Chew On This #3

Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explains in great detail what junk food does to your body. It described obesity very well, explaining both the cause and effects of obesity.

Obesity is being extremely overweight. Two thirds of all adults and one sixth of all children in the US are overweight or obese. That's 50 million obese adults, along with 6 or 7 morbidly obese people. "Morbidly obese" people are about 100 pounds overweight than the standard weight. Since the 1970's, the obesity rate among adults has increased by 50%, the obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled, and the obesity rate among 6-11 year olds has tripled. Obesity is caused by many factors, including what you eat, how much you eat, how much you exercise, your genes, and even familial traits or racial traits. However, the familial and racial traits in the US have not changed very much in the last 30 years. So why has the obesity rate increased so much? It's really quite simple. In the past thirty years, Americans have begun to eat more, especially fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Also more and more people begun to get office jobs, so they exercise less. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt, fish and farm to get food. That took a great deal of effort and forced them to exercise. Early humans' worried about not having enough to eat, let alone to worry about getting fat. Fat cells were probably developed to store energy for periods of little food. In normal amounts, they are good for the body, signaling to the brain how much energy was stored and when it was time to eat. They even help the immune system, preventing cancer and disease. Typical people have 25 to 35 billion fat cells. Obese people have nearly eight times that amount: 275 billion fat cells! These fat cells require new blood vessels, place new demands on vital organs, create chemicals imbalances, and actually make the body more susceptible to disease. Fast food is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic. It is usually not very nutritious, but high in salt, starch, sugar, fat, and calories. This is why sometimes fast food is also referred to as junk food.

Junk food does not only make you obese. It also affects other parts of the body. Foods that are high in sugar and bad fats such as cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat cause higher than normal amount of fat molecules in the blood which leads to blood vessels narrowing. If these blood vessels lead to the brain, they may not be able to carry all the blood that the brain needs, causing a stroke. That causes permanent severe brain damage or even death. If a piece of the fatty plaque that blocks the blood vessels suddenly breaks off, it may block the flow of blood to the heart, causing a heart attack. The liver, which processes all the fat, can also be damaged by junk food. If it gets full of fat, it begins to malfunction. Heart disease and stoke are the top killers in the US. With the growing popularity of fast food, heart disease is beginning to become more common among young people, probably due to junk food. We should try to avoid fast food and exercise more.

Chew On This #2

Chew On This is an excellent book about fast food. It combines startling facts with humorous opinions. The sections I recently read are written in stunning detail about the ingredients in modern fast food. A good example is the section about artificial flavorings and artificial colorings. The co-authors, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explain exactly what goes into the mysterious "natural and artificial flavorings and colorings" that are present in almost everything a fast food restaurant sells.

Flavorings began to be widely used in the mid-1900's. They were used to replace the flavors lost during processing. For example, cooking and heating large amounts of food and the process of canning, freezing, or dehydrating food destroyed most of the good natural taste. The natural taste of food is extremely complex. For example, the taste of coffee is made up of thousands of chemicals. The chemicals used as artificial flavors that go into most foods are supposed to mimic nature as closely as possible and should not present any danger to peoples' health. The book described an example of the way artificial flavors are used in fast food. To make a strawberry milkshake at home, all you would need is ice cream, strawberries, sugar, and vanilla. However, a strawberry flavored milkshake from a fast food restaurant would contain extracted milkfat and preserved milk, sugar, sweet whey, high fructose corn syrup, guar gum, mono- and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carageenan, citric acid, red food coloring, and artificial strawberry flavor. But what is in the artificial strawberry flavor? Let's just name a few chemicals, such as amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, and many more. These chemicals may be safe to be consumed alone in the short term. However, little is known about their long term accumulative effects when all ingested together. Studies suggest that artificial chemicals may cause hyperactivity in children. These chemicals should simply be avoided if possible.

Artificial coloring is used to mimic the natural color of food. These artificial colorings have many chemicals, which may have long term side effects to health. However, manufacturers now go beyond natural food colors, and use colors like bright blue and purple. This has led to accidental poisonings because young children drink liquid laundry detergents that are the same color as many popular sports drinks. Surely, I don't want to turn my skin blue because I drank too much Gatorade!

Chew On This #1

Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, is a book with an in-depth look at fast food's history, the evolving process of fast food production, and its impacts on our daily life. It contains many interesting and little known facts. For example, I was surprised to learn from this book that the hamburger was invented by a fifteen year old boy named Charlie Nagreen.

Charlie was selling meatballs at a county fair in 1885 to make some extra money. However, the meatballs were difficult to eat while walking. Seeing this, Charlie flattened the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, thus creating the first hamburger. However, many people from the early 1900's believed that the ground beef used to make hamburgers was made from unfresh or low quality meat. This made hamburgers very unpopular during that period of time. It was considered a food for the poor. In 1925, when New Yorkers were asked what their favorite food was, hamburgers were nineteenth. Hamburgers even lost to cow tongue and spinach! However, a man named Walt Anderson loved hamburgers and set out to change the idea that hamburgers were unhealthy. He started a small restaurant devoted to selling hamburgers. He grilled the burgers right in front of his customers so that they could see that the meat was fresh and the equipment was clean. With the success of his first restaurant, he opened more restaurants in the shape of white medieval forts and named them White Castles. This name suggested that the food was pure and fresh. He even sponsored an unusual experiment. For ten days, a medical student at the University of Minnesota ate nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. At the end of ten days, the student seemed quite healthy. From then on, people viewed hamburgers in a new way. It was no longer called a food for the poor, and workingmen finally could afford to eat at a restaurant.

However, White Castles didn't attract many women or children. Walt Anderson didn't turn hamburgers into America's favorite fast food. Richard and Maurice McDonald, with help from a traveling salesman who had failed at everything for years, changed history with a new concept of restaurants that marked the beginning of the era of modern fast food.