4 Reasons To Stop Eating Fast Food

Okay, this is an easy one.  Everyone knows that fast food is terrible for you.

Or do they?  I live next to an older couple that eats fast food at least three times a week.  McDonald’s being their favorite.  On a recent walk around the block I ran into them — McDonald’s bags in hand.  So I asked them why they ate it so much.  I figured they would utter some sort of standard variation of: it’s cheap, it’s quick, it’s hassle free.  But they said, “It’s a great way to get protein.”

Wait… What?!  That was a first for me.  I figured if you wanted to get a cheap source of protein that peanuts or a hard boiled egg would do the trick.  Certainly not large, frequent doses of fast food.  That’s not a valid reason to eat it.  Here are four more:

1.  It’s NEVER what it appears to be.

This is a photo of a Big Mac from an ad I grabbed off the internet…

What a beautiful burger!

And this is what it looks like in real life.  This might be the best actual photo I found…

Not looking so good there, burg.

Me telling you that the fast food “restaurants” are deceptive is not revelatory.  But take a look at the difference.  Pretty gross.

2.  It’s infused with… SUGAR!

In the 1970’s the FDA decided that, as far as Americans were concerned, we were far too obese.  The reason: we ate way too much fat.  Therefore, they cracked down on companies and food manufacturers per the fat content of the food they distributed and served.  Without fat, foods like beef, pork, even chicken, taste pretty flat.  So they needed a new additive that provided flavor to the food which no longer had a large amount of fat.  And that ingredient is sugar.  Let’s go ahead and use the Big Mac as an example.  It’s loaded with sugar:  9 grams worth.  That’s more than a grape popsicle, which is little more than sugar and water.  Sickeningly sweet.

3.  The cheese isn’t cheese.

That warm, gooey goodness that cloaks the burger like a yellow shroud is frequently not cheese at all.  It’s “food stuff”, or “cheese food”.  The definition of either being: a manufactured food item used in the lieu of real food.  Real, authentic cheese is comparatively expensive — but fast food is very cheap.  That’s a problem.  So years ago the fast food corporations realized that they can mimic the flavor and consistency of cheese (and increase the ‘viability’ of the products’ shelf life) if they replaced actual cheese with “cheese stuff” or “food stuff”.  Ask any sane doctor the world over and they’ll all agree, eating things other than real food (which is what fast food restaurant cheese often is…) is not good for you.  At all.

4.  Nothing’s fresh.

All of the ingredients that make up a fast food burger are either: processed, frozen, packaged or shipped.  Frequently, an item is all of the above.  There are zero fast food restaurants that employ the locally grown strategy.  It’s not cost effective.  So even the pickles, the lettuce, and the produce that you’re eating — that has been heavily handled, sprayed with preservatives, and then packaged and shipped to the local link in the chain and served to you daily.  We don’t even have to get into the bread, the sauce, or the meat itself to prove our point here.  Needless to say, frozen is not fresh, and neither are foods loaded with preservatives and additives to keep them edible.  Those burgers are about as fresh as Abe Lincoln’s corpse.

A source of protein?  Maybe… Albeit a very strange one.  So I say to my neighbors, come on by my house, I have bowls of peanuts and a dozen fresh hard boiled eggs ready to eat.  To me, that sounds infinitely better than preserved, sugar laden, mis-represented non-food.

But that’s just me…