Fast Food restaurants and Obesity

Introduction

America, as opposed to most of Europe, is always rushed. The average working week is forty hours, with maybe forty-fi ve minutes as the lunch break. This is not enough time for the lavish lunch, leaving fast food as menu of day. Americans, who live to work, will often bring home fast food as an alternative to time consuming process of preparing dinner. Fast food is targeted to cater to speed of an on--go American. The popular quote "In, out, and on your way" describes exactly how convenient fast food truly is. Now one doesn't need to go lengths of in and out, just wait in drive thru and go. In recent decades, family structure of many Americans has changed. In most families, both parents need to work to support their families and to own the house, limiting amount of time to spend with their children - let alone cooking meals. Fast food restaurants solve this equation easily by giving parents option of killing two birds with one stone.

Discussion and Analysis

Furthermore, it is easy for the family to get the loan to open an easy food franchise as running the fast food restaurant requires capital from investors. The amount of capital is affordable for middle income families to own the fast food restaurant: For this reason, numbers of fast food chains grow quickly around world. According to fast food guide (www.fastfood.com), there are three hundred forty seven fast food restaurants in Salt Lake City and four thousand fast food restaurants in Los Angelos. The most notable fast food restaurants are MacDonald, Wendy, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. According to Wikipedia, MacDonald, which is largest fast food chain in world, is pioneer for fast food restaurant. It was founded in 1940 by Dick and Mac Donald. Based on National Restaurant Association, consumers in United Stated spent roughly 110 billion dollars on fast food in year 2000.

However, this figure does not reveal dissatisfaction from consumers. In recent years, there were several lawsuits against fast food restaurants. For instance, Michael Y. Park (2003) of Fox New, reported that the 56 years old maintenance supervisor, Caesar Barber, ate at the fast food five times the week. He claimed fast food cause health problems. The fatty diet caused him to have obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol which lead to two heart attacks. In addition, Morgan Spurlock, who is producer of documentary movie “Super Size Me” in year 2004, showed several lawsuits against Fast Food restaurants. Several lawsuits failed to convince judges that fast food diet causes health problems. This was because there were others factors, such as eating habit and life style, needed to be considered. However, these lawsuits showed that people were concerned about nutrition content in fast food. Hence I will discuss causes of fast food diet in following paragraphs.

First and foremost, aggressive marketing of fast food restaurants causes people to have unhealthy diet. Fast food advertisement appears in many media, such as radio, newspapers, magazines and ...