(Fast Food) Ok thats it. Time to grow up

[SubakuGaara]

So I admit, even at 25, and a 3rd year medical student, I still am somewhat of a child. I still laugh when someone just farts rather loudly midsentence and then keeps going like nothing happened. I still can't seem to keep my room from looking like a small explosive device detonates inside it every morning, despite all the technological advances in de-explosifying small bedrooms that my local Ikea store has to offer. And I still eat fast food. In fact, my enjoyment of fast food is one of greatest vices. I literally have eaten every sandwich McDonalds and Burger king has ever made, uncountable times over. I probably have had more fast food in my life than non-fast food. Heck in the last 2 weeks alone, I must have eaten at least 30 pieces of heat-lamp baked fried chicken (4x 9-piece specials for $7.99) from a place called Popeyes chicken (kind of like a cajun version of KFC for you guys nack home in England).

Why is that? Why do people, myself included, love fast food despite it obviously being poison? A lot of people argue its cheap, but thats not really true. Dollar for dollar, you're better off buying food in a grocery store and cooking it yourself. No, its not money but 2 things. One is the time crunch. We have less and less time each day to actually cook and enjoy our meals. The other is reason is denial. Look at the name. Fast food. We hold on far too strongly to the belief that despite the bag soaked in grease, and laden with 3 or 4x the amount of salt you need, and despite all the millions of people who will develop heart disease because of this stuff, it still fundamentally is food. KFC fundamentally is just chicken. Arby's is just roast beef and bread. And Taco Bell still fundamentally is just ground meat and tortillas. Fundamentally its still just food (which should never go to waste) that's enough for me to overlook the rest of their flaws.

Well, today is the start of a new era. Apparently Taco Bell is being class-action sued because what they're calling beef doesn't actually have enough beef in it to call it beef. Its only maybe 35% meat and the rest is some mysterious concoction of fluids, chemicals, and who knows what else. It apparently has upset enough people to where they aren't going to sit around and take it anymore.

I am one of such people. I have nothing to do with the lawsuit, but damn it, no more fast food for me, and I recommend those of you who regularly frequent these places to consider a drastic lifestyle change as I just have. You can't even say its food anymore.

[Akranadas]

It's all about convenience.

Buying and making your own food, while satisfying in its own right is full of more hazards then simply purchasing fast food. While you may think it's also cheaper to buy the ingredients from the supermarket and create the meal at home, it most likely isn't in the end. You usually end up with left overs that eventually turn into mould (unless you train yourself to eat it for lunch) and then you have the left over ingredients that often not, sit in your cupboard or fridge taking up space as you don't have any other recipes that uses them.

Fast food takes the hassle out of preparing food. We all wish we had the time, skills and cash to spend hours in the kitchen making our own sauces and preparing our own vegetables, and I am sure a fare few people here do exactly that; we just either don't have the energy or time to devote to it. I myself certainly do enjoy making my own food and opting out of getting fast food, but there are nights where I get home, slump on the couch, or stare into the cupboard/fridge and just can't seem to see a meal out of the mix-match ingredients I have. So I'll opt to get Fast food a night or two a week, and my diet/body can handle it; I eat healthy the other nights, so it balances out.

Also, Fast Food doesn't have to be unhealthy; there are plenty of healthy alternatives popping up (At least in Australia) that offer healthy meals for you with little of the grease talk about. I mean, our fast food certainly isn't dripping with it as you've described.

[Paladin]

Sure you can. Anything with calories, protein, fat, and carbs is food. It may not be the healthiest food available, but it's still food. And honestly diet matters less than exercise in both short term fitness and appearance, and long term health, but no one wants to face the hard fact that you can't be healthy without hours of exertion.

Lately I'm cooking our dinners every night, but while I'm saving money and we're eating healthier, not everyone can manage to produce truly tasty dinners every night from scratch. Unless you have at least an hour per day to devote to making dinner, you simply don't have the time.

[Guilliman]

Although the actual website makes it look dubious, it comes from the book "The End of Overeating: Taking Control Of Our Insatiable Appetite", by David A Kessler, published by Penguin,UK.

http://kfcmenu.info/why-fat-salt-and...ting-at-times/

I quote an important fact:

“Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more,” which was read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the “three points of the compass.”

Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behavior and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what’s called a “bliss point”, at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in “hedonic value”.

It's the same thing of which I saw a documentary a while ago. Basically for example, McDonald, continue to try and find the sweetspot of fat, sugar and salt in order to make their products the most satisfying and rewarding.

I can see how it can be quite addictive to want to feel satisfied, happy and rewarded. A dangerous ground for a food business, but totally legal.

[Paladin]

Well, traditional food is also high in butter (fat) and salt. They're flavor enhancers, and if you want to cook food that tastes good and is cheap, butter and salt are pretty much how you do it. Any other approach is costly, and probably won't end up saving you money over fast food.

If you go to a really fancy restaurant, that prepares food in a truly traditional manner, you'll find your dinner has more fat and salt than you would have had at McDonalds.

The main difference between fast food/prepackaged food and the kind of scratch made food you get at a high end restaurant or when cooking at home is that the scratch cooked food will be made with natural ingredients like butter, and the fast food and prepackaged food will be made with a lot of artificial analogues that allow them to reduce costs and make more profit, as well as a ton of preservatives and such. But how big a deal you consider that to be is a pretty subjective matter.

[Akranadas]

As Paladin mentioned, most fancy restaurants will smother food in butter, cream, salts and oils to enhance the flavour which can tip the meal into the realms that some fast food won't even reach. No matter where you get your food, be it home, fast food or restaurant you'll be injesting some amount of fats and oils that could be unhealthy.

In fact; anything can be unhealthy in the wrong dosage.

[General Nuke Em]

I end up boiling pasta, boiling dumplings, boiling vegetables, etc. and throwing various sauces on them to make them taste good most days. Or do people expect to eat like marinated steaks and stuff every night for dinner?

[Paladin]

Boiling pasta and throwing sauce over it is not cooking from scratch, and in most cases isn't really saving you much money.

If you're trying to save money, you'll be wanting to make your own pasta, and your own sauce (Although obviously in winter it's cheaper to buy canned tomato puree as a base for your red sauce than buy tomatoes and puree them...).

But even to prepare a simple thing like hamburger helper will end up taking an hour out of your day when you consider prep, cooking time, and cleanup.

I find I can cook pretty gourmet stuff for quite cheap, and it's no hardship to eat the same thing for three days or so if it's good enough. So I generally make a dinner that will last a few days in leftovers.

But often the prep for a dinner needs to start that morning, or even two days before. So if you're not willing to plan ahead and cook pretty constantly, it will end up not working out in terms of cost.

[No Surrender]

Why do people love fast food? Simple, it tastes good. It appeals to our Neanderthal craving for all the fats, proteins and sugars we can get our hands on. It's unhealthy, sure and it's probably fair to call it poison in a way but when has that ever stopped people from putting something in their bodies? Consider alcohol and tobacco - two substances that are quite literally poison but millions of people willingly subject themselves to that on a daily basis. Face it, we're generally pretty bad at making long term decisions for our own benefit - especially if our present pleasure is on the line.

Also, yes fast food is pretty awful for you if you have a lot of it but I hardly think that it matters if you have it occasionally as a treat or comfort food. I try to limit myself to one meal of fast food a month and I definitely try to cook for myself the rest of the time, with regular exercise I'm actually lighter now than I was before on a zero fast food diet. Also, the convenience factor that others have raised is a massive factor as well. As a med student I'm sure you've had days where you get back from school and just feel like flopping down on the couch out of exhaustion, hell I feel that way sometimes after a long day at law school, and that's when our urge to get something quick and nasty is at its strongest - you don't really care what you eat as long as it's tasty and easy.

PS, I changed the title slightly to give people an idea of what's going on here.

[General Nuke Em]

Ok yeah Pally, I guess different goals then. I'm not really trying to bother saving money, but rather to have minimum :effort: when feeding myself. Making one trip to the grocery store for several packages of tortellini and vegetables and pasta sauce and then just boiling water and then adding stuff to the water until it boils again is less effort than making a dozen trips to a fast food place. I have very little patience for the making meals from scratch thing unless its for company.

[Malachi]

Apparently Taco Bell is being class-action sued because what they're calling beef doesn't actually have enough beef in it to call it beef. Its only maybe 35% meat fluids, chemicals, and who knows what else. It apparently has upset enough people to where they aren't going to sit around and take it anymore.

This isn't limited to fast food though. What really pisses me off these days is that unless you go to the countryside and buy, say, meat directly from a farmer, there's a huge chance that what you bought is only around 50% actual meat.

So, even if you cook for yourself, it gets harder and harder to actually control what you eat.

[Paladin]

Yup. Cooking... Real cooking is essentially a full time job. If all you're after is convenience then yeah, pasta works well (Although for me a trip to the nearest fast food is a five minute thing, so even then...).

But yes, my goal has been to save money first, and make our diet healthier as a secondary goal. I've been spending a lot of effort making our diet as cheap as possible without sacrificing taste, which means cooking from scratch most of the time (But I do a quick cost analysis on everything to figure out where the cheapest point is, like using canned tomato puree being cheaper than fresh tomatoes). Some dishes I start when I get up in the morning (Generally by checking my recipes, picking something out, and going to the store for ingredients) but others I put into motion a day or two in advance by buying the meat and starting the brine. Other things only need to be marinaded for a few hours. I discovered that while running my actual smoker is expensive, doing a low and slow cook in my oven is not, and makes passable pulled pork (Although it's obviously tastier when it's been properly smoked). When we see meat marked way down, we buy it and I build meals around it. We got cheap hamburger a few days back so we've had a few days where I used up some of our stock of hamburger helper. We just got cheap stew beef and chuck roast, which I can transform into stew, or braise or slow roast and turn into something wonderful.

I figure I'm saving us a few hundred dollars a month compared to our previous habit of eating out several times a week and subsisting off of frozen food the rest of the time.

We still buy frozen, but only what we see on sale, because with all the leftovers we don't need to eat frozen food often, and therefore we don't have to buy it when it's not on sale.

But all of that comes at the expense of hours of my time. That's fine with me, I think the savings are worth it, and we really need to cut the corners we can, having just a bought a house not even a year ago, and planning almost a month in Europe soon. And well, I spent several hundred dollars when I hosted Thanksgiving, between the new table, service, table dressing, propane for the smoker, various tools for prep, and so on. A lot of that expense is things we can keep using for a long time, but still, we needed to cut back, so I decided cooking every dinner would be my contribution.

Still, just cooking dinners I can see that if I were trying to prepare three meals a day, every day, I'd pretty well have no time to do anything else, and honestly I don't think most people in our modern life even have the hour or three a day it takes me to keep up with dinners.

[dd14]

Fast Food is evil. It's a product of corporations cutting corners wherever they can to provide a barely edible...blagh fuck it.

I find it incredibly strange that the notion of "eating healthy" has created a sub-culture created by and exclusive to the people who can afford only the most organic and natural of foods, all the while looking down on those whose diet doesn't consist of "organic, organic, and organic". It's a fad in my opinion, akin to the "Apple (company) or nothing" people.

Look, there's really no question at this point that almost all fast food has suspect ingredients and questionable effects on your heath if you eat it for exactly thirty days, but it's absolutely ridiculous that people feel "bad" when they eat it. The only reason people even "feel bad" is because health nuts vehemently demonize anything that isn't what they eat (which is organic, or at the very least "natural"). I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a heath conscious person either, but I swear that every "heath conscious" person I've met (and I've met and know a few) has given me a mini lecture or at some point in the day/meal pointed out how "unhealthy" the food I was eating was. Thanks, but you're not a fuckin' dietitian. And even if you were I'd tell you to fuck yourself because I didn't ask for your opinion.

This is quite literally a conversation I had with a friend who buys organic and prides himself on living a healthy lifestyle:

Me: You hear about that professor who ate nothing but Twinkies for two months straight and lost a whole bunch of weight? Seems to me it's less about what you eat and more about the calories.
Friend: Yeah, but he's not healthy.
Me: What do you mean? His total fat percentage and cholesterol levels were reported to have lowered. All from Twinkies and a few celery sticks.
Friend: Right, but he isn't really healthy. He ingested all those harmful ingredients only processed food have.
Me: Sure, but can you explain specifically what those ingredients are doing to his body and heath? Obviously he's pretty healthy to have a "normal" BMI, a healthy level of cholesterol, and a reduced level of fat. What's the difference between him and you?
Friend: I'm super healthy...

I'm not kidding, the conversation was that scientific that the words "super healthy" had to be used. Now in all fairness, my friend was right. The professor still took a multi-vitamin every day coupled with a few greens and a protein shake. If his diet consisted of nothing more than Twinkies, he'd have gone into a coma due to a lack of nutrients that the snacks simply don't provide. But my friend couldn't explain that, or why he felt he was "more healthy" than the professor, which is pretty stupid. He bought right into the heath craze without ever actually doing research on what the fuck the craze was about. And I think there are a ton of people in the same exact boat as him.

Another great example, my father read a book (it's a good book actually, can't remember the title at the moment) about health that covered topics like bread having no real nutritional value, the human body having problems with dairy, and how detrimental large amounts of sugar can be to your body. All informative stuff, except now every time I make a god damn sammich' I gotta listen to my paps criticize my fuckin bread by reciting a few lines from the book I have to pretend I didn't know he read so he can sound smart. Excellent.

I'm not an expert. I've done only enough research so that I'm comfortable with the choices I make with regards to my diet. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, definitely do some research on your own. But I will say this: I pretty much eat whatever the hell I want, which includes Chipotle about three times a week for lunch, fast food maybe once every week, brownies, bacon, fruit, fruit snacks, fruity drinks, brown rice, doesn't really matter so long as I'm over 3600 calories a day. I work out a measly three times a week for an hour, and I've never felt or looked better in my life. There's nothing wrong with my "health" either, I'm fucking healthy. Doctor says so. I guess I could go the extra mile and spend 43$ on an organic banana at Whole Foods to be "super healthy", but I feel pretty good regardless so I think I'll save the cash.

tl;dr You can eat just about whatever you want so long as you get some exercise. If you can keep some kind of balance between nutritious foods like fruits/veggies/meats and crappy-for-you-but-delicious processed foods, and of course exercise, your body will work itself out. You'll be just as "healthy" as a guy who stays completely away from fast food and only eats what that stupid fuckin food pyramid says to.

[Flagg]

Fast Food is disgusting, and people have no idea of what they are eating.

This, is Separated Chicken:


That is what "fast food chicken" essentially is.

[Akranadas]

The amount of alarmist reactions to fast food is funny. It must be different in American, but here in Australia; our fast food actually looks like normal food. Our fast food chicken places (KFC, Red Rooster, Oportos) uses chicken that comes from the same places I get my chicken for home use. McDonalds, Burger King the same deal applies, they source their beef from the same places my super market does. How can this be so? Well they are quite proud of boasting about it, and have thrown labels on their products indicating where it comes from. How do I know that its true? Well, a company can't commit that kind of lie without the Watchdog fining them as they've done in the past.

Our fast food also have taken steps to promote healthy eating, yeah sure it's not much but hey, you don't exactly go to McDonalds for the Salad. Yet, it's nice how they've placed on the packaging the nutritional information as well as recommend deity intake of what your about to put into your mouth. Most of the companies websites even have ingredient listings of their products

When I go to KFC or Nandos or McDonalds and bite into a chicken burger, it tastes like real chicken, looks like real chicken and feels like real chicken because it is.

[Starfisher]

Paladin: I disagree that you HAVE to exert yourself for hours to be healthy. If you eat properly, you don't have to exert yourself much at all, because your body can take care of itself if given the proper inputs.

dd14: Twinkie guy starved himself and lost weight. This is uncontroversial. I hate the "calories versus food" argument to the point of wanting to burn the world with my mind; the kind of food you eat (what you eat) can affect the amount you eat (the calories) and eating less makes you hungry. They are not independent and not in conflict, yet somehow everyone is convinced that only ONE WILL SURVIVE.

Unless you lied when signing up for the forums you're 22 years old and thus can eat whatever you want. This is a common phenomenon called "being a healthy young male", so common that every male over 35 blames their gut on the loss of it. Give it twenty years and see what happens. The problem with eating whatever the hell you want from the modern food selection is that the modern American food selection is biased towards nutrient poor, high calorie foods, and so now your diet is similarly biased; given time and unlucky genetics you'll end up with some level of metabolic syndrome, or with simply non-ridiculous genetics just plain old skinny fat. Maybe you're one of those freaks of nature that can process the modern diet for their whole lives and remain healthy, who knows. But many people are not, as evidenced by the rising tide of metabolic issues in America.

Organic is not the answer and I agree that it's mostly bullshit. But "fuck it I'm doing fine!" is great until it stops working, kind of like "house prices always go up" was great until it destroyed the financial system.

[Paladin]

Not true Fisher, all sorts of studies show that even if you look fit, and are a "healthy" weight and blah blah blah, if you don't exercise you die younger. A lot younger. In fact, if you have a desk job you'll die younger than people who have jobs where they stand all day, even if you go to the gym.

If you don't go to the gym or walk, or get some kind of regular, constant exercise (And we're talking at least three hours a week. At least), you're going to be subject to all sorts of negative health issues, no matter how skinny you are. Without exercise your cardiac health will go down the drain, regardless of your diet.

PS: Mechanically separated poultry is only used for things like chicken nuggets and sandwiches at the absolute lowest end of the fast food pool (Which is to say, McDonalds). If you order a chicken sandwich at Carl's Jr. or Jack In The Box, you're getting an actual hunk of a chicken. Also, MSP is a perfectly edible and not at all unhealthy product, so who cares? Just because it looks gross in that picture? Really?

----------

PPS: The public school system probably serves up more mechanically separated poultry to our kids in the school lunch cafeterias than all our fast food places combined.

[Starfisher]

I'd like to see your studies, if you please. Especially to see how they controlled for diet when coming to their conclusions. I would argue that if you eat the standard american diet, your health will suck. Exercise may mediate the effects of SAD, but the better way is to not eat it at all.

Like this guy: http://www.arthurdevany.com/

Trains once a week, high intensity weights, and eats right for the rest of it. 72 and doing great.

I'm not saying you can lay on the ground motionless forever if you eat properly, only that the conventional idea that you have to suffer for AT LEAST three hours a week (usually running) is bullshit.

[Paladin]

It doesn't matter what you do for three hours a week. Walking to the store is fine even. Just that you need to be on your feet doing something for at least that much time per week. Hitting the gym is of course better than just walking to the store, but you need some sort of activity. Too many americans have literally zero physical activity. They get up, go to work, sit at a desk all day, come home, watch tv or sit in front of their computers. The less activity you have in your daily life, the harder you need to hit the gym. That's just obvious.

And I'm not even going to get into it with you on your crusade against the modern diet. Your position is a fringe one with little evidence to back it up.

[dd14]

Starfisher: Yes, I'm 22 years old. And sure, much of my current health situation could be written off as an inherent advantage due to my age, but age doesn't negate bad eating habits nor grant immunity to weight gain. I graduated from high school at about 165-170lbs, or normal within my BMI, two years later I was 204lbs. That's thirty pounds overweight. Drinking wasn't the problem either as I didn't do much of it, instead it was due to an absolutely horrendous diet and zero exercise. Trust me when I say I struggled losing that weight too, even at my age, and it took more than a few tries before I succeeded.

My entire point was that many people eat too much and exercise too little, it sounds simple but a little bit of exercise goes a long way. Besides, over a certain caloric intake it doesn't matter what you eat, you'll gain weight. If my BMR is 3500 calories (it is) and I consume 3000 calories a day from McDonalds, I'm gonna lose weight. If I consume 4000 calories, I'm going to gain weight. Simple. I know you know that, I wasn't trying to sound like a genius. And even though I sincerely doubt McDonalds can provide a 50 / 30 / 20 diet, your body is going to work itself out.

That was why I brought up the the professor. He ate garbage. Fucking Twinkies. Nobody defends Twinkies. So he ate Twinkies, a multivitamin, a protein shake, a few greens (quite literally) a day, and two months later he had lost thirty pounds, lowered his LDL, increased his HDL, and reduced his level of triglycerides by 39%. And no health problems reported. If you weren't intrigued by that, fine. I thought it was interesting considering the assumptions most people make about what it is to be healthy.

I just feel like everyone is shouting "FAST FOOD IS BAD, ITS NOT REALLLLLLLLL. YOUR HEALTH IS AT RISK" but very few actually know why. Most just ramble off hollow answers like "it's not healthy!" or "it's nasty!", but specifically can't explain it. And then we're shown those terrible photos like the one a few posts up. Yeah, it's disgusting, but it looks nothing like that when it's served to me. And it's delicious. Plus it's a very small fragment of my diet, so what exactly is it doing LONGTERM? I'm still getting exercise and proper nutrition from other sources, so what's the fuckin' problem?

Is it just that eating it consistently over long periods of time causes problems? No shit? Fine, say that. Don't eat it so god damn often, it will cause serious health problems...which can be corrected if you stop eating it and get on a normal diet.

[Kirjava]

I'm of the opinion that a KFC every now and again (oh gods it's so unholy and so good) is no bad thing. Besides, it's hard to resist when you're on the way home at 1am and you're hungry and oh look! There's a fried chicken place! That seems like a GREAT IDEA. Go for a run the next day, you'll need to sweat out the booze anyway.

[Starfisher]

And I'm not even going to get into it with you on your crusade against the modern diet. Your position is a fringe one with little evidence to back it up.

So in other words you're not going to quote your studies or explain how they controlled for diet?

I doubt you really know my position at all, but yeah, thanks for making random assumptions and then bowing out of the discussion based on them. Rejecting someone because they're "fringe" sounds absolutely hilarious coming from you of all people. Now that I think about it I'm not sure if you're joking or not.

dd14: The Twinkie guy doesn't really interest me because he was on such severe calorie restriction. As you say, if you force your energy balance to an extreme, you get an obvious result. His results are obvious. Losing weight/fat improves blood panels, so it wasn't really surprising. Also, since he only did it for two months, he avoided virtually all of the real problems of diet (ie maintenance and long term health effects). What happens in the middle of the extremes is much more interesting, and unfortunately much harder to measure.

Another guy ate nothing but fast food, predominately McDonalds, for a month. He lost weight and improved his blood panel too. He just avoided the soda and the fries and voila. That's more interesting to me because it's a more realistic behavioral pattern than 1000 kcal a day deficit with half of total intake being twinkies.

What interests me in diet is two things: 1) mental models which help people eat properly and 2) diets which allow your endocrine system to properly regulate fat/weight/appetite. "Hai guys I ate <X> for <Y> months and look what happened!" is just a red herring, since the diet problem is one that lasts forever. Anyone can do anything for a set period of time. Hell, I ate nothing but meat for a year. Could I do that for a lifetime? Maybe, if I really needed to, but for most people it's not a sustainable mode of living so it's not helpful to the discussion. What's most interesting is the diet that you can eat, never weigh or measure anything or even think about calories, and still have a healthy outcome.

I would argue that most people simply lack any real rigorous mental model for food, and so they eat whatever. Since "whatever" nowadays is mostly total shit, they get shitty outcomes. If the only thing available was meat and vegetables, I doubt many people would get fat, regardless of how they made their food choices or what they did for exercise. In reality, people randomly awake to the fact that food matters beyond what it tastes like, and then they settle on some mental model - calorie counting, low carb, paleo, whatever - and try to live their life by it. If the model isn't strong enough/compelling enough, eventually they fail (see virtually all studies of "diets" in the long term).

You're right saying that people eat to much and move to little, but the reasons for that are not necessarily simple sloth. It's often as much a problem of knowledge as it is a problem of motivation; you can find anecdote after anecdote of people who were overweight but who suddenly got in shape once they discovered some way of looking at the world which made it all click. Sounds like you're one of them actually.

Anyway, we probably agree more than we disagree on this.

[SquidDNA]

"Not true Fisher, all sorts of studies show that even if you look fit, and are a "healthy" weight and blah blah blah, if you don't exercise you die younger."

*cough*

[Open Blue]

When I left home, I went through 3 phases:
1- Cooking like my parents did.
This was rather time consuming and quickly broke the bank on a regular basis. Both work, study and doing student things ate time and money too, so my food habits essentially ended up conflicting with my lifestyle. This was a confusing time for me, the small comforts of familiarity in my food and cooking were working against me. While I ended up eating well, it was unsustainable.

2- Fast food.
Durring this time, it was nothing but Maccas, KFC and pizza. Thankfully I kept fit by walking to and from work, about an hour each way. The problem was that I didn't have any energy, hence I resorted to energy drinks to counter this, even more bad stuff going into myself. Fast food was, at that point, not only convenience, as I could pick it up on the way home from work, but also financially better than buying like what I was before hand. As an after-thought, I was sick very often during this time.

3- Eating well
I buy less, I eat less, but I'm still always full. There are things to munch on when I feel the need too. Simple meals with small prep time with lots of fresh fruit, veggies and nuts. I eat quinoa instead of rice, grow my own herbs, strawberries and avocados and do mixed martial arts as I don't walk to work any more. Cooking has become a passion and I'm constantly experimenting with dishes and foods I create. I had KFC a few weeks ago as friends where having some and I felt sick afterwards from all the oil and fats.
The last thing I want to do is sound like a health nut, but this has been the cheapest and one of the fastest options concerning food for me. The excuses of convenience, finance and taste are all bogus. It's a personal choice and if you choose to be fat and lazy, you really don't have anyone to blame but yourself.

That was why I brought up the the professor. He ate garbage. Fucking Twinkies. Nobody defends Twinkies. So he ate Twinkies, a multivitamin, a protein shake, a few greens (quite literally) a day, and two months later he had lost thirty pounds, lowered his LDL, increased his HDL, and reduced his level of triglycerides by 39%. And no health problems reported. If you weren't intrigued by that, fine. I thought it was interesting considering the assumptions most people make about what it is to be healthy.

He, most likely, exercised like a pro and made sure those multi-vitamins and greens were filling in his diet. All the twinkies do, if you're active, is add extra energy, which you can work off easily and loose weight.
It's not that fast food by itself that's bad, if interwoven with a balanced diet and activity, but a diet heavy on fast food with a lack of required vitamins and exercise that will pile on the kilos.

[dd14]

I would argue that most people simply lack any real rigorous mental model for food, and so they eat whatever. Since "whatever" nowadays is mostly total shit, they get shitty outcomes. If the only thing available was meat and vegetables, I doubt many people would get fat, regardless of how they made their food choices or what they did for exercise.

I agree with this completely, but there's really not that many options. You either settle for shitty food, which like you said is just about everything, or you fork over large quantities of money for healthier food. And there's only one Whole Foods in my area, which is to say that it's not only more expensive to eat healthy, it's harder to find the place to buy the healthier foods from. And it's probably not close to you.

Rusty Nail: I found the article for you to read, seems I may have been mistaken to comment that there were "no health problems", an American Dietetic Association spokeswoman is quoted saying that "There are things we can't measure.", so the guy might have some problem he's not aware of.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08...sor/index.html

Then again, she goes on to say it might affect his risk of cancer...seriously? What doesn't cause cancer these days? Is that some get-out-of-jail-free card they get to use whenever they run out of ideas?

[Nerdfish]

If you are a medical student, perhaps you know that precise composition of what you eat doesn't matter much due to the digestive process. Nothing larger small polypeptide can be transported past intestine lining anyway.
Every item is basically broken down to the similar set of molecules, even when the ratio between these molecules vary depend on things eaten.

I don't see why we should fuss over food that are supposed to be "healthy" or "unhealthy" a long as we don't eat too much of something.

[Trinity]

A decent tasting meal at McD's for the whole family... 12 GBP. Decent meal at any mainstream local restaurant... 50 GBP. 16 times out of 20 the stuff at McD's tastes better and is likely healthier.

Love the Southwest Chicken Sandwich back in Canada. Over here in the UK the Sweet Chilli Chicken sandwich is excellent.

[Harmanoff]

Just to throw a another side of fast food into the mix here, is there really nothing except the health side of it that bothers you all? All that disposable packaging, the crap wages, the meat industry constantly devouring land for soy plantations.. i mean, on the whole i don't think fast food is poison but taking in the whole picture i can totally agree with the sentiment that giving up fast food is, for body and soul, healthy. I always feel guilty when i wind up in one of those plastic restaurants.. it is not a satisfying experience on any level.

[SubakuGaara]

I don't see why we should fuss over food that are supposed to be "healthy" or "unhealthy" a long as we don't eat too much of something.

Yeah well you have daily limits to how much of stuff you should consume and many of these meals are 2-3x the daily limit. Salt is one of the worst offenders. There are meals out there with 2-3grams of salt.

Plus there's a lot of talk these days that perhaps there are substances in the food that are pro-lipogenesis beyond simple fat deposition, substances that are hormonally active. That McDonald burger may be making you fat by directly depositing the fat in it and by directly upregaulating fat synthesis beyond what would normally be made anyway.

@flagg
That is absolutely disgusting that picture. It reminds me of a milkshake. Please don't tell me that stuff ends up in my milkshakes.

[Starblade]

The Onion is always relevant.

[Zallis]

That's mechanically separated meat. Basically, after they get what they want from the chicken, the toss the remaining carcass (minus the internal organs) into a blender, mulch it up, and then pass it through a filter/sieve thing to get the meat. You get a lot of marrow and fat from it, but unless they go out of their way to make it unhealthy (like tossing in the skin of the chicken) it's not that much worse than dark meat in terms of fat content at that point. Basically, it's like buying a chicken from your local supermarket, taking out all the good cuts (drumsticks, wings, breasts, thighs) and tossing the remainder into a blender, and then filtering out the hard solid bits.

Usually it tastes somewhat odd or just downright bad, so they'll add all sorts of stuff to it to preserve it and make it taste good. Admittedly, it looks like milkshake. it also looks like the huge sheets of rubber they make into those little parallelogram erasers. Also reminds me of strawberry icecream. But it shouldn't end up in your milkshake unless you're drinking some very weird milkshakes to begin with. At that point (in the picture) it's raw, so even if they put it into a milkshake, you'd be better off worrying about salmonella and whatnot than it being simply unhealthy. If they actually cooked the thing, you'd get chewy rubbery bits in your milkshake.

Of course, what I wrote above is only based on a... think it was called a reclaiming facility or something like that near where I live. Other places may keep the organs and the skin, but some of the claims made by people are just plain idiotic (they toss feathers in to fill up the weight! They toss cocaine in to get you addicted to this! They toss battery acid in for... no good reason! They toss mercury in because they want us to die!) The meat itself though isn't that bad for you, and depending on how you cook it, you could probably remove most of the fat and oil in it. The preservatives and stuff is another matter, though. The stuff doesn't feel like meat when you eat it either - it's chewy and kind of rubbery - but it's still essentially protein when you get down to it.

[No Surrender]

I don't see why we should fuss over food that are supposed to be "healthy" or "unhealthy" a long as we don't eat too much of something.

Yeah but the problem is that if you go to a fast food place it's really, really hard to not eat too much of something. Take a big mac meal from McDonalds for instance. You get a burger, which is 24% of your recommended daily intake (RDI) of calories, 37% of your RDI of fats, 42% of your RDI for saturated fat and 47% of your RDI of sodium. You also get a medium order of fries with that which in itself is 16% of your calories, 25% of the fats, 8 % of the saturated fat and 18% of the sodium you're supposed to eat per day. Chuck a medium coke into the mix and you've got another 7% of your calories as well as 39% of your daily sugar intake . So let's add that up. From one big mac combo, regular size, you get:

47% of your daily calorie intake
62% of your fat intake
50% of your saturated fat intake
65% of your sodium intake
~40% of your sugar intake

That's just for one meal. If you go to McDonalds twice that day you've well exceeded your RDI of sodium and fat and that's not even counting breakfast and snacks. The point is not that eating at McDonald's once a month or something will kill you. It's that the composition of the food makes it very difficult to eat a healthy amount when you are there. This is especially problematic if you go there often which is what commonly happens to poorer people like students and low-wage earners, a combination of lack of time and lack of money can result in some very seriously unhealthy people.

PS: Nutrition information taken from Mcdonalds.co.nz.

[Paladin]

Unless you have high blood pressure there's no reason to worry about your salt intake.

[No Surrender]

Well that's simply not true, for example there is evidence that a high sodium diet can lead to heart problems independent of blood pressure effects (Source). Also there's a lot of scientific evidence that a high sodium diet causes high blood pressure so I'm not sure what your point is.

[Open Blue]

...seriously? What doesn't cause cancer these days?

Looks like eating well can prevent cancer though. I know it's the universal draw card when you run out of things to say, Starblade's posts increase my chance of cancer, but you should take these things with a grain of salt.

Also, the RDI is an approximation based on the average person. That being said, an additional 30% of the RDI of sodium from two meals is slightly worrying.

It's that the composition of the food makes it very difficult to eat a healthy amount when you are there.

This, easily. It's hard to have a balanced diet when one serving is such a large portion of your daily intake. It's doable, but staying satisfyingly full while also staying within the RDI (the same thing I rag on about being an approximation this same paragraph, but whatever).

[SubakuGaara]

Unless you have high blood pressure there's no reason to worry about your salt intake.

There's a pretty good correlation between high blood pressure and salt. Eat more salt, and you increase your chances of having high blood pressure. In fact, the first step in managing Hypertension is a trial of diet (mainly cutting out salt and alcohol) and exercise (salt loss through the skin).

[Flagg]

To be honest, living in the Developed World, we enjoy the luxury of having a meat rich diet, no matter how it's prepared. All too often I hear how eating too much red meat is bad for you.

Do we really need to eat as much meat as we do? Would not increasing our grain intake and lowering our meat content not be a healthier option compared to debating over which type of meat and how its best prepared?

It was earlier touched on that exercise is important, and while I agree, I do think a good diet is more important than exercise.

Edit: SubakuGaara, my first thought when I saw that pic was that it looks like a McDonalds strawberry icecream as well. Zallis pretty much covered the whole process of how its made, but I also heard its washed heavily in ammonia to kill bacteria, then various other additives are added to prevent it tasting disgusting. I don't know how people can simply say "it looks and tastes like chicken, so meh" when it seems anything but chicken by the end.

[Starfisher]

You either settle for shitty food, which like you said is just about everything, or you fork over large quantities of money for healthier food.

To a degree, yes, this is true. It will always be more expensive to eat meat and vegetables than it will be to eat stuff that comes in plastic packages and may have been food several months ago prior to going through the chemistry lab.

But you don't need to go to Whole Foods and shell out for the most expensive beef and the most "organic" vegetables. The cheap stuff in the nomral store will do you just fine. People quibble about omega3/6 balance and micronutrients and organic and whatever, but that misses the point: you eat right by NOT eating shit instead of seeking out good food. It sounds subtle but it's important. So long as your definition of "shit" isn't so wide ranging as to exclude everything but the finest pastured animals it's pretty easy.

As for salt intake, the science is by no means conclusive. In fact, the benefit of a reduction in salt intake is essentially 1-2 points off your blood pressure, which might be significant population wide for people right on the edge of having blood pressure, but for a guy who is clinically stage 1 hypertensive (140–159mmHg systolic pressure), dropping down to 138 doesn't really solve the problem. Individuals might see more benefit but on average the idea that salt "causes" high blood pressure is far from a proven causal link. Or, maybe more accurately, it may be true but if your blood pressure only goes up by 1 point it's not particularly relevant, and the focus on salt ignores the massive other variety of factors that play a role.

I think Paladin is perfectly correct to say what he said, unless your definition of eating salt includes eating over a hundred grams a day or something.

[No Surrender]

We can quibble over exactly what effect salt has on blood pressure but even we assume arguendo that Fisher and Paladin are completely right (and disregard the various physicians and studies who claim otherwise) the point still stands that it's much harder to have a healthy diet when you consume around half of your daily recommended intake of calories in one out of three daily meals (and that's not even counting snacks which tend to be high calorie), same goes for fat, saturated fat and sugar which indisputably are not good for your body when consumed in excess. I acknowledge Rusty's point that RDIs are abstractions based on averages, but it's impractical for the people who eat fast food the most (i.e. people of lower socio-economic status) to go to a doctor and get their dietary intake recommendations measured out in tests. When used as a baseline for comparison I think it's fair to say that a McDonalds meal makes keeping to a healthy intake difficult for an average person, outliers exist but aren't all that relevant.

[Akranadas]

You just need to ask yourself, "Do I need a side of fries and a soda?" Why not just get a burger and a water?

[dd14]

A burger and...water? That's the most un-American thing I've ever heard of. I'll eat my burger with an unhealthy dose of sugar syrup water, thank you very much.

[Starblade]

DIET sugar syrup water, thank you. And a large fries.

I just ate a chicken marinara sub from Subway keeping in mind that chicken ooze picture.

[Starfisher]

(and disregard the various physicians and studies who claim otherwise)

You could just read the article and look at the study. They're right there.

The science shows that lowering salt intake has a trivial effect on blood pressure, because high blood pressure is caused by all sorts of factors outside of salt intake. The screams about salt are largely crusaders out to make a public health change which probably won't do anything at all, but health crusades are heady things, so that won't go away any time soon.

I would dispute that fat and saturated fat are "indisputably" bad for your body when consumed in excess - actually, I'd dispute that the amount of fat found in a hamburger constitutes excess. If saturated fat was indisputably bad for your body, the Tokelau Migrant Study (traditional Tokelau == 50% calories as sat. fat) would not be interesting, since all the islanders would have simply died early instead of having no incidence of chronic disease before migrating. The RDAs aren't just based on averages, they're based on arbitrary health paradigms.

When you go to a fast food restaurant and eat every single thing in the meal package every day, yes, you will eventually get fat. If you go and do what Akra suggests, you'll probably be fine. It's a question of avoiding the excess crap with no nutritional value (soda, fries). Even McDonald's beef is still beef, and the amount of sugar you'd get with the ketchup and what have you wouldn't be a huge. I challenge you to unconsciously overeat hamburgers for months on end; it's just difficult to achieve. Unconsciously overeating fries and soda? Easy. The problem isn't fast food necessarily, it's that people don't understand how to manage their own response to it.

[Zallis]

I also heard its washed heavily in ammonia to kill bacteria, then various other additives are added to prevent it tasting disgusting. I don't know how people can simply say "it looks and tastes like chicken, so meh" when it seems anything but chicken by the end.

Not sure about the ammonia bit, since adding a crap ton of salt (which they do already) would kill most of the bacteria anyways. Though, that should probably be an indication you shouldn't be eating this stuff. This stuff is so inhospitable to life that even bacteria can't grow on it, so why would a person eat it?! Same could be said of alcohol too, I guess, but that's another can of worms.

While it does taste like chicken, it's disgustingly strong tasting chicken. I think it's because they throw the marrow and cartilege in there too. The only way a person can stomach it is through all the preservatives and salt that's added probably. I hate to waste food - almost to the point of it being a problem, but even I'm not crazy enough to attempt to suck the marrow out of chicken bones or eat the muscles between the ribs. There's nothing technically wrong with the meat itself, I guess, but it tastes like shit, and after all the stuff is added, it tastes like salty, spicy shit. It doesn't really look like chicken, and it tastes like a really fermented chicken, so I think people who think it tastes fine are just as crazy as the people who say things like "They throw battery acid in it to kill us faster!" The only reason people and restaurants (I believe McDonalds used to make their nuggets out of this stuff) was because it's dirt cheap.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwNFYbYRksI

As conceited as i think Jamie Oliver is, this video sums up the process rather nicely, in addition to highlighting a problem with fast food - it's like comfort food, but available all the time. I'm not sure if that's a psychological or physiological thing that makes us so addicted to certain foods, but it seems to have become quite a problem because of the availability and low cost of unhealthy foods.

[No Surrender]

@Fisher, First regarding your article. It really doesn't help that you linked a source with this on the front page. It makes it a bit more difficult to believe the article when it says that everything is happening for political reasons when it's hosted on a clearly partisan right-slanting site which, by the way, seems to devote itself to attacking climate change. So yeah, at best there's vigorous scientific debate about the topic with proponents on both sides. I don't see how you get from vigorous scientific debate to agreeing with "unless you have high blood pressure you don't have to worry about your salt intake".

As for the rest of your arguments, you sound like a creationist - desperately trying to throw out any study which might, on some tiny level, contradict the currently accepted mainstream model. Sure, one study might have inconsistencies (which could, by the way, be explained away with genetic predisposition or any number of factors) with the accepted theory but that's like pointing at the French Paradox and concluding "Clearly there's nothing wrong with alcohol and cigarettes. We should all drink and smoke more".

Look, I'm not saying that having a McDonald's combo on occasion is going to make you drop dead from a heart attack and yes, it's possible to have just a burger once in a while and be okay but the point is that you're still consuming much more calories, fat, salt, sugar, etc per gram than you would eating other, healthier foods. The vast majority of people don't stop eating when they've reached a caloric limit in their head, they stop eating when they're full and they'll order as much food as they think they'll need to make them full. How many people actually go into a McDonald's and order a burger and water? I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that and even if there were people like that they would still be a tiny insignificant minority compared to the amount of people who go there and get a combo, ever mind people who then upsize said combo.

Going back to the premise of the tread as laid out in the OP, the problem isn't that people are having the occasional piece of fried chicken or burger with no fries and no drink. The problem is that people are having 30 pieces of fried chicken over a two week period. I'm not saying that it's impossible to go to McDonalds and get a balanced meal, what I'm saying is that doing so is very difficult for the vast majority of people and I agree with you that it's our response to food that's partially to blame as well. However, not having fries and a drink is much easier said than done when you're going to a restaurant where just about everything comes with a side of fries and a drink and all the advertising and pricing is designed to entice you into getting fries and a drink or even an upsized version of both!

[Moe]

The science shows that lowering salt intake has a trivial effect on blood pressure, because high blood pressure is caused by all sorts of factors outside of salt intake. The screams about salt are largely crusaders out to make a public health change which probably won't do anything at all, but health crusades are heady things, so that won't go away any time soon.

People are often confused why many of these medical studies seem to contradict each other, or why certain things are linked to causing cancer, then again maybe not, then someone else finds another link and so on. A lot of them are statistical analyses. In other words, we look at a population that does X, and then run statistical tests to determine whether there is a statistically significant correlation (p<0.05) between X and disease Y. The problem is that in a lot of cases, the underlying biochemical processes are poorly or not at all understood, leaving us with the good old correlation != causation problem. Good studies will attempt to control for that by looking at other variables, but until someone actually figures out how this shit works on a cellular and subcellular level a lot of it is bound to get "disproven" and "re-proven" later on.

[Elukka]

That is what "fast food chicken" essentially is.

Often repeated, but only half-true. Regulations here (and I believe in the US too) require that it be specifically labeled as mechanically separated meat. McDonald's food doesn't contain it. (Could vary by country though, I guess?) Those nuggets in my fridge don't contain it. In fact, the only product where I've ever seen it used were the cheapest of the cheap burgers at the supermarket.

[Kirjava]

Or, as you may have meant to say, the most delicious burgers at the supermarket.

Oh gods.

[Methuselath]

To add to Elukka's point, the nuggets in Malaysia (McDonalds as well) are definitely NOT MSC's. Ours are real chicken, but you can actually see the meat after the bite. The MSC's are usually the lowest of the low that they serve in schools.

[Starfisher]

As for the rest of your arguments, you sound like a creationist - desperately trying to throw out any study which might, on some tiny level, contradict the currently accepted mainstream model.

Really. How about you state clearly the "accepted model". Hint: it's that lowering salt intake lowers your blood pressure by a few points. I'm not "throwing out" studies, I'm repeating the conventional wisdom to you. I don't think you actually know what you're talking about and are instead assuming that since everyone says salt must be lowered, the effect has be more significant than crazy ol' creationist Starfisher is saying. That's simply not true. Even the most positive estimates are talking about 4-6 mmHg, which when you look at hypertension, is, you guessed it, trivial. This is how I conclude that unless you have a blood pressure problem, you don't really have to worry about salt intake - objectively, looking at the actual numbers, you simply don't have to. And this of course assumes you are eating normally and not literally shoveling salt into your body.

Also, the article I linked was originally published in the journal Science in 1998. Congratulations on doing your bias-dismissal research! You win! If you want a link directly so you can actually read the damn thing, here. I had read it before and just grabbed the first link when I googled for it. I know that anything global warming deniers believe is wrong, kind of like using toilet paper is evil because Hitler did it, but maybe, just maybe, we can get past that and actually read the argument.

However, not having fries and a drink is much easier said than done when you're going to a restaurant where just about everything comes with a side of fries and a drink and all the advertising and pricing is designed to entice you into getting fries and a drink or even an upsized version of both!

Actually, it's really simple.

"Would you like fries with that?"

"No thanks."

"Super size?"

"Nah."

OH MY GOD I FOUGHT OFF THE CRAZY MIND CONTROL ADVERTISING THAT FORCES ME TO EAT POUNDS OF FRIES OHH NOOOO

You are assuming that McDonalds is the problem because they offer certain foods. I am assuming that people who refuse to make simple choices which could render even McDonald's every day relatively benign are the problem.

The problem is that in a lot of cases, the underlying biochemical processes are poorly or not at all understood, leaving us with the good old correlation != causation problem.

Exactly. People can construct whatever case they want from the existing pile of data by ignoring the data that contradicts it. Then they build a career on it. And then they try to make it a public health issue. Which becomes political. And once that happens, the issue is screwed.