a Hostess Twinkie, a cupcake, and other burgers to his collection. As of April 2008, no changes in feed composition have been observed.
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself! Go spend a dollar and buy a hamburger. (By the way, this is the only time I’m going to tell you to do something like this!) Put it in your garage, or wherever, and let it sit there. I think it’s important to see this for yourself so that you know on a deep level the implications of what this means. Food does not spoil, therefore it cannot be natural.
We brought the Bionic Burger Museum to a recent health event to demonstrate how fast food is made from low-quality chemicals, preservatives, dyes, and ingredients. Hundreds and hundreds of people saw hamburgers that were between one and eleven years old. None of them had broken down. Adults and children were surprised. When people see firsthand that fast food is not food, it has a powerful impact that can lead them to make the right choice: choosing to eat healthy, nutritious foods instead of a cornucopia of chemicals, preservatives, fat, and salt. . .
This video I just described has been viewed by 1.3 million people on YouTube. It has been translated into 7 different languages and appears on 50,000 blogs. This shows that people want this information, they want to be informed because the information allows us to make the right decision. You choose what you are going to put in your body every day. Make the best choice and put foods in your body that help you, not hurt you.
When you put live foods into your body, they contain enzymes that naturally break down the food. The fruit ripening process, for example, is an enzyme-controlled process. And those enzymes eventually, if that fruit is not eaten, they will cannibalize the fruit. Then the fruit will eat itself.
Well, these burgers don’t eat themselves. They are here twenty years later because there are no enzymes present. These burgers are so loaded with preservatives that they’re like a sealant, like they’re made permanently, like you have a painting glazed, framed, and put on your wall. It’s not food, it’s something else. What that something else is, we don’t know, but I’m totally amazed that people can survive eating it.
Now I have also seen the hamburger that is nineteen years old, some that were fifteen, sixteen years old. It looks like we now have the technology to build the world’s first bionic burger! I recommend that if you are serious about your health, AVOID fast food AT ALL COSTS! There are so many healthy alternatives out there that can not only satisfy your cravings, but also provide you with the vitamins and nutrients your body needs for peak performance. Read all about delicious superfoods, super herbs, and other top health foods in one of our many other special reports at http://www.thebestdayever.com.