"americans are all obese." Shut the forget up already, yes we have our fast food, no not all of it is unhealthy.
This is a wide understatement.
Allow to me address the full issue, where it comes from, and how to fix it:
In the last twenty years, the American population has contributed to creating America to become the world’s fattest nation. Obesity is the result of being too overweight. The problems of obesity can include: depression, sickness, fatigue, shortness of breath, high heart rate, high risk of heart disease, high risk of heart attack, and a projected loss of fifteen to twenty-five years in the person’s life. This is primarily due to a poor diet and exercise in the American lifestyle, and the economic choices, overwhelming fast food advertising, and the exposure to an unhealthy life style at childhood. Due to these five things, nearly a third of America is obese. At this rate, heart disease will become the leading cause of death across the American continent in 2020.
McDonalds is the leading fast food corporation in America. This corporation has over ten thousand locations, including areas in other countries. Other fast food corporations such as Burger King, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, etc., reign over America as well. Many of these corporations serve people unhealthy foods that can lead to obesity. A well planned and healthy diet can help prevent obesity. Eating at a fast food restaurant regularly is the best way to have a poor diet. Most fast foods contain a large amount of calories and sugars, both of which will cause you to gain weight quickly. Many soft drinks that the average American consumes contain a large amount of caffeine, along with calories and sugar. In fast food restaurants like McDonalds, and some other non-fast food restaurants, the soft drink machines mix the soft drink beverage with a substance consisting of water and syrup to lessen the amount of the actual soft drink. The syrup in most of these soft drink mixes contains a large amount of sugar. Clearly, soft drinks and fast foods are a one way ticket to obesity. Not to mention that soft drinks alone have little to no natural ingredients.
On top of fast foods and soft drinks, corn is another ingredient for obesity. Corn is a healthy vegetable, but it is also a starch. Corn is mixed in many different kinds of food, and also mixed in things that are not food. You can find traces of corn in adhesive glues, aspirin, tires, ketchup, latex paint, batteries, chewing gum, chocolate, carpets, shoe polish, syrup, toothpaste, wallpaper, and a much longer list of many others. Take a look at fast food Coke-Cola. Fast food Coke-Cola is half water and syrup, half Coke-Cola. Your average syrup bottle contains several corn derivates and plenty of sugar. Mix that with Coke-Cola, which contains even more traces of corn, and nearly forty grams of sugar. As you can clearly see, Coke-Cola purchased from the fast food corporations is not healthy for you. There are foods outside of the fast food enterprise that are not healthy for you as well. Common food items, such as table salt, contain corn and other products that are unhealthy in large amounts. Even some salads are not as healthy as they seem, especially after you add dressing. Dressing contains corn, fat, sugar, salt, and other unhealthy ingredients.
Exercise is another problem that Americans encounter in the 21st century. The lack of exercise has to do with an eventful day, and the lack of will to exercise. Nearly every adult in America works at a designated place every day for about a third of their day. They spend another third sleeping, and the last third is mostly filled with going from place to place in a car, which results in no exercise, preparing and eating food, taking care of their house, and other desired “necessities” such as talking on the phone with friends, watching television, and other forms of socializing and entertainment. At the end of the day, the last thing on American minds is exercise. If exercise is not on a planned agenda, there is a good chance that it is not going to happen.
Exercise has many benefits to the human body. It can lower stress, which helps prevent heart disease and sickness, exercise can also help decrease body fat, and lower the anxiety to smoke. Doctors proved this smoker to athlete comparison, and concluded that ninety-eight out of one hundred athletes did not smoke. Lastly, exercise can improve motivation for getting healthy. All in all, exercise is another daily activity that all Americans should be involved in. Most doctors will recommend thirty minutes of aerobic exercise every day. This means that for thirty minutes, everyone needs to get their heart pumping for thirty minutes. Aerobic exercise will lower your resting heart rate, and help you get and remain healthy. Most Americans get an hour of exercise per week, sometimes less. Students in school attend a physical education class once a week, or every other day depending upon the school. The class time can range from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. An hour and a half sounds good, but the students are not working out the entire time. First, they dress out, or get into workout clothes, then, they warm up by stretching. By this time, twenty to thirty minutes have passed. The reverse cycle repeats at the end of class. The students will cool down by walking or stretching, then, they will dress out again, this time getting into their school clothes. At the end of the day, they have only gotten thirty minutes of exercise, which does meet the requirement, but the next day, the students will not attend their physical education class.
One of the biggest problems in the 21st century for fighting obesity is the money problem. Cheap foods will normally consist of unhealthy fast foods, doughnuts, cookies, candies, snacks, and other foods that your body does not need. The more expensive foods are usually fruits, vegetables, organic meat, and whole grain bread. Economically, your average fatty foods and sweets are cheaper to buy than common healthy foods. Every Americans wants more money in their pocket. The American population has come to purchasing the cheaper unhealthy foods other than the more expensive healthy foods to save their hard earned cash. Sadly, some Americans who want to buy healthy foods are unable to do so because their occupation does not supply enough money to purchase healthy organic food, and they are reduced to purchasing unhealthy cheap food.
Unhealthy foods became cheaper than healthy foods because of how the foods are manufactured and the seemingly universal ingredient of corn. Healthy foods are normally all natural, while unhealthy foods are designed to meet the human’s desire for fat, salt, sugar, and in liquid beverages, caffeine. Unhealthy foods are designed to satisfy the human’s taste buds. In doing so, the fat, salt, and sugar amounts are much higher than they need to be. One question that is raised to this is: how are the fast food corporations able to sell food cheaper with all of the added ingredients? This is possible because of the process of getting their meat and other main ingredients. Corporations like McDonalds and Burger King get their meat from a factory. Here at this meat factory, chickens and other animals where they get their meat are mass produced by breeding animals feeding them genetically altered formula to cause them to grow twice as fat in a matter of days. In 1950, chickens were grown to full size in sixty-eight days. In 2008, chickens were grown to full size, being twice the size of full grown chickens in 1950, and in only forty-seven days. Everything we’ve done in modern agriculture is to grow meat faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper.
On top of the food being unhealthy from the start, the working environment is worse. Former workers from Burger King have said that there was multiple times where burger patties would fall off the grill and land on the floor. Every time the worker picked up the burger patty and threw it in the trash can, their manager would criticize them saying that the worker was throwing away money. Similar cases of spoiled meat patties being thrown away were recorded with the same results: the worker’s manager would criticize the worker for throwing away money in meat form.
Corn is in many food products. Corn is easy to grow, easy to sell, and easy to use. Factories feed the animals corn, even the cows which are engineered to eat grass. Corn is used in many foods because of its cheapness. Corn is mass produced on nearly every farm in America. The big corporations use corn in their products because it makes production much cheaper. If everything comes from cheap corn, then the outcome is a cheap product.
Advertising is a fourth main issue that causes obesity. Fast food corporations and other corporations that sell sugary sweets advertise their products over fifty times as much as healthy food corporations. The fast food corporations and other unhealthy corporations are able to advertise more than the healthy food choice because so many Americans purchase their products. A fast food corporation like Mc Donald’s spends nearly two billion dollars on advertising while a company like Sprouts can barely afford to spend two million dollars on advertising. The amount of fast food advertising is so huge; children learn the name “Ronald Mc Donald” before the children knows who George Washington is, and what he stood for. The surprising fact is that even though many Americans know so much about fast foods, few people can even define the word “calorie”. A calorie is a measure of energy in food. The amount of one calorie is how much it takes to raise the temperature of one liter, one degree centigrade.
Many Americans know of the problems about fast food dieting. The real problem is that not enough people know the down side to consuming these fatty foods. Many Americans eat fast food thinking that it is healthy. The truth is the exact opposite of what they know. Fast foods are exceptional at times, but on a day to day basis, fast foods should be avoided. Advertising is the reason why many Americans are unaware of the negative effects of fast foods. When looking at a fast food commercial, the viewer will always witness average weighted beings enjoying the fatty fast foods. In reality, eating fast foods will cause the consumer to become overweight, and if the fast food diet is prolonged, obese. Advertisements will always express how delight the company’s product is, despite the actual quality. Fast foods are no exception. Because fast food corporations cannot express how healthy their unhealthy food is, the corporation will focus on how low the price is, and how enjoyable the food is.
Early exposure to the unhealthy environment is the final problem. More and more American children are becoming obese. Many kids require nutrients found in most fruits to grow taller. Many obese children are shorter than their peers. The connection is obvious. Instead of parents purchasing healthy foods, they choose the quick route of giving their children cheap and unhealthy fast foods. Fast foods are indeed addicting. Studies have shown that once you begin eating a fast food diet, you begin to get depressed when you eat a healthy meal, but you feel great if you eat fast food. Early exposure to an unhealthy lifestyle causes the children of America to become addicted to these fast foods and other unhealthy addicting foods. Later in their adulthood, the new adults must buy their own food. They will go for the fast foods for the same reason as the parents; it is cheaper and quicker, with another reason: they are sick and depressed without it. This cycle will continue of the American population chooses to take action early in life, and maintain the healthy life style for as long as they shall live. The rise of obesity in children is becoming so severe; the current generation of children in 2010 is expected to live shorter lives than their parents.
Having a good, well balanced, and non fast food diet along with a minimum of thirty minutes of daily aerobic exercise or more, and making smart choices to buy healthier foods, declining the temptation of unhealthy advertising, and preventing our children, or future children, to fall into these temptations as well, will help Americans cease to be obese and live healthy lives and ultimately conclude with America being the world’s slimmest nation. Every American has a choice. Every time an American purchases something at the supermarket, they are voting for whom they prefer. If all Americans come together and cease to tolerate the unhealthy behavior, America will become one step closer to defeating national obesity, but if nothing is done for the next ten years, there is a chance that the rise to obesity will become a permanent change. Everyday nothing is done will make the next day harder to revert the transition to an obese nation. The choice is yours.
