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Reasons for the Unhealthiness in Fast Food

Fast food is often unhealthy because it tends to have a great deal of fat and salt, neither of which are good for your system in excess. Fat tends to be stored in your body, making you overweight, while salt causes high blood pressure when eaten in overly large quantities. Fast-food vendors use such unhealthy ingredients to enhance taste, efficiency and mass production.

  1. Trans Fats

    • Fast food tends to be high in fat. More importantly, though, it tends to be high in trans fat. Trans fat is a synthetic fat that is cheaper to produce than natural fats. What's more, it can be used multiple times in a deep fryer, which further cuts fast-food chains' costs. Trans fat is harder for your body to process than natural fats, and more of it is stored in your stomach, thighs and bum, while less is used for things like lubricating your joints.

    Portion Sizes

    • A major component of fast food is that it is large. Many fast-food meals are far bigger than similar meals you would cook at home. A burger and fries you cook at home and eat with a 12-oz. soda is probably going to be high in fat and calories. However, the same meal at a fast-food joint will likely be much larger, with a bigger serving of fries and a 20-oz. soda. So, regardless of the actual percentage of unhealthy chemicals in the meal, the portion size alone means there is a substantial amount of fat.

    Salt

    • Fast food has extremely large amounts of salt. This is because salt is a flavor that appeals to essentially everyone; while most people would be loath to put several times their daily salt requirements into a meal they cook at home, they think nothing of ordering a similar meal from a fast-food establishment. Large amounts of salt can cause heart problems and high blood pressure.

    Preservative

    • Fast-food production is mass production. Franchise owners generally get all of their ingredients from a central location, then simply put it together and serve it to customers. This means that ingredients need to be robust enough to last the journey from the factory to the franchise. To minimize their losses and achieve economies of scale, fast-food companies load their ingredients with preservatives, which makes them less natural. These don't have the same direct effect as salt and trans fat do, but they are adulterating otherwise natural food.

    Frying

    • Fast food is just that -- fast. The fastest way to cook something is to fry it. It is also, however, the fattiest way to cook something, as you need to coat the pan or griddle with oil, or deep-fry something by covering it in oil. This means that many things that could be baked, steamed or boiled are simply fried, as this makes the process faster.

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