Racing to the finish line with fast-food

10 min readJun 21, 2022

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Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece. It should not be considered health advice.

A simple Google search

I spent the last two weeks digging deep into the food industry. I initially started with a simple Google search about frozen food that led me to write this. To begin with, it has been disgusting. We all know that fast food and junk food are bad for our health. Then, what about them doesn’t stop us from having them? Is it because we don’t know just how bad it is? This question bugs me even when I’m through a lot of research. What makes pizzas, burgers and fizzy drinks comfort food?

Would you do it if I asked you to eat ten teaspoons of sugar at once? That’s how much sugar there is in one can of Coca-Cola (350mL) — 39g. How about eight teaspoons? That’s one bottle of Minute-Maid lemonade (240 mL) — 29g. It’s Friday evening, and you’re craving “good food”. But, what does “good food” mean? You’re thinking, “I’ve had boring homemade food for a week. The least I deserve is to go out once a week and eat at McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, La Pino’z or KFC…” or other alternatives. I’m sure you or someone you know must have thought this at least once in your lifetime. I know I have.

The comfort of fast food

We eat with our eyes first, then our nose, then our tongue. Finally, the food ends up in our stomachs. How we eat food is much more nuanced than just picking up a random food item and putting it in our mouth. In this age of instant gratification, the faster you can give a consumer the feeling of pleasure, the faster they will rush to your product. Enter fast food. Fast food is that: two cups of speed of service, one big, fat spoon of pleasure, topped with sheer inexpensiveness to produce your favourite pizza, burger, fries or milkshake.

The convenience and speed with which you can get junk food is precisely why it’s called fast food. One can quickly get a burger, fries, and Coke — your typical happy meal or any likes of it, in less than 15 mins.

We see our food

On billboards, TV, pamphlets, and posters in restaurants. They all look so delicious. Those juicy patties, fizzy drinks, cheesy pizzas, and saucy garlic bread all elicit a signal in your brain that makes you feel pleasure when you look at them. Many fast-food giants have been using an invasive technique called neuro-marketing to study the kind of neural signals you receive when you see their product. They use these results to market ads to consumers. Sadly, we all get influenced. So, there it is, you begin eating with your eyes first. It’s delicious, and the colours pop out of the graphics. The imagery is mind-blowing, perhaps because it’s not real?

We smell our food

Right at the gate of a fast-food chain, we can smell their food. Research has shown that our appetite for a particular food item may increase when we sense its smell — especially if we have positive experiences attached. Fast-food chains, thus, use this to their advantage by making food that smells strongly. This makes you indulge in your sense of smell. Eventually, your desire to eat that food item increases, provided it has given you pleasure earlier.

We taste our food

So you order at a fast-food restaurant, and the food is ready within minutes. You get it within 10–15 mins. This is quick compared to how long it would take to prepare food at home. It’s super convenient. You put the food in your mouth, and suddenly, all those senses add up, and there is a release of flavours in your mouth, savoury or sweet. You instantly feel amused by the flavours, and it gives you a lot of pleasure. Awesome!

We try to digest our food

Now, here is where the real trouble begins. Digestion. Fast food comprises ingredients that make you feel great in the moment by giving you instant pleasure hits, but once it goes into the stomach, you rarely feel satiated. Most items have excess sugar, salt, spices and/or excess fats. If you’re thinking about how much excess, I’ll add some context. If you were to eat one McSpicy Paneer Wrap from McDonald’s, you would have all your dietary requirements met for one entire day. But it’s very rare that someone has a wrap and does not eat anything for the rest of the day. It’s usually accompanied by a can of Coke or some other soft drink. That’s a can of carbonated, saturated sugar water.

Junk food is usually made of refined flour, oils and processed ingredients. They are low in fibre and water content and high in unhealthy fats, sugar and salt. Fibre is a crucial element of our digestive system because it makes you feel full. In its absence, your stomach can feel bloated, and you may have digestive issues such as constipation. It also tends to increase overall inflammation in your body.

Comfort is in the fleeting moment of pleasure

Coming back to fast food once a week for the fleeting moment of pleasure it gives you is probably what makes it comfort food for many people. Eventually, it’s bad for our health. Still, those few minutes of pleasure, from what you see to putting food in your mouth, the whole experience is filled with stimulations that make you feel amused and get you hooked to the food.

Corporate profits at the cost of epidemics?

Companies profit a lot from such consumer habits. They try everything they can to make a consumer stick to their products. What I mentioned in the last section is just one of the few ways they try to lure consumers. Fast food is quick, convenient and cheap — cheaper than healthy alternatives by almost a whopping 60% [3]. Building bad consumer habits is just the tip of the iceberg. What these habits cause is much worse. The United States is already suffering from an obesity epidemic. One in every three people is obese. By 2030, it is predicted that every other person will be obese [3]. Obesity leads to many other health issues, such as coronary heart diseases, hypertension, diabetes etc. which most of us are aware of. The irony in India is that while a large group of children are susceptible to malnutrition, another group from urban, affluent families is vulnerable to childhood obesity, diabetes and hypertension. With an increase in the average income per capita and disposable income in India, people have started to spend more on such products over the years. Fast food giants find this an attractive opportunity to capture this market. Their marketing campaigns are highly targeted. Since these foods give us momentary pleasure, we are bound to seek it again because we are pleasure-seeking mammals. This causes repetitive behaviour, which leads to unhealthy food habits.

It is also shocking to realise the double standards of these giants. A study that compared the Indian and French counterparts of the same items served by a fast-food company revealed that western fast-food giants that entered the Indian market made significant changes to the recipes of their menu items to cater to the Indian audience. They were not very small changes but huge, terrible ones. The sugar, salt and fat contents are excessively higher in the Indian counterparts of these items than in the French counterparts. This is owing to stricter legislation in France. However, they adopt other strategies to work around strict legislative laws in France. They have come up with advergames — games which advertise food products. These games are aimed at small children. They usually have their brand mascots as the main player of the game. Whenever a player crosses any levels, they display their brands right when the player is happy. This subconsciously associates happy feelings with the brand, and the children will eventually start asking their parents to buy those products. It’s a very subtle way to penetrate a market without advertising, like on TV.

Fast food provides fleeting moments of pleasure and does not last long. So, you are bound to ask for more. They get you hooked on their products. But, at what cost?

The dose is the poison: overload

Of sugar

“the claims that sugar is corrupting are of a recent vintage; if it is bad today, when was it good?… (and) if it is true that sugar is bad for us, how did the world become so corrupted by this single, simple commodity?” — James Walvin, author of Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity

Fatty liver in one’s early twenties? Soft drinks contain lots of glucose and fructose (processed, refined sugar). Our liver excessively processes fructose. The liver turns fructose into fat which leads to fat deposition. The recommended dietary sugar intake is less than 36g/day for an adult male and less than 25g/day for an adult female. In the beginning, I mentioned the amount of sugar in a 350mL can of Coke — 39g. So if a person drank one can of Coke in one day, they would have had 8% more than the recommended daily sugar. Children should ideally have less than 25g/day as well. It has become increasingly common to see children gulp cans of sugary drinks alongside happy meals. They would have had 50% more than the recommended dietary intake. Phew!

Sugary drinks and beverages have a massive market in India. And it’s growing. It’s cheap. It’s accessible. It’s everywhere. A study from Connecticut College on Oreos revealed that Oreo cookies are more addictive than cocaine for lab rats. They also found that eating cookies activated more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure centre” than exposure to drugs of abuse. This lent support to their hypothesis that high-sugar/high-fat foods are addictive.

Of salt

Salt acts as a good preservative and enhances the taste. But… how much should you have in a day? A study found that a single fast-food item contains about 47% of the recommended daily allowance. If you have it with a side, that adds 26% more of it. So, if you were to have a burger and fries for a meal, you would already have about 75% of the recommended daily allowance of salt. Over the years, the amount of salt in fast food has increased dramatically. Perhaps because salt is a good preservative and adding more salt allows them to preserve the food for a more extended period.

Of colour

Ever eat at a restaurant and come home with fingers in orange? Yeah, food doesn’t naturally emit that much colour. Of course, they are safe to be eaten, but are they essential? Why are they added? Just so that we can feel more amused by the food we see, it increases our appetite.

Of oil, fats, and… of stimulation

We are no longer eating food just for energy. We are eating food for our amusement. We are entertained by the different flavours, aromas and colours that our food contains. We are constantly seeking for new variety of food to keep ourselves from boredom. Just like we scout for new content on social media, we cannot stop ourselves from seeking different flavours. Nothing is bad with trying out new food. It’s great. But the problem is the dose. If we start looking for artificial flavours, aromas and colours in our food, we will eventually develop terrible eating habits. Those are the roots of a lot of lifestyle diseases. Fast food giants exploit these habits and constantly innovate to make products that we tend to get addicted to — food that is high in fats and sugar.

This constant need to be stimulated at all times can be mind-numbing. It’s not healthy to eat out of boredom. Since this stimulation is so subtle, it’s hard to notice. It’s hard to see how influenced we are by these food companies’ marketing strategies. And while these giants are responsible for the kind of food they produce, we are also responsible for the food we consume. It’s challenging to take care of that if we are unaware of what we consume. Mindless food consumption just because it’s new, famous, and trendy is worrisome.

It is no longer true that we alone are responsible for our health, especially since there are no active efforts to inform us about what we consume. Better labelling systems put in place may help. Labels that actively try to inform the consumers that what they are buying has high amounts of sugars and fats — unhealthy for consumption. Awareness is the first step to changing any habits. It’s difficult for food companies to implement such a system simply because that will reduce their profits. What are those profits worth if they cause epidemics of lifestyle diseases in the long run?

As consumers, working towards making ourselves aware of our consumption can go a long way towards leading a healthy life.

I have added a lot of references in the section below. They have some great documentaries which may interest you if you find this interesting.