Fast Food Restaurants

Improved Essays
Are Fast Food Restaurants the leading cause for Obesity in America?
Fast Food restaurants have been around for years, and they provide a fast and easy way to eat cheap food if you 're short on time. But does this convenience come at a price? Fast Food may be the leading cause for a serious issue in America; Obesity. The Harvard School of Public Health defines Obesity simply as “having too much body fat” (Obesity Definition), meaning that your body mass is above the sizes of what they define as a healthy human. The problem of Obesity extends beyond that however. Obesity can be linked with “Bone and joint disease, Type 2 Diabetes, and even Heart disease” (Obesity), which are all life threatening conditions. It is a scary thought that Obesity
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A great deal of Fast Food restaurants contain high amounts of sugar and animal fats to make them taste better. Animal fats are given to animals such as cows to make them provide more meat for bigger portion sizes. On top of all of that these unhealthy foods carry an immense amount of calories in one serving. Take the burgers from McDonald’s for example. With their many signature burgers such as “the Big Mac and Double Quarter Pounder reaching 540 and 780 calories” (McDonald 's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items.) respectively, it 's no wonder why burgers get their unhealthy reputation. If consuming these burgers was not bad enough for one 's health, they are typically sold in bundles with fries and soft drinks to make a complete meal. Even if you were going to go for a medium fries and soft drink, the calories would still be somewhere around “340 calories for the fries and roughly 200 for a soft drink (using Coca Cola products as an example)” (McDonald 's USA Nutrition Facts for Popular Menu Items.). These number can reach way above the recommended amount of calories that you should have per meal. Livestrong.com recommends that “the average woman and man needs around 2,000 and 2,500 calories respectively everyday” (Recommended Intake of Calories Per Day.); that would be around 666-833 calories for 1 of 3 meals per day. The burger alone about reaches that level with the fries and drink included surpassing it immensely. It not isn 't the problem of us simply eating too much food, but also that every piece of food at these restaurants contain a surprisingly large amount of calories that your body doesn 't know what to do

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