Camille Moore
Fast food is one of the most popular, most convenient extras in the lives of most Americans. In theory, people know that fast food is unhealthy, not really all that reliably made and pretty much disgusting. But it is salty, tasty and so much easier than going home and cooking dinner for your family when you have 5 places to be before bedtime even rolls around. So, we buy fast food. It doesn’t matter where you go for your fast food, you buy it at least once a month – and probably more often than that. These fast food facts are going to blow your mind.
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Fast Food Spending
A study that showed Americans spent approximately $142 billion annually at fast food restaurants. That’s a lot of money on cheap food. But what’s even more amazing is the fact that in 1970, Americans only spent $6 billion on fast food. That’s a lot of money when you consider the fact that fast food is generally not that expensive, and that many of the items in fast food restaurants are purchased from a list of items that cost about a dollar.
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Statistics
Out of 10 kids, 9 of them visit McDonalds at least once a month. You don’t even want to know how many of them visit more often than once a month. Statistics also show that just one meal at a fast food restaurant per month can increase your chances of obesity. Love what we’re doing to our kids as far as keeping them healthy and ensuring that they live long, healthy lives.
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Number of Fast Food Restaurants
Fast food is not just found in America. It’s found all over the world. However, when you take out the rest of the world and only consider America, there are more than 300,000 fast food restaurants located in our cities and streets. That’s a lot of fast food, but that’s what people want. This means that there is an average of four or five fast food restaurants in every small town in America.
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McDonalds as an Employer
This one is a staggering fact. Of all the companies and employers in the world and in Brazil more specifically, McDonalds is the biggest employer for people who live in Brazil. Seriously, McDonalds employs more people in Brazil than any other company or industry in the country. It’s exceptionally sad. Most of the rest of the world has many different employers that employee people far beyond the level that McDonalds does.
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Uncomfortable Chairs
McDonalds did not want their customers to linger. They wanted them to order and get out as quickly as possible when they first opened. They made sure this happened by forbidding newspaper boxes, entertainment and other things in their restaurants. They then made it a point to install the most uncomfortable chairs they could find so people would want to go quickly. It’s worked. Well, that and the fact that most people eating at McDonalds are doing so in their vehicles.
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Burning Calories
If you consume just one Whopper with cheese from Burger King, you’d need to walk 9 miles to burn the calories you just consumed. There are more than 923 calories in just that one sandwich. That’s almost the average woman’s daily recommended intake of calories in just one burger. The catch is that you have to walk briskly. You can’t go for a leisurely stroll and expect that to do the job for you when it comes to burning off calories like this.
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French Fries
The French fry is the one most popular food in American. They have been better sellers and more consumed than any other type of potato product, chips included, since 1970. In 2004, Americans consumed a staggering 7.5 billion pounds of fast food French fries. And we wonder why our kids are fat. That’s enough french fries to fill a lot of landfills, or to fill thousands of tanker trucks, or even to wrap around the world a few times.
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Beer in McDonalds
It’s the only thing missing from McDonalds if you want to make an entire meal even less healthy. In America, fast food restaurants such as McDonalds do not serve alcohol. However, in Germany, you can get a beer with your meal at any McDonalds restaurant. Why the chain has decided not to serve beer in American restaurants is not something we can explain, but we are willing to bet they’d increase those profits.
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Strawberry Milkshakes
You go to a fast food restaurant to order a strawberry shake and you might be very surprised just what you’re getting. It seems pretty easy to make a shake, since you could do it from home with something like three or four ingredients, right? Well, at any given fast food restaurant, you’re eating a strawberry shake with as many as 50 artificial flavors in it. It’s anything but a strawberry shake.
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Fast Food Salads
Sure, you feel better when you order a fast food salad than when you order a burger and fries, but you’re actually consuming chemicals. The same chemicals used to produce the very dangerous chemical called antifreeze are actually found in your fast food salad. That’s right; you’re not eating anything healthy by eating this kind of food. You’re actually just eating chemicals. And it’s not good for your body.
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Chicken Nuggets
If you like to say that you only like chicken and you don’t eat beef, but you do consume chicken nuggets from fast food restaurants, you’re a liar. The nuggets served in fast food restaurants are actually made with beef, so you’re consuming beef. They’re not listed as additives, of course, they’re listed by their other names, which look like anything but beef. Trust us, though; it’s in there. They don’t list it on the ingredients, but it’s there.
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McDonalds Profits
Believe it or not, McDonalds is one of the biggest real estate owners in the world. The profits they boast do not come so much from selling happy meals as they do from collecting rent from their many different locations around the world. It does pay to be a landlord when you are one of the biggest owners of land in the entire world.
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Fast Food Coffee
You might think that coffee is the way to go when you go out to eat at a fast food restaurant, but it’s not. There are bug particles, hair particles and even bug droppings in your coffee. In fact, some of the coffee made at fast food restaurants is made of beans that are made with bug droppings. It’s not illegal, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just how it is. There are so many of these different types of coffee on the market it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s what, but it could be that you’re drinking a morning cup of bug feces.
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Fast Food and Hair
If you eat fast food during the year, you are likely to consume at least one piece of hair from a body part you wish you never ingested hair from. Statistics prove that the average American who consumes fast food at least once or twice a month consumes at least 12 pieces of hair from various body parts annually. It’s really disgusting when you think about it. It’s enough to get you to stop eating fast food.
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French Fries and Sugar
Ever wonder how fast food restaurants get that gorgeous golden glow on their French fries? The answer is very simple. Most fast food restaurants make it a point to dip their fries into sugar. This helps to turn them that great shade of golden brown that’s needed to make them look perfect. So not only are they filled with salt and other unhealthy additives, they also contain sugar as well.
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Cheese
The cheese that’s used to make your burgers in a fast food restaurant, or the cheese you put on your chili or your salads at fast food restaurants is not actually cheese. It’s only 51 percent cheese. The rest of it is just stuff that’s all lumped together to create something that’s supposed to look and act and feel like cheese, but not go bad or get disgusting or melt completely when it’s placed on a hot sandwich.
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Food is Not Fresh
Those “Freshly” made items you’re buying when you eat fast food are not fresh. Even if it’s piping hot and you assume it was just cooked, you’re wrong. It was cooked prior to being packaged and shipped to the fast food restaurant. You are eating something that’s been cooked several times. In fact, if you’re eating fast food, you might be eating something that was cooked before it was shipped, earlier this morning and again just before it was served to you.
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Food Sits Under Warmers
Those warmers that you see housing burgers and fries in fast food restaurants are really hot lamps. They keep food hot for long periods of time. In all honesty, you might be eating food that was cooked and put together hours before, but it feels like it was just cooked because it’s been under those hot lights all day long. It’s disgusting when you really think about it.
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Fast Food Doesn’t Die
Die probably isn’t the correct word to use, but what we mean is essentially the same thing. If you take a fast food meal outside and place it on the ground, it will still be there in perfect condition the following morning. Unless a dog or cat gets to it, nothing else will. Bugs won’t even touch it. You might place a piece of candy on the ground next to some fries and see that the candy is covered in ants, but the fast food is free of ants. It’s gross.
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Fast Food Doesn’t Change
There are so many chemicals and other disgusting things in fast food that you can’t even get it to change over time. If you leave a fast food meal in the bag for a year, it’s going to look exactly the same a year later as it did when you purchased it. That’s because of all the “stuff” used to create the food. It’s so disgusting and unhealthy and filled with chemicals that it doesn’t even have the ability to grow mold.
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Bugs
There are as many as 10 to 20 bug pieces and parts in any given piece of fast food. The FDA allows this because they are so microscopic and unnoticeable that they don’t have any negative lasting effects on the people that consume them. What does this mean? This means that you might eat some bug parts, but you don’t know about it so it doesn’t matter to fast food restaurants or their employees.
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Chicken Sludge
It’s no big secret, but some people don’t know. When you eat at McDonalds, don’t order the nuggets. Not only do they have beef products in them, they’re made of a disgusting pink slimy-sludge that comes out of a machine in a factory. It’s called chicken, but it’s not actually made of chicken. You can look it up if you don’t believe us.
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Beef is Bad
The beef used in many fast food restaurants, particularly those that serve tacos, is so bad that even animals won’t eat it. That’s right. A dog that will eat anything is likely to turn away from a taco from a fast food restaurant because it looks so disgusting and is so disgusting that it’s not worth the dog’s time. Beef is graded, and the beef used for this purpose is known to be the beef with the worst possible grade. Even dog food makers won’t use beef this bad in their product. And they’re not feeding their kids.
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Super Size It
Actually, don’t supersize it. By making this $1 addition to your meal, you’re adding hundreds of calories – or more. You might make this meal so calorific that it becomes the size of three meals a day – in one sitting. Additionally, a supersized meal takes 7 hours to walk off. That’s a lot of time to spend walking if you’d like to stay fit and trim and not have to worry about gaining any weight.
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Eating a Lot Causes Cancer
That’s right ladies and gentlemen; eating fast food on a regular basis is enough to cause cancer. There have been studies linked to this that show that the more fast food you eat, the higher your chances are of developing many different forms of cancer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Some of the other health related issues you can suffer from when you eat a lot of fast food include cardiovascular disease, food poisoning and even diabetes. This doesn’t even include the health issues you could face by becoming obese and dealing the side effects from that.
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