Dr. Tate
WRIT 1133, Section 53 (MW 4:00)
April 16, 2008
Proposal
After watching Morgan Spurlock’s movie Super Size Me, I have a desire of finding out everything else I don’t know about fast food. I decided to make it my research topic. I’m sure there are some weird diseases out there that can cause people to gain weight, other than that the only thing would affect us to increase the waist lines is eating. Fast food is one of Americans’ proud “inventions”. America is also the “fattest” nation in the world, are fast food and obesity closely related? I am very interested to find out!
Started with some questions in my head: 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 frequently eat fast food are overweight? Is there anything other than people gets affected negatively by the fast food industries? Why is fast food so fascinating? How much fast food do American people eat every day? How much money do Americans spend on fast food daily? Do most of the Americans care about their over-weighted-bodies? What is the number of Americans that are sick from being too fat every year? If it is true eating fast food can cause so many problems on our bodies, why are we still eating fast food? I started my researches with all the questions I had in mind.
Following by my secondary researches: From the movies Super Size Me, there were many important facts from the movie that surprised me. The movie itself is a documentary of how fast food can slowly put our lives in danger. Morgan Spurlock, the main character of the movie, put him onto the operating table and showed us how bad fast food can be. He ate nothing but the food from McDonald’s restaurants for one month. Before the “adventure” Spurlock went to four different doctors, he had they exam his health status, everything was normal, one doctor said his health is above average at his age. After one painful month stuffed with three McDonald’s meals every day, the doctors he went visit before were surprised how much his health has gone downhill since he started eating McDonald’s food, and they said that Spurlock is going to die if he doesn’t stop his “McDiet”. No one has ever done that before in history, and the result was very significant. Spurlock went from a healthy man to a sick man in just one month.
The following piece of information comes from the article “Finding Fault for the Fat” I found in “The Boston Globe” magazine, by Daniel Akst. Akst has noted that based on a standard measure that is relating weight to height called body mass index (BMI), there are two thirds (2/3) of American weight too much in these days. In another words, only thirty-three percent of Americans weight what the experts say they really should. We can see why America is considered as the fattest countries in the world. More than half of the population is overweight in the U.S. Also the Co-Principal Investigator of Healthcare for Communities Roland Sturm analyzed that from the telephone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between years 1986 to 2000, a fourteen years period, the amount of "morbidly obese" Americans has been quadrupled, about 4,000,000 Americans. The super obese Americans have quintupled! Fat people are still increasing rapidly!
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.! This health problem has already caught up with drinking, smoking, or poverty. There are 400,000 deaths that are related to the obesity in America annually. Why everyone still getting so much fast food does, aren’t American people scared of fast food leading them to miserable and danger? In this modern world people are “well trained” so that they know what we are putting in their mouths exactly, we should be able to determine whether the food is healthy or unhealthy easily. Obviously fast food is bad for you, but one of the very important facts is that fast food is really fast and also convenient. Hamburgers for example, it was named after a German town Hamburg was long famous for its ground-beef steaks, and Charlie Nagreen was the founder. Back in 1885 Charlie was a young man who wanted to make some money selling meat balls at fairs. He found it is time consuming and the customers would more likely to eat the meatballs while walking round the fair. So he squashed the meatballs and sold them between two slices of bread. Throughout an average day, the time we spend of cooking food and eating is getting ridiculously shorter and shorter. Fast food would be the only way to go because no one has time for food anymore! Most of the fast food restaurants have twenty-four-hour service schedules, they cook whatever food you want from the menu, you name it they make it right on spot, and only take them about three to five minutes. Food is inexpensive, compare to other sit-down restaurant services. Although fast foods take little time to make, they have incredible tastes! Compare to the past, most of the American families eat out more than having home meals these days. For my primary researches, I am planning to hand out some surveys to the college students, full-time workers, and families to find out how often they go to fast food restaurants. This way we can see people at what age eat fast food the most.
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 it is because food companies maximize their profits by maximizing the amount of food their customers eat. Obviously fast food industries are making much more money this way, but are they caring about the customers anymore? Having much more energies than we need only will make us fat and sick. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc said: “Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself”. It’d be a very good idea having an interview with the managers of the fast food restaurants, my goals will be finding out how much food an average people is getting every meal; how much an average customer spends on one meal; have they (fast food industries) ever concerned about customers’ health and so on.
Not everything in fast food is bad for you, but you will not be healthy eating only fast food that’s for sure. 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 eating fast food is not a good choice compare to a homemade meals. But we are lacking of willpower, our brains are filled with hedonism and laziness. 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”. Doesn’t matter if you win the case and get so much money from it, your health will be lost forever.
Annotated Bibliography
Akst, Daniel. "Finding Fault for the Fat." Boston.Com. 07 Dec. 2003. 09 Apr. 2008
The article talked about how American people are suing the fast food industries; when they should take care of their bodies try to eat healthy instead. Akst is a well-known journalist who has worked for 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. Article came from newspaper The Boston Globe, it is a trustful site.
Daynard, Richard. "You Want Fries with That?" Northeastern University Site. May 2003. 09 Apr. 2008
Richard’s popularity is well known over the world as well. He had done some impressive things about tobacco. In this article he talked about the ricks of having fast food, also how people should really treat the fat peoples, we need to treat them as the smokers. Richard Daynard is a professor in the School of Law at the Northeastern University and the chair of the Tobacco Products Liability Project and Public Health Advocacy Institute’s Law and Obesity Project. The web site comes from Northeastern University, a nonprofit site, worth it to look up information on it.
"Fast Food Items Highest in Trans Fat." A Calorie Counter. 09 Apr. 2008
This article talks about how much Trans fat contained in different fast food and how bad they are for us. No author found in for this article. Web site is a food web site where people talk about the calories in food we eat daily. It has many opinions of how people think about fast food.
Mary, Enig. “Lowfat Diets” www.westonaprice.org. 31 Dec. 2001 09 Apr. 2008
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In this article Dr. Mary G. Enig had published, she talked about the negative sides of Trans fat. Dr. Mary G. Enig is an expert of international renown in the field of lipid biochemistry. She has headed a number of studies on the content and effects of Trans fatty acids in America and Israel, and has successfully challenged government assertions that dietary animal fat causes cancer and heart disease. And the site is a government site.
Schlosser, Eric, and Charles Wilson. Chew on This. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 13-20.
This is another popular book that is written by Schlosser. Like Fast food Nation, it is about fast food and Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. In 1998 Schlosser wrote an investigative piece on the fast food industry for Rolling Stone.
Un Food and Agriculture O. "Do Americans Eat 3,790 Calories per Day?" Diet Blog. 27 Dec. 2006. 09 Apr. 2008
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Serving both developed and developing countries, FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy. FAO is also a source of knowledge and information. FAO is a real organization, it is reasonable to believe what’s on the site.
Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Perf. Morgan Spurlock. DVD. Kathbur Pictures, 2004.
A documentary film about eating McDonald’s food for a month, true story. Actor Morgan Spurlock directed the movie himself. And used him as a guinea pig, plenty of facts of how bad fast food can cause us. It is a movie that was shown in many theaters.
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