Is There A Connection Between Heart Disease And Fast Food?
There is a definite and sobering connection between developing heart disease and fast food. This does not mean that eating one burger will automatically give you a heart attack, but eating one burger or more a week (or day!) will. There is nothing inherently evil in fast food, but overindulging in it has dire health consequences. You should look at fast food as a very occasional treat - as in only a few times a YEAR - and not any more than that. Your wallet will also heave a sigh of relief.
Should We Ban It All?
Because of the connection between connoisseurs of fast food and heart disease among those diners, there is a sudden national push to ban fast food or some ingredients in fast food that make them so full of fat and sodium. One of these scapegoats is trans-fats. These have even been banned in major cities like New York City (a city that runs more on trans fats than it does gasoline).
However, by banning fast food, heart disease fatalities will not go down. Heart disease was here in our species long before the first Golden Arches went up. It's not the fast food that is the culprit, but it's the overeating that's the culprit. If fast food or all trans fats were eventually banned, people would turn to other high fat, high-sodium and high-sugar foods to get their fix.
Poor Food Choices
People are turning to fast food as their regular diet more than ever because they are so busy and stressed out that they can't be bother to go food shopping and then cook their food. Even buying prepared dinners at the grocery store can be the same for developing heart disease as fast food. They are often packed with as much sodium, fat and sugar as fast food.
As a species, we are programmed to cram down as many calories as we can, because we need to store up fat for winter. Our genes haven't yet realized that we don't need to store up fat for winter anymore. We first saw ready-made food as a treat, but now we want treats all of the time, because we're stressed. And because it's so readily available, it's not surprising that fast food and heart disease have both risen in recent decades.
When people learn to cook for themselves and that their taste buds can be retrained to crave foods they avoided as kids, then they can be weaned away from fast food. But if you just ban all fast food, it makes people want it all the ore because it ticks the government off.
