Set The Pan Over Medium-Wrong
by tristero
Matthew Yglesias has it wrong and Mark Bittman rightly responds :
The fact is that fast food isn’t “bad” because it’s fast — it’s bad because of crummy ingredients. And it contains crummy ingredients because crummy ingredients — i.e., ground up cow’s noses, high fructose corn syrup, potatoes grown for “sliceability” (or whatever it’s called), or worse — are more profitable than real ingredients.
(Ground-up cow’s noses? Um, do they, you know, wipe them clean before they grind ’em up? Or do they just irradiate the snot like they do the fecal matter?)
In fact, the problem isn’t even eating awful fast food as it is eating it all the time. You like to feed your children irradiated cow’s nose every once in a while for a treat? Alright, whatever. But if you do it a lot, which Americans are increasingly doing, you’re gonna risk making them really, really sick as they grow up:
BACKGROUND: Fast-food consumption has increased greatly in the USA during the past three decades. However, the effect of fast food on risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes has received little attention. We aimed to investigate the association between reported fast-food habits and changes in bodyweight and insulin resistance over a 15-year period in the USA…
FINDINGS: Fast-food frequency was lowest for white women (about 1.3 times per week) compared with the other ethnic-sex groups (about twice a week). After adjustment for lifestyle factors, baseline fast-food frequency was directly associated with changes in bodyweight in both black (p=0.0050) and white people (p=0.0013). Change in fast-food frequency over 15 years was directly associated with changes in bodyweight in white individuals (p