It’s common knowledge that fast food is not the healthiest menu option. Yet, fast foods have become every day food for many people across the world. They become comfort foods and they are so convenient and affordable. It’s so easy to grab a pizza, burger or fish & chips on your way home after a hard day at work. Unfortunately, there is very little understanding how dangerous fast food and other processed foods can be for your heath and developing chronic disease like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Did you know that eating fast food once a week increases the risk of developing heart disease by 20 percent (1)?.
The more you eat of it, the fatter and sicker you become, and the faster you age. Eating fast food kills more people prematurely than smoking cigarettes.
Joel Fuhrman MD, Fast Food Genocide
What is fast food?
Fast food, also called junk food is processed food that you can buy at many commercial chain restaurants, snack bars and you can find them at the local supermarkets too.
They are mass-produced in an assembly-line process where processing methods remove and destroy original nutrients and add artificial ingredients to enhance their flavour, improve their consistency and prolong their shelf-life. Fast food is calorie dense foods that is very high in salt, sugar, high-fructose syrup and unhealthy fats. They also contain minimum nutritional value such as vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals.
A typical example of fast food is:
- Processed meats (bacon, sausage)
- Deli meats (ham, salami)
- Cheeses
- Burgers
- Pies
- French fries
- Fried fish and chicken
- White flour sandwiches
- Snack foods (pretzels, chips , crackers, biscuits, candies)
- Commercially baked goods (pastries, waffles, cakes, cookies, doughnuts)
- Ice cream
- Soft drinks
Negative effects of fast food
Let’s explain the negative effects of fast food that contributes to developing chronic disease.
Empty Calories
The processing method strips fast food from most of the original nutrients so they become empty calories. This means they provide no value to your body’s nutritional needs beyond calories. Eating empty calories means less room for natural foods that contain important nutrients critical for healthy immune system and for your protection against diseases such as as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other autoimmune diseases. Eating empty calories eventually makes you overweight but undernourished, prone to disease.
High Glycemic Index
Fast food has a high glycemic index and glycemic load which means that glycose enters your body rapidly and high levels of glucose build up in your bloodstream immediately after your meal. Eating food with a high glycemic index has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and some types of cancer.
Group 1 Carcinogen
The World Health Organization has classified processed meats, including bacon, ham, salami, hot dogs, and sausages as Group 1 carcinogens which means they have been proven to cause cancer. This puts them in the same category as tobacco, asbestos, and plutonium (6).
Food Addiction and Cravings
Our brains are designed to get rewarded with pleasure feelings when eating higher density food. When this food is consumed, it increases the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. In early humans, this mechanism helped their survival as they could store up energy for times when food wasn’t available. In today’s world, fast food is a high-density unnatural food that overstimulates your brain and overpowers pleasure feelings from any other food. This creates unhealthy cravings and addictions (1).
Weaking taste buds
Fast food rich in added sweeteners, salt, oils and artificial flavoring leads to gradual weakening of your taste buds. When eating fast food regularly, your brain produces an enhanced pleasure response and you crave more and more fast food to achieve the same pleasure response. Natural food is no longer appealing because you cannot taste their natural flavors and the pleasure from eating them is very low. This is why children who eat a lot of candies and junk food do not like fruits and vegetables. They simply can’t taste these foods anymore (3).
Saturated & Trans Fats
Fast foods are very high in Saturated Fat and Trans Fat, both linked to cancer and heart disease. They raise the bad cholesterol (LDL), leading to many problems such as narrowing and hardening of the arteries, heart attack and stroke (1,2,3,4). These fats enter the blood stream rapidly and are absorbed very quickly which means they are more likely stored as fat rather than burned for energy, increasing your chance for becoming overweight. Some studies have also shown that Saturated Fat may be toxic to pancreas that produce insulin, leading to higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes (4).
Trans Fats are especially dangerous to your health as they decrease the good cholesterol (HDL) and omega-3 acids in your body (1,4). There are only very small amounts of trans fats found in foods naturally. The majority of them are produced in the process called hydrogenation which makes them more stable for the use in the industrial food processing. Trans fat are also created when a vegetable oil is heated, cooled and reheated again (partly-hydrogenated oils). This is why eating fried and deep fried foods like fish and chips is very harmful for your health.
Sweeteners
All types of white sugar are linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Fast food is particularly rich in High Fructose Corn Syrup which is the cheapest and sweetest form of cane sugar, manufactured using chemicals and often contaminated with mercury (1). This syrup is added to sweet drinks and desserts but also hidden in sauces, dressings, breads, pizza crust and even burger meat. It is widely used because fast food with added syrup stay fresh, soft and moisture for very long time.
High Fructose Corn Syrup contains isolated fructose (55 percent fructose, 45 glucose) which rapidly enters your blood stream and contributes to insulin resistance, increasing your risk for developing diabetes and high blood pressure. The isolated fructose is also immediately absorbed by liver where it triggers the production of fats and leads to fatty liver (1).
Salt
Fast foods include excessive levels of added sodium. High salt intake causes high blood pressure and you are also at an increased risk of stroke. Excessive salt intake increases your risk of developing asthma, autoimmune disease, stomach cancer, osteoporosis and kidney failure. For example, a meal from KFC supplies more than 3,000 milligrams of sodium in one meal which is more than 3 times above the upper limit of the recommended daily consumption (1).
In addition, excessive salt intake weakens your taste for salt so you crave more salty food and add more and more salt to your meals. Studies have also shown that salting food stops the natural instinct that tells you to stop eating when full, leading to overeating and obesity (1).
Toxic Waste Products
Not everyone knows that your body produces toxic waste products called toxic metabolites when you eat fast food. The more fast food you eat, the more of these waste products are accumulated in the body and leads to inflammation, oxidative stress and disease. This is especially dangerous if your overall diet is very low in plants as plant foods contain phytochemicals, important for removing these cellular toxins (1).
Artificial Additives
Last but not least, fast food includes many chemical additives that are toxic for your bodiy. These include artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides, antifoaming agents, emulsifiers, stabiliziers, thickeners and flavour enhancers (MSG). They are added to fast food to improve their taste, look and feel or to stop mould from growing on them. They accumulate in the body in the form of toxins that weaken your immune system, and further promote inflammation and disease (1,2,4,5).
Better choices
There are just so many negative effects of fast food on your health that the safest bet is to avoid them at all cost. So what can we eat on days when we just can’t be bothered cooking? Let’s face it, who wants to be cooking on a Friday night?
Here is the list of foods that my family enjoys as a much healthier alternative in place of ‘fast foods’:
- Seasonal salads from salad bars (My favorite one is Vegan Roasted Sweet Potato Salad from Dunn and Walton)
- Sushi rolls, rice paper rolls and rice noodles (Peko Peko is my best choice)
- Soups (Many small grocery shops now stock good quality soups without additives or try this easy pumpkin soup recipe)
- Burritos and burrito bowls (Zambrero is our go-to place on the weekend and kids love their burritos and quesadillas too)
- Sweet or Savoury Buddha Bowl (This is a great option especially if you have some left-overs from previous dinner at home. A recipe is coming to Plant Oceans soon)
- Home-made pizza (l always keep some pizza crusts in my freezer to make a quick veggie pizza in no time. Make your own pizza crust or look for a pre-made one at your local farmer’s markets.)
- Home-made whole meal sandwich with avocado, veggies and a small slice of chicken breast, tofu or smoked salmon
- Oven-baked home-made potato chips
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References
- Joel Fuhrman, MD, Fast Food Genocide, How processed food is killing us and what we can do about it, 2017, New York
- Eleanor Whitney, Understanding Nutrition, 4th Australian and New Zealand Edition, 2019, Australia
- Joel Fuhrman, MD, Disease-Proof Your Child, Feeding Kids Right, 2005, New York
- Michael Greger, MD, How not to die, 2015, London UK
- Joel Fuhrman MD, 2012, Super Immunity, The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body’s Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free, New York.
- Doctors For Nutrition, 2021, Growing gains, not pains! Nourish article on childhood nutrition, https://www.doctorsfornutrition.org/post/growing-gains-not-pains-nourish-article-on-childhood-nutrition
