Fast Road to Fat City - EatingWell.com

What price all those cheap burgers & fries??Science starts to find the unsettling answers:

I've stepped into the fire-grilled world of Burger King with a mission to order the healthiest meal on the menu. It's 12:30 in the afternoon, the line is six deep, orders from the drive-thru crackle over the intercom, and nine workers hustle to keep the burgers moving. Glossy posters of golden-crusted chicken and juicy bacon burgers hang everywhere. The unmistakable aroma of French fries and crispy chicken surrounds me.

I am tempted. A cashier dressed in a maroon uniform looks at me expectantly from under his black cap as I peer over his head at the brightly lit menu board.
"Do you have any nutrition information about the meals?" I ask. He raises a brow and silently points to a poster on the wall behind me. I turn to squint at row after row of tiny listings—88 statistics for each menu item with calories, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, fiber and more. To order lunch, I have almost 5,000 numbers to review. I turn back, confused.

"You probably want the Chicken Whopper," he offers, "or maybe the Veggie Burger." Then he flips his thumb at the poster. "If I looked at that poster," he says, rolling his eyes, "I'd probably never eat here again."

But people do come back, and in droves. The average American consumer eats three burgers and four orders of fries each week. A typical American child now gets one-fourth of his or her vegetables in the form of French fries or potato chips. Half our nation's family food budgets are spent in restaurants, with fast-food operations getting the lion's share of the spending.

According to new studies, those patterns have devastated public health, directly feeding the obesity epidemic and increasing risk of life-threatening disease. Trans fats, massive portions and highly refined carbohydrates along with fast food's ubiquitous presence and incessant advertising, say health experts, have collectively created a dangerous scenario for unwary consumers.

On the Junk Food Trail:

For two months I've been on a quest, frequenting fast-food joints from McDonald's to KFC, from Taco Bell to Quiznos. Over and over again, I confront the same problem: even when healthy options do exist, it's awfully difficult to decipher the menu to find them. The salad I chose at McDonald's was laden with cheese and bacon, surprisingly high in saturated fat and calories. The "wheat" bun I ordered at Subway turned out to be refined, not whole-grain, and I didn't realize that the 410 calories they listed did not include the mayonnaise (another 110 calories) that the girl slathered on the bun. The BK Chicken Whopper recommended to me actually delivers more calories and fat than the classic Double Hamburger from the same menu.

At Burger King I sit down with my grilled chicken salad near a young, heavy woman who urges her 16-month-old, a sweet-faced boy named Joshua, to take another bite of a breaded chicken sandwich. She has already finished a hefty bacon cheeseburger and large fries and is sipping on a large Coke.

Certainly it isn't simply the foods we choose that determine our weight. Americans are also eating more and burning fewer calories in work, play or just getting from place to place. Hours in front of computers and televisions exaggerate an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Physical education in school has been cut dramatically in favor of more academic courses, and a car-centered culture does little to encourage walking. The environment has complicated both the cause and the solution to the obesity crisis.

As I hop from Wendy's to Pizza Hut, I'm plagued by two questions: Is fast food really a threat to our health? And why do people continue to come back, time and time again?

Science Finds a Smoking Gun:

I find the answer to the first question at Children's Hospital Boston. Here children come to seek treatment for leukemia, for brain tumors, for crippling asthma and for heart conditions. And they come in increasing numbers to pediatrician David Ludwig to be treated for what has fast become the most ominous threat to childhood health—severe weight problems.

To Ludwig, a renowned endocrinologist, the only good fast food is no fast food. Thus he has declined an invitation to meet me at a burger franchise. Instead we climb four flights of stairs to his office where he slumps into a chair, exhausted from a week of travel. But as he begins to describe his research, Ludwig's passion rallies. He and a group of colleagues have just published a groundbreaking study in The Lancet medical journal that directly links fast-food consumption to both obesity and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

Each year, 350,000 Americans die from obesity-related illnesses. Sixty-five percent of the U.S. adult population is currently overweight, with 30 percent of those people classified as obese. (Obesity is officially defined as having a Body Mass Index of 30 or more—roughly 40 percent above ideal weight.)

While statistics involving adults are ominous, Ludwig, who regularly sees 400-pound teenagers and whose obesity clinic has a 6-month waiting list, worries more about the trends he is witnessing among children, of whom 15 percent in this country are already obese, a number predicted to climb steadily.

"Virtually every organ system in a child's body can be influenced by excessive weight," Ludwig says. Among the life-threatening complications are a condition called pseudotumor cerebri, in which the pressure of fluid around the brain increases; sleep apnea, in which breathing during the night periodically stops for 15 seconds or more at a time; and the ever more common type 2 diabetes.

It is so hard to resist fast food with the kind of advertising we are bombarded with which makes the food look sooo good your mouth waters. It's a kind of mass brainwashing or hypnosis. Fast food franchises are responsible for this kind of advertising and if that was restricted it would definitely help people to resist . A little nutritional councelling while we're young would go a long way too.