Fast Food Restaurants example essay topic

How important is diet and exercise? And what can individuals do to prevent serious heath risks linked to being over weight? There physical problems as well as mental. For most Americans it is routine to hit the drive-thru at a fast food restaurant for lunch three or four times a week. Most people do not know how many calories they have consumed in one meal. For example, a super-sized fries approximately thirty to forty French fries, about five hundred calories.

Now if you add a big fat cheese burger and a large soda pop, you " re looking at an eleven hundred calorie lunch, almost two-thirds of most people's calorie intake for one day, consumed in one meal. Depending on your occupation, and your fitness routine, most of those empty, unused calories will be stored as fat. Being as it may, fast food restaurants are quick, easy and a cheap way to get your fix but, their not the only restaurants to pack there foods full of empty calories and high-fats. "A double Whopper from Burger King has a whopping 1150 calories with 76 coming from fat" (Burger King Brands, inc.) Most commercial / franchise restaurants play the portions game, the platter or buffet. "Restaurant owners believe that costumers go home feeling more satisfied if their guts are aching, because being overfed makes Americans feel they " ve gotten a real bargain. The owners are convinced that if you eat two of their meals, one in the restaurant and one at midnight in front of the TV, you have them in mind twice a week instead of once" (Food and Advertising.) It isn't just lack of exercise or activity that is causing the American body to expand.

Habits that start at home, most American families eat seven meals a week away from home, and because they eat on the run they are inhaling more restaurant and processed foods. Studies have shown that poor and working families are more likely to eat at fast food restaurants where nutritional values are lower and calories higher. Food manufacturers have increased the calories in their products over the past decade, making them sweeter in an effort to get people to buy and eat more. For example, the new sugar and cinnamon sticks all the pizza places are advertising for free with the purchase of any size pizza. According to a recent report in the Boston Globe; the number of American men weighting more than three hundred pounds is up fifty percent in the past decade, and now include one in eighty men. For women, the figure is one in two hundred a sixty seven percent increase.

One result is that 1.14 billion was spent on stomach stapling or gastric by pass surgery. In 2000 more than fifty-seven thousand people had the surgery. This data is from a 2002 MARS survey. A mail survey of 22,097 people adults living in the fifty states conducted during the first quarter of 2002. Within this survey, 7.9 percent of the survey respondents said that they had been diagnosed as being obese, either professionally or by themselves.

Note that this is not necessarily an objective classification. However, we can take these answers to mean that 7.9% of the people recognized that they are obese. Sixty percent of adult Americans are overweight, and nearly eighteen percent of Americans are categorized as obese. Even worse, the proportion of obese children is now twenty-five percent. Obesity and poor nutrition are caught up in a host of serious diseases, including one that used to be called adult on set diabetes.

It's now so common among children that doctors can't call it that anymore. It's now known as "type II Diabetes" (Fit & Well 86. ). Obtaining a healthy lifestyle and keeping it isn't easy. The benefits of a healthy lifestyle are huge, and they include higher immunity to disease and illness, feeling good about yourself, being less stressed.

Less likely to become sick, more likely to do well on exams and test. And are more likely to live longer than those who do not have a healthy lifestyle.