There is a very good chance that today's Australians may have a shorter lifespan than their parents. We are simply consuming too much sugar, salt and saturated fat in our diet and the resulting obesity crisis is responsible for the health problems that are causing earlier deaths.
It seems to be an impossible battle because our taste buds are our worst enemy. We crave the sweetness that sugar imparts to soft drinks and food manufacturers know that adding salt to their product gets the cash registers ringing a happy tune, and anytime that saturated fats are replaced with a healthy alternative the sales graph drops sharply.
This problem started to multiply soon after the end of the second world war. The food industry started to offer pre-packed ingredients to save time and reduce the preparation effort and that coincided with the start of the fast food industry. The Australian culture quickly changed from a steak or a chop with three vegetables to either eating out or bringing home a meal in a cardboard box. We now face an amazing product choice with many offering a home delivery service.
Today, fast food restaurants cover sixty-seven percent of the food market. A university survey had a look at this spectrum with regard to their marketing policies and content disclosure. There have been threats to enact legislature to force the industry to adopt healthier food standards and many outlets doubt that it could survive if this became reality. It is the taste that keeps the customers coming back for more !
Fast food was examined and rated on a scale of one to a hundred on six factors. These included policies on marketing to children, disclosure of nutrient information on menus, plans to reduce " nutrients of concern " and commitment to health in corporate strategies. That all important content of sugar, salt and saturated fat content of the food offered was taken into account.
The worst outcome from this survey was Domino's Pizza with a score of just 3 in 100. McDonald's, KFC, Nando's, Hungry Jacks, Pizza Hut, and Red Rooster ranged from 10 to 42 and the clear winner was Subway with 48 out of 100, although there was criticism of their policy of offering free soft drink refills.
Some health conscious people will read this survey with interest and resolve to both reduce their content of fast food fare and promote Subway to the top choice because of their excellent result, but come Saturday night and the crowd gets together to have some fun the most likely outcome is that they will gorge on beer - with a salt content that makes it so appealing - and send out for Pizza because that is a universally popular snack.
It seems to be an unwinnable war. The food industry long ago learned that human taste buds react to drinks sweetened with sugar or made tangy with salt and that for unknown reasons saturated fats add to the taste better than healthier alternatives. The food industry is in the market to make sales and the best policy they can devise is to " Give the customers what they want - and what they ask for " !
Ideally, this warning should result in these unhealthy products being restricted to occasional treats to reduce the harm, but that runs contrary to human nature. The longer the break between satisfying the taste buds, the greater the urgency those taste buds demand. Not even the threat of a shorter life span seems to dampen these magic ingredients that now rule our lives !
It seems that fast food is the fare we are literally dieing to eat !
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