The Fast Food Ban

Why at fast food restaurants is the food getting smaller and the price getting larger but the quality of the food staying the same? I wouldn't mind paying so much if it was at least better for you. Maybe they should up the budget for their food. Donald Thompson makes $4 million a year. The greed is what is ruining the food.

— Anonymous

Forty million people are served at McDonalds a day. That means forty million people are putting chemicals, pesticides, and genetically modified meats into their bodies every day. No wonder why we have so many problems with our environment and our health. Fast food has taken over the world. Kids have grown up with it, parents worship it on that hectic day, but no one thinks about what it is doing to our bodies. The human body cannot survive on its own. It needs nutrition, vitamins, and proteins, everything the fast food businesses’ have been pushing under the rug. The have been creating illusions to what our bodies are manufactured to want like sugars, carbs, and fatty foods. Because of the illusions and cheap prices of fast food restaurants, we are now facing serious problems of:
a. Obesity
b. Malnutrition
c. Animal mistreatment and disease
Fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, Checkers, etc. should all be shut down because of the harmful effects if has on our health and environment.

Obesity
Sixty percent of adults in the United States are now obese. The number of obese people has doubled since 1980. Another thing that has been on the rise since the 1980s is fast food restaurants. Today you can find a McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendys in any five mile distant. The foods served at these locations are nothing but refined carbs, chemically induced animal product, and sugars, all things that will lead you to obesity. Since adults are eating so much fast food, what do you think their children are eating? In the last twenty-five years the number of overweight kids has doubled. Obesity leads to diabetes that will kill you. A very sad statistic said “one out of three children will develop diabetes in their life. Seventeen to twenty years of life span is lost if you get diabetes before you’re fifteen” (Super-Size Me). In the documentary Super-Size Me they interview a middle aged man that has diabetes, he was about to have a gastric bypass. The man was diabetic because he drank three-four two liters a day and went blind one day on his way to work. Obesity/Diabetes is a popular problem and is not taken seriously. Obesity has become the second biggest cause of death with 400,000 deaths per year, right behind smoking. The medical cost has doubled from 44 billion in 1997 to 92 billion in 2002. These fast food restaurants are the link between the people and obesity, if we banned the restaurants that would help the obesity problem immensely.
Malnutrition
Our bodies need all different types of nutrition to maintain healthy. McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Checkers, etc. have almost zero nutrition. The proteins you should be getting from meats you will not find in your local McDonalds cheeseburger. The good carbohydrates you should be getting from a potato you will not find in a large value meal french fry from Burger King. Even if there was any nutrition, before you get your food it travels 1500 miles, making it already a week old. There is only approximately forty percent of its nutrition left by the time it reaches the fast food restaurant, leaving you with slim to no nutrition. There is one in four Americans eating McDonalds a day, which means around forty million people are being malnourished a day. Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super-Size Me, wants to know what will happen to him if he eats only McDonalds for thirty days. He begins this experiment in perfect shape and well-nourished and by day nine was already starting to feel the side effects. At week two his liver started going down and his doctors became very worried, begging him to stop his experiment. He kept going with his diet and by the end of the thirty days he gained 24 pounds, eighteen percent of his body fat. He was completely malnourished and his organs were beginning to shut down. What kind of chemicals and parasites are McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants putting in our bodies to make our organs start failing after two weeks? After this movie came out, McDonald’s decided to try and hop on the newly popular healthy and organic-type diet. They came out with new “premium salads”, these salads have 51 grams of fat, making up seventy-nine percent of your daily fat intake. Nice try McDonalds.
Animal mistreatment and disease
There is such a high need for beef and chicken that farming animals is no longer on farms but at factories. Chickens are grown completely differently than they were fifty years ago. Today chickens only take 48 days to be fully grown, not 70 days, and are immensely bigger. The chicken has been redesigned to have larger breasts because people generally like white meat. Antibiotics are put in their food, so now they are abnormal and too fat for their bodies. They can’t keep up with all the fat in their bodies and can only walk a few steps without falling. Tyson, one of the biggest meat corporations, don’t let their chickens see sunlight. They are all thrown in cages when it is time for processing, it doesn’t matter if they have any kind of disease or are sick.
McDonalds “all white meat” chicken nuggets are not exactly all white meat. First they were made from chickens that couldn’t lay eggs but now are made from chickens with extremely large breast. They are cut off and grinded together with other over grown chicken breast then formed into a patty, fried, and shipped off to your neighborhood McDonalds. How does it feel to have your children eating those now?
E. coli outbreaks have become more and more popular, they occur because of corn fed cows. If one gets it, they all get it and the processors do not know about it until it is too late. E. coli outbreaks have killed young kids from contaminated meat. When eating at a fast food restaurant that will serve you a cheeseburger for only ninety-nine cents, you should know the quality of your meat is not very high, making yourself more at risk for e. coli and other diseases. There is only thirteen slaughterhouses in America now, imagine how many animals go through processing every day. You think those workers actually care if they are taken care of well? In 1972 the FDA conducted approximately 50,000 food safety inspections and in 2006 the FDA only conducted 9,164. Going to a McDonalds, Burger King, etc. makes the percentage rate of getting sick about one hundred percent higher. Why would you want to gamble your health?
The saying “you are what you eat” has been passed around for many years and is extremely true. If you eat fatty non-nutritional food you are going to become fat and malnourished. If we banned fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Wendys, Burger Kings, etc. it would be helping the health of our society immensely. It would also be helping our animals and farmers. We would need farmers, not factories, and our animals would not be in such great need so the farmers could take better care of animals they are farming. Something that is so simple and so obvious shouldn’t be so hard to fix. Our governments know what is going on, why haven’t they stopped it yet? “If we have to make a movie about where our food has come from, we have a problem.” (Food Inc.)

— Anonymous

I would rather see fast food restaurants get with the program and offer healthy options beyond a grilled chicken breast on a tasteless bun, or salads with iceberg lettuce and fatty dressings. My favorite chain is Panera's. Stay away from the sugar laden pastries and opt for one of their delicious salads with vinaegrette dressings. Request that the white bread be replaced with whole grain and you have a fast, delicious, healthy, reasonably priced meal. But you can't eat a salad while driving. Slow down America and savor the good stuff. Buy local from farmers if you can. Support restaurants that do offer healthy alternatives and let them know when they do how much you appreciate their efforts.

The next generation needs to learn how to prepare healthy foods at home. We learned to cook what our parents served. They did not know that piles of mashed potatoes and gravy, overcooked veggies, and large portions of meat was a bad thing. We do. Break the carb cycle and learn what a healthy portion of meat and starch really is.

— Anonymous

Banning new restaurants won't solve the problem, because even without new restaurants there is still too many fast food joints easily accessable as it is. What should be done is that there should be more affordable healthy "fast food" restaurants that have affordable prices. Also more work needs to be done from the fast food industry to make their food more healthy as well. One thing I've figured out as a dieter is I can eat anything I want even foods I would consider unhealthy. Like let's say a burger, before I wouldn't consider it because it's unhealthy, but here's the thing, it CAN be made healthy. Just replace the ingredients with their healthy low fat alternatives, which is what all restaurants should do, this way you can still eat what you want and it can still be healthy or atleast acceptable when it comes to the nutritional content in the food.

— Javier, Redlands, CA

I think banning new fast food restaurants would help, but I also agree that menu board calorie labeling would have an even greater impact....if the consumer can, at a glance, compare the caloric and fat amounts in each menu item I think they would go for the healthier choice.

— Christa Lemons, Keyser, WV