Complete draft Proposal and Annotated Bibliography

Sean Hu
Dr. Linda Tate
WRIT 1133
04/09/08
Complete draft Proposal and Annotated Bibliography
After watching Morgan Spurlock’s movie Super Size Me, I have a desire of finding out everything else that I don’t know about fast food: what kind of impact fast food has done to the whole American society? Is it fast food industries’ fault that almost all the Americans who eat fast food are overweight? Is there anything else somehow get affected negatively by the fast food industries besides the fast food customers? I started my researches with all the questions I had in mind.
Start with the movie Super Size Me, there are many important facts from the movie about fast food. The movie itself is a documentary of how fast food can slowly put someone’s life in danger. Morgan Spurlock put him onto the operating table. He ate nothing else but the food McDonald’s for one month. Spurlock went to four different doctors, had them check his health status, everything was normal, one of the doctor considered him as an average health man at his age. After one month stuffed with three meals of McDonald’s meals every day, the doctors he went visit before told him that his health has gone downhill since he started eating nothing but McDonald’s food, one of the doctor even told Spurlock that he is going to die if he doesn’t stop his “McDiet”. No one has ever done that before in history, and the result was obvious. Spurlock went from healthy to unhealthy because of the fast food.
The following piece of information comes from the article “Finding Fault for the Fat” is found in “The Boston Globe” magazine, by Daniel Akst. He is a well-known journalist who has worked at the LA Times and Wall Street Journal and now writes a monthly column in the Sunday New York Times. He also writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal culture pages, and has appeared in many other publications as well. Akst has noted that based on a standard measure that is relating weight to height called body mass index (BMI), there are two thirds of American weight too much in these days. In another words, only one third of Americans weight what the experts say we should. America is considered as the fattest countries in the world by having six out of ten people are overweight. Roland Sturm, Co-Principal Investigator of Healthcare for Communities analyzed that from the telephone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between year 1986 to 2000, fourteen years period, and the amount of "morbidly obese" Americans has been quadrupled, that is about 4,000,000 Americans. The super obese Americans have quintupled! Fat people are increasing quickly.
Knowing that because of fast food, we have the biggest and fattest people and obesity is turning into the biggest public health problems in the U.S., and it has already caught up with drinking, smoking, or poverty. There are 400,000 deaths that are related to the obesity in America. Why everyone still getting so much fast food does, aren’t American people scared of fast food leading them to miserable and the danger of death? In this modern world people are well trained to know what kind of food they are putting in mouths, we can easily determine whether the food is healthy or unhealthy. But there is a very important fact about fast food we need to admit, is “fast” itself. Throughout an average day, the times we spend of cooking food and eating are getting ridiculously shorter and shorter day by day. Fast food would be the only way to go. Most of the fast food restaurants have a twenty four seven service time schedule, they cook whatever food you want from the menu, you name it they make it, take them about three to five minutes to prepare the food. The food is inexpensive compare to other food services. And of course, tastes really good! Most of the American families eat out more than cook home these days. Nestlé, the world’s largest food companies argues that one of the major reasons why Americans are getting dangerously fat is because we’re consuming more food than we did two decades ago, largely because food companies maximize their profits by maximizing the amount of food their customers eat. That is a lot more food than what we need to maintain our daily activities. With all the extra energies stored in our bodies, how could we not get fat?
But everything in fast food is bad for you. The worst ingredient possibly contained in the fast food will be the trans fat (trans fatty acids). According to Dr. Mary G. Enig, a nutritionist is known for her research on the nutritional aspects of fats and oils, she claims that trans fat are considered as possible cause for: Coronary Heart Disease (Raise bad cholesterol and lower good cholesterol); stroke; diabetes; cancer; obesity; liver dysfunction and infertility etc… Amount all kinds of food, fast food happen to have the most trans fat in it.
Richard A. Daynard has published an article named “You Want Fries with That?” And he mentioned that there is no such thing called “moderate” smoking, even it is just a little use of cigarette can harm your body. But using eating as an example on the other hand, its condition is biological. Too little of food will do just as bad as too much of food. Now we can see that we are playing fairly important roles here, we control how much we want/ need to eat. What is making us fat has to do with changes in the way we are eating, and the food industries also have the responsible for some of the changes. We still consider it as a meal after the food industries emphasize the size of what we eat. Days after days, we will have to get more food each meal, it happens naturally, even though we don’t physically need that much of the Calories to function. Plus these days, nationwide, there are only ten percent who walks or bikes to schools on a regular basis; compare with sixty percent two decades ago. Popular women clothes size has pumped from size 8 in 1985 all the way up to size 14 in 2002!
Again, I believe whoever is having fast food out there knows that eating fast food is not a good choice compare to a more complicated homemade meals. We are lacking of willpower, our brains are filled with hedonism. No one actually care about their increasing waist lines until the ultimate pains strike onto their body, too much Calories and high cholesterol combined with a sugar high and some heart problems before suing the restaurant for “justices”. No matter if you win the case, or get so much money from it, your health will be lost forever.