Thursday, November 12, 2009

DANGER: Fast Food Kills

Fast food is very tempting to consumers because of its convenience. It’s so easy to swing through the drive thru on your way home from work, starving, and order a super size extra value meal for yourself, spouse, and kids. The food is fairly cheap and you usually won’t spend more than five minutes in line. If the food that fast food companies are serving were actually good for you this would be an ideal situation. However this is not the case. Instead, fast food companies are profiting off of clogging your arteries resulting in heart disease.

The problem with fast food is that over the decades they have been increasing their serving sizes. Today when you order a small fries, you actually get what would have been a medium size just five years ago. The larger serving size you are served, the harder it is for you to know when to stop. From the time we are children our parents teach us to clean our plates because there are those less fortunate who have no food. So if we are given an extra large fry, we should be thankful and eat the whole thing.

Fries, burgers, nuggets, shakes, sodas, and other items you can find at fast food establishments are usually three times larger than the amount you should be consuming. This means that you could easily be consuming 1,000+ calories per meal when you super size it. If you are trying to stick to a healthy 2,000 per day calorie diet, you will have consumed over ½ of your entire daily food allowance.

Another problem with the foods you are served at fast food restaurants is that these foods lack nutritional value. The foods are high in fat and sugar. By regularly consuming these high calorie meals that do not have any nutritious value is basically poisoning your body.

There are even some studies that have shown fast food may be addictive. The high levels of salt and sugar content found in most fast food items cause the brain to seek them out. This stems back thousands of years when salt and sugar were hard to come by so people would stock up on their supply when they could.

People will continue to frequent fast food restaurants as long as they continue to see ads on television for Big Macs and super size fries. One solution to this problem would be to limit the number of ads fast food companies can have at any one time.

While we cannot blame fast food companies entirely for our increasingly expanding waist lines, it is their food that is making us this way. If they increased the cost of a burger and lowered the cost of a salad there may be more incentive for consumers to choose the salad over the burger.

As long as fast food companies are making money off of their 1,000 calorie burgers, they will continue to sell them. The best way to prevent weight gain associated with a fast food diet is to completely cut fast food out of your diet. Drive right by those golden arches and hurry home where you can make a healthy meal. Completely removing fast food from your diet is similar to detox; it removes the addictive properties found in fast food.

Also, exercise is a vital aspect that is missing in most people’s daily lives. This is an essential piece of the puzzle to reverse the effects of high calorie fast food diets. Incorporating some type of a daily exercise routine will decrease your risk of heart disease ten fold.

Be sure to check out this video by Josh Trent (fitnessSD), NASM-CES, simply titled "Fast Food Fitness". It's a great video that depicts the problem with fast food and how it affects your health based on the decisions you make for what you eat.

Remember.....less hot dog and more downward dog!

-AR

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