To your PS. Fast food chains are one of and possibly the number one reason for obesity in America and as they have spread world wide the same thing is happening elsewhere.
The Blue Zone in Costa Rica is shrinking due to fast food chains moving in. It is all about choices. I eat a Mediterranean diet and never touch fast food. My combined cholesterol two years ago was just over 220. Two years on the Med diet and my combined cholesterol is 116.
I also participated in an Obesity study at Duke Hospital. I was a control participant my weight has never been over 165 and I am 5’ 9”..
The four page questionnaire was all about fast food. Almost completely.
Sadly people’s lives are being shortened for profit.
Singapore restricts all soda by law it can only contain 12% sugar max. In America it can be 100% sugar. Singapore also has a healthy food rating system for restaurants!
Actually, it's less the fast food chains, than you might think. The food industry has figured out that if you put more sugar in ANY food, we eat more of it, whether we can taste it or not. Sugar is a metabolic poison that plays havoc with hunger/satiety hormones. So, it's not just fast food, but nearly ALL food in American supermarkets that can be, is adulterated by sugar intentionally by the food industry. Same with "seed oils" in many products that are "supposed" to be safe, like salad dressings. Really, fresh/non-spiced frozen meat and vegetables is literally the only safe food to eat out of American grocery stores these days.
And you have a certain politically-motivated portion of the populace in America that is dead set against any regulation of sugar whatsoever, as they want to maintain "MUH FREEDOM".
The problem all comes down to lack of education where it really counts for our young people. They are never taught that we evolved to be mainly carnivores, and that "sugar" (carbohydrates) was only ever available to us as hunter-gatherers during specific seasons, and that our bodies prefer fat as fuel (which is why we carry it around on us), and that the human body evolved to see sugar and other carbohydrates as a means to quickly pack on fat reserves for the harder winter months. Americans grow up on a high-carbohydrate diet (whether it's fast food, or cooked at home), which induces insulin resistance due to chronically high blood sugar levels.
Many of the citizens in poorer Asian countries like Vietnam simply were not able to afford fast food, so they either grow their own food, or buy it from local markets. Nearly every country whose economy boomed enough for there to be enough profit for fast food and junk supermarket food companies to make a profit, soon began to see increasing obesity problems. The food is specifically engineered for you to want more and more of it with sugar being added to increase hunger, and salt being added to increase thirst, with heavy marketing of sugary soda, which induces more hunger, and the salt in the food induces more thirst (because it is a diuretic), etc..etc..etc... America itself will continue to have obesity and diabetes issues, until our politicians simply cannot ignore the problem any more, and are forced to reign the food industry in, despite the political backlash from certain ill-informed voters. The only reason that they will be successful in that, (if ever) is the rising cost of healthcare, which the food industry is almost 100% responsible for. Those who don't know what the F*** they are talking about say it's not the food industry's fault, that it is due to "personal choice". When what they do is effectively the same as putting an extremely addictive drug as an additive to their products, pretending it is not physically addictive, and then blaming the customer for being hooked.
I often get criticized on here for being "anti-American", for criticizing stuff like this that toxic American capitalism is in fact, responsible for.
