Are we taking it too far by blaming fast food restaurants for obesity?

Introduction

Fast-food giants are frequently criticized for peddling fattening, artery-clogging burgers, fries, and other menu items, but long before McDonald's was franchised, lunch wagons, diners, and drive-ins offered fatty, sugary food. In fact, these independently owned restaurants dare customers to eat unhealthy meals, such as steak dinners with the caloric content of ten Big Macs and sky-high platters of burgers and fries. However, instead of being lambasted by nutritionists and anti-fast-food crusaders, these establishments are lauded for bringing communities together and serving up authentic, greasy American fare. The food at McDonald's, Wendy's, and the like pale in comparison for which we should be thankful. This paper discusses if we are taking it too far by blaming fast food restaurants for obesity or not.

Discussion

Food advertising cannot be blamed for rising obesity in children and teens. Obesity has increased across all age groups and in countries with stricter controls over advertising. The two most important factors in obesity are the low price and convenience of fast food and the sedentary lifestyles of adolescents owed to more time spent on computers, browsing the Internet, and playing video games. Furthermore, studies used to examine the link between advertising and diet cannot separate the effects of exposure to commercials and watching television itself, and the demands of parents have influenced companies to market healthier foods to children. (Andrew 25)

The list of explanations for what got us fat over the past quarter century, each with its own ring of truth and band of devoted scientists, activists, and dieters, is longer than a well-stocked smorgasbord. Journalists and government officials typically favor what I call the "fiscal model," which holds that "energy is deposited by eating food, that exercise and metabolism withdraw it, and that body fat is a sort of corporeal balance sheet," as S. Bryn Austin, an instructor at the Harvard School of Medicine and critic of the model, summarized. A version of the gospel of naught, the fiscal model blames the obesity epidemic on overeating and inactivity. As a writer for U.S. News & World Report put it, "Over-weight results from one thing: eating more food than one burns in physical activity."

Believers in the fiscal model contend that in the absence of additional exercise, it took no more than a few extra bites or slurps a day by most Americans to produce the obesity epidemic. The obesity epidemic materialized over a couple of decades, whereas genes take at least a couple of generations to change. Generations of Americans have followed her command, aided, during much of the period when our collective weight shot up, by federally mandated labeling of the calorie content of every packaged food product. (Eric, 56)

A Red Herring

Some argue it is the types of foods Americans eat that have made us fat. "Fat makes you fat," the diet guru of the 1990s, Susan Powter, famously proclaimed, and Dr. Dean Ornish, of Eat More, Weigh Less fame, continues to preach that ...