When it comes to fast food, I have a pretty simple position: Never, under any circumstances, no matter what should anyone eat it.
Did you know that a single meal at most fast food joints can metabolically and biochemically poison your body for up to two weeks? By that I do not mean that you will be likely to drop dead in the parking lot. No, it is more subtle than that. Even though they may not be obvious, the ill health effects from a single meal can last for more than two weeks. Yes, that is just from one meal. For people who frequent the fast food joints the ill effects can persist for months, even after one has cleaned up the diet.
Why are these so-called meals so harmful? Simple, they are full of poisons and toxins! Here is just a partial list of the toxins and poisons that fast food “meals” are absolutely full of, and a description of the harm that they cause:
1. Cancer Growth And Risks: Fast foods increase cancer risks and cancer growth by flooding the body with sugar. This feeds any cancer cells that are already present in your body.
2. The Most Toxic Form Of Sugar: Because it is more profitable for them, the fast food joints use sugar in the form high fructose corn syrup. Or they use sugar made from high fructose corn syrup. This is by far the deadliest of all sugars in common use.
3. Diabetes And Pre-Diabetes: The huge amount of sugar in a typical fast food meal is enough to give a fire hydrant diabetes. Seriously, the amount of sugar is huge, compared to that in a home-prepared, healthy meal. Further, the sugar and the carbohydrates are in a form that absorbs much more rapidly than normal. This badly shocks the system. It destabilizes pancreatic functions and leads to diabetes, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and other serious sugar-related health problems.
4. Deadly Systemic Inflammation: The huge and unhealthy amount of sugar in a fast food meal raises the overall inflammation level in the body. This can lead to cancer, heart disease, liver disease, serious digestive illnesses, arthritis and much more.
5. Still More Inflammation: Other ingredients in almost all fast foods in many other “foods” that increase inflammation to very unhealthy levels. These include the contaminated, bad quality dairy products, GMO grains, unhealthy grains, GMO potatoes and more.
6. Bad Fats And Oils Are Highly Toxic To Human Beings: Most fast foods contain oils and fats that are inherently unhealthy, such as canola oil, (which is good for furniture polish but not for human consumption), margarine and more. These fats and oils are unhealthy in the extreme, even before they are heated. Once they are heated, they become even more toxic. They are not heat stable. When heated these bad oils are transformed into transfats and other toxic chemicals. These are even recognized by the mainstream as being carcinogenic – cancer-causing. Even if you do not get cancer from these heat-damaged oils, they raise the inflammation levels in your body to dangerous levels.
7. Unhealthy Gut And Compromised Immune System: Fast foods damage the essential population of beneficial bacteria in the gut. This dramatically weakens the immune system. Having a healthy bacterial population in the intestinal tract is absolutely essential to having a strong and effective immune system. Without that you are a sitting duck for cancer and a host of other serious diseases. Most of these diseases are becoming increasingly common these days, even though they used to be rare. Many experts agree that the typical American diet is to blame. I would say that fast foods are likely the biggest culprit.
8. The meats that are served in fast food joints are filled with artificial hormones, antibiotics and poisons. If we eat this garbage, these poisons go right into our bodies. They remain in our bodies until they have done a great deal of harm. The alarming health statistics for the U.S.A. should be all the evidence we need to convince us the shun fast foods. Some of the hormones routinely used in raising fast food meats actually have been shown in the laboratory and in the body to accelerate the growth of cancers.
I could go on and make this list much longer. But I am hoping you get the idea. There are more than a few books and documentary films on the subject of fast foods and what they do to us. “Fast Food Nation” is a good book to start with.
Some Ethical Implications Of Fast Foods: (in no particular order)
The entire industry and the way it operates causes significant environmental harm that other food service industries do not, or at least to a much lesser degree.
The animals that are raised and then killed to provide the meats used by the fast food industry are typically raised in more extremely inhumane ways than is found in most other food industries. There is a good argument that all raising of animals for food is cruel, inhumane and cannot be justified. I will leave that discussion for another time. Suffice it to say, that the fast food industry is the cruelest and least humane of these industries.
I have been told that the executives of most of the fast food chains do NOT eat their own cooking. I can’t say I blame them for that. But if they won’t eat it why should we?
Here’s an interesting side note: At Monsanto’s corporate headquarters, as is the case with most multi-national very rich corporations, they have an “Executive Dining Room”. This is where the upper management elite of Monsanto can dine. Guess what? They not only do not serve any of the GMO crap that they insist is safe and good for the rest of us, but I’m told the entire food supply for that operation is 100% organic.
I think this demonstrates that the executives of these corporations know that their products are not safe. They have a good idea of the harm caused. Yet they continue to try to fool us into eating them.
So, I ask you: Do you really want to give your hard-earned money to corporations whose primary activity is to continue poisoning you and your loved ones for profit? Might there be a moral obligation to boycott them, aside from the obvious health benefits?
A Quick Story:
I have a relatively new client who is dealing with a life-threatening cancer. Conventional medicine had nothing to offer him. Instead, he has been working with me for the last several months. He has already made quite a bit of progress. He has been following a pretty strict diet to build up his immune system, clear the toxins from his body, and eliminate all the factors that cause cancer cells to proliferate at higher than normal rates. (We all have some cancer cells growing in us all the time. This is not a problems as long as the rate is normal and our immune systems are healthy so that they can keep up with and eliminate the over-population of cancer cells.)
A few days ago, a little birdy told me that he had made a visit to the local fast food joint. (I think it was “stool pigeon”. LOL) He ate a bunch of fast food, which will take his body a minimum of 2 weeks to overcome. He brought his 2 young nieces along. In fact, that was his excuse for going there in the first place – he thought his nieces would not eat a healthy meal. We had an interesting discussion about this!
What if, instead, he brought his 2 nieces to the local market, or maybe even a local farmer’s market. What if they shopped for some good organic veggies and related foods? What if he made a little mini-class on healthy foods out of that shopping trip? It could be a combined adventure and a learning experience. Lord knows, they are not learning anything about healthy eating anywhere else – likely not the home, not the school, or…
Upon arriving home from the shopping trip, making a nice stir fry with healthy cooking oil, (organic coconut oil), becomes another learning and teaching opportunity.
At first, kids not used to this type of meal may not appreciate it that much. But if you patiently explain to them the real benefits, I am enough of an optimist to believe change it possible.
I have actually had some experience with this. I love to cook and those who eat my meals tell me I am good at it. My same ferocious curiosity about health and so much else in this world extends to cooking. I have made it a point to learn as much as I can about the cooking from a number of distant lands, including China. I have gotten to be quite good at making healthy, tasty stir frys. I enjoy teaching others this valuable and easy-to-learn skill.
I have several times had young children here that I needed to feed. I have done exactly as outlined above and made a shopping lesson, a cooking lesson and even an eating lesson out of the whole adventure. At the beginning the kids assured me they would go along to the market and be “good sports”. They would participate in the cooking, but were not enthusiastic about eating what we prepared.
When the meal was ready, a few of them quipped that they would rather go to McD’s. I ignored that and asked them to just taste it. I served the stir fry over steamed quinoa with a small amount of Coconut Aminos® healthy soy sauce substitute.
Most of the kids asked for seconds. While I am sure they did not stop eating at fast food joints, at least some of the time, I feel there is a good chance that the experience at least opened some doors for them.
Let me leave you with a couple of reminders:
If you eat the crap that they serve in most fast food joints it takes a healthy body that has really good detox pathways up to 2 weeks or more to fully rid itself of the toxins. It may take a lot longer than that to undo any immune system damage. This is because the fast food damages the intestinal bacterial population, which in turn degrades the immune system.
I know it can be tempting to eat fast foods and other things we know we should not. It is not always easy. Further, there often are social and family pressures that do not help us in our efforts to feed our bodies wisely and well. I usually use the tension as an opportunity to share my information and teach. Occasionally, this is met with a less than welcoming attitude. But, surprisingly, I have had more success than I expected.
I try to follow this motto: I do not live to eat. Rather, I eat to live.
To your great health!
Jeff Bell