Disadvantages Of Fast Food

Fast food is a trend that is feverishly catching on with our generation. This is mainly because of our fast paced lives in an increasingly competitive society. As the world progresses, everyone gets hard-pressed for time, making a huge population of the modern day families to turn to fast food and ready-made meals. They no longer seem to have time in the day to sit down and cook a meal for themselves and their families. As the name suggests, fast food can be prepared fast and can conveniently be eaten on the run. You can find numerous take-away joints selling hamburgers, pizzas, noodles and fries. Fast food is a relatively new interface in our dietary habits coinciding with the rising popularity of automobiles. It caters to a growing population of mobile individuals who find the convenient and cheap fast food to be an easy recourse. Though fast food is certainly an occasional fun treat, many people tend to have it too often resulting in unhealthy eating habits setting stage for irreversible health disasters for many youngsters. This is because there are a host of disadvantages associated with fast food as they contain high amounts of fats, salt and sugar that affect the health adversely. To know more on the disadvantages of fast food, explore this piece.

 

Many fast food restaurants serve foods that are extremely high in sodium content. Sodium is an essential constituent of salt and hence, consuming too much of it can contribute to high blood pressure, water retention and obesity. Even diners are often tempted to add additional salt to fast food items such as French fries. Many Americans of all ages consume more than four times the recommended daily intake of sodium in one fast food meal. High sodium content of the fast foods can be very dangerous for one’s overall health as it can trigger a stroke anytime. Lowering salt intake to recommended levels could reduce the incidence of strokes by almost thirty percent.

These quick and convenient fast foods such as cheeseburgers, milk shakes and chicken nuggets are often (rather obviously) loaded with fats. It is the high amounts of fats that make for that delicious taste in fast foods. Many fast food joints increase the fat content in items even further by adopting cooking methods such as deep frying in saturated oils etc. For instance, ground beef patties are usually cooked on a frying pan filled with butter or unhealthy oils such as lard or cottonseed oils. The daily recommended fat allowance for an average individual is 65 grams per day. A meal consisting of a burger or chicken sandwich, desserts and large fries can easily tally your fat to about 60 grams at a time. Imagine one fast food meal almost exceeding the daily recommended amount of fat! Needless to say, these numbers soon manifest as those unhealthy unwanted pounds.

Calories measure the amount of energy that we derive from food. The calories consumed in a fast food meal can be disastrous for our health. It is not uncommon for a single fast food meal to have the equivalent of an entire or even two days’ worth of calories. Healthier choices such as salads can also be loaded with calories if you top it with dressing and bacon bits. Kids need only two thousand calories per day, while adults require even less. Unless your energy output is more than your intake, you are bound to increase your body weight. Sedentary lives, poor food choices and lack of exercise, all contribute to the exponential increase in obesity and related complications.

Excessive consumption of saturated fats and trans-fats can prove deadly in the long run. These fats typically take a solid form at room temperature and are associated with increasing blood cholesterol and heart diseases. Many fast foods are cooked in hydrogenated oils which are made to have long shelf lives. This kind of processing makes the oils extremely unhealthy as it is a storehouse of trans-fats which the body immediately stores under the skin as fat. These fats raise the level of bad cholesterol in the body thereby reducing the good cholesterol. This makes fast food a sure recipe for disaster.

With all the overdose of fats, oils and calories, the liver gets burdened as it has to incessantly work overtime to break them down. Eating fast food for prolonged periods of time can cause as great a harm to your liver as alcohol.