Fast Food- A quick fix to eating on the go…or a recipe for obesity and rising health costs? 
By: Irena Papst, Editor

          Caesar Barber, 56, a maintenance worker who weighs about 270 pounds and stands 5-foot-10, claims McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and KFC jeopardized his health with their greasy, salty fare. He filed a class action lawsuit, in the New York State Supreme Court in the Bronx on behalf of an unspecified number of other obese and ill New Yorkers who also feast on fast food. 
Cases like this have become more newsworthy the past few years, and still, our country has not yet realized the harm fast food is inflicting upon our society. Sure, it’s a good solution to families on the go, but does it really help us, or is it only creating an unhealthy and obese society that won’t be able to afford the price to fix the problems it will develop later on?

Fast food is, in fact, making our society unhealthy and obese. It has almost no benefits what-so-ever and is basically getting us addicted to fat-loaded hamburgers and greasy fries. Obesity is the state of being dangerously overweight and it’s a condition that puts your health in danger. When we get addicted to these unhealthy and un-balanced meals, not only does our society get obese, but we also become more vulnerable to other diseases and horrible consequences. Consequences such as high blood pressure, hypertension, heart disease [strokes], adult onset diabetes, juvenile diabetes, gall bladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, endometrial, breast, prostate and colon cancers, dyslipidemia, steatohepatitis, insulin resistance, breathlessness, asthma, hyperuricaemia, reproductive hormone abnormalities, polycystic ovarian syndrome, impaired fertility and lower back pain. All these consequences can eventually become a grim reality if we continue to pig out on consistent orders of Big Macs and Supersize Fries.

Since the birth of the relatively young fast food industry, the obesity rate has doubled in the past 20 years. Today, 2 out of 3 of Americans are overweight. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 300 million people worldwide are obese. In terms easier to understand, take the whole Canadian population AND the whole American population, add them up and you’ll have a rough idea of the number of obese people that exist in the world. And sadly, many, if not all are in this condition because of addicting and unhealthy food. Why pay more with you life, for less with your money.

Fast Food isn’t only causing us to suffer, it’s also causing a noticeable drain on the healthcare system too. Being directly linked to obesity, fast food is being named the main cause of a variety of illnesses which require extensive treatment to fix. When it comes time to deal with these illnesses and consequences, the healthcare system takes a hard hit. Take 1998 for example. Obesity related illnesses alone soaked up $78.5 billion of the nations annual medical bill. Why spend our hard-earned healthcare dollars on obesity, an avoidable disease, when instead we could be spending it on hemophilia, an un-avoidable genetic blood disease? We could have been spending more then half of that money on hemophilia and other un-avoidable illnesses. However, the problem is not being corrected. As a society, if we continue to consume fast foods, at the current rate we are, $78.5 billion could be rounded to well over $100 billion this year, and even more for next year, due to the obesity related illnesses fast food joints are responsible for.

In conclusion, fast food is creating an unhealthy and obese society that’s costing us way more than just the meal price of a combo deal. Is a bite into a Burger King Whopper worth the pain and suffering you may develop later on in life? If you can’t answer that right now, perhaps you should give it some thought the next time you pick up a greasy, fat-loaded hamburger.