Junk food is bad. You do not have to look far to know why. Just think why it is called ‘Junk’! Essentially, these only fill you up for the moment without adding any nutritive value to the body. The only thing you derive is the pleasure of instant taste and a wide range of related health problems. Junk eating is actually a main aspect of modern living, and it affects everything very negatively. Look up the explanations.
1. Creating an obese generation
The saturated and trans fat in junk foods along with the inherent chemical ingredients are the main culprits of creating a morbidly obese world!
It is totally a menace as from children to adults, everyone loves to dine on junk.
Data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that in the last 30 years, childhood obesity has doubled in children and quadrupled in the adult population.
Besides distorting the natural slim or curvy figure, obesity leads to a wide range of health problems including heart risk, diabetes, blood pressure issues, sleep apnea, bone and joint problems among other things. All fast food services such as McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s started about 40-60 years ago.
2. Promoting instant pleasure
Fast foods do have very deep cultural influences. Indeed, it has successfully promoted the happiness of quick pleasure. This profit-centric approach clearly contradicts the idea that earning happiness needs patient efforts.
When you do not have to wait for your dish to be prepared and arrive at your table, you also accept the losing sense of patience. This, in a way, harbors the infamous ‘taken for granted’ idea, which is totally a malady of the modern world.
Love is taken for granted nowadays. Feelings and emotions are taken for granted. Attachment and care is taken for granted! Respect is taken for granted. None of these are good. No! Such attitudes ultimate corrode the heart and soul irrevocably, promoting insensitivity.
3. Having it cheap
Fast foods are unrealistically cheap! The stuff that goes into making a simple hamburger should normally add up to be more than the cost of the burger you are buying! In other words, these are damn cheap!
Although this is attractive for someone who is tight on budget, it is not helpful at all. Later on, you may have to face up with a hefty medical expenditure, caused by ruining your immunity by fast food addiction.
Anything that promotes such abysmal cheapness actually degrades emotional values as well. You tend to think nothing of simple value or pleasure should come with a good price tag. Giving value to simple emotions is actually a rare and lost art nowadays!
4. Promoting bad health
Junk food is bad for health in almost every way possible! Manufacturers use chemical preservatives so extensively that the foods are rarely suitable to be called ‘foods’.
Independent studies have shown fast food products have an unbelievable shelf life, which can range up to more than a year! Anyone can try this if you have the patience.
You can keep your favorite burger intact for more than a year on the shelf! This is not natural. Then again, the ingredients in junk food consist of GMO products which have been proven to have serious health effects such as cancer and infertility. Obesity deaths to the trans fat in junk foods is a highly common issue.
5. Deepening social inequality
Fast food chains have been known to pay their staffs very low. Working on minimum wage, workers need to give all their energy in a hectic work day. Layoffs and other worker issues are very common as well.
All these lead to a deepening sense of social inequality and abject poverty. The proven key focus of a fast food service is to extract maximum profit, at all fronts.
They use ingredients that are more synthetic than edible.
They get their staff to work without sufficient payment. Grievances are not addressed and insensitive behavior from managers is only expected. All these issues are not on small scale either as junk food companies earn millions of dollars in their businesses every year.
6. No value to life
Animal rights activists have raised deep concerns on the way of deriving animal protein in the fast food industry. Cows and pigs are bred in thousands of containers where the live animals cannot even move!
Calves are taken away from mother cows almost as soon as they are born. The animals are fed heavily with antibiotics which later turn up on the plates of the consumers.
Leaked videos and images from inside fast food factories show they make holes on the abdomen of live cows to put their hands inside the animals for manipulating its digestive system. Chickens are bred in such a manner that they do not even grow feathers and are just masses of meat. In short, it is terrible!
7. Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is a major concern of the modern world. No one seems to do what they say ideally. It is the same with the fast food industry.
The advertised products seldom look the same as the real deal. Consumers find the advertisements attractive, but when the order is placed, the burger is quite not like expected.
Although you accept the contradiction and eat it nevertheless, yet you are also accepting the hypocrisy at the same moment. This is a social issue as it erodes the fabric of trust. Businesses must be based on reliability and honest service. Fast food services are much farther from these values, and persistent in keeping on doing what they do for maximum profit.