I’m interested in the known biological processes that are enabling my fries and hamburgers and salt to shorten my life, by some mans or another.
About me. I’m 40, about 6’ and 178.5 lbs and have been thereabouts for all of my adult life. I’ve only ever been described as slim to normal by people who have only just met me, although my ht & wt put me at 24.5 BMI. I’m slightly active; not sedentary, but I don’t devote time to exercise either. I don’t drink, or smoke, and eat a typical breakfast and dinner. But I loooooove me some fries and a hamburger. Every lunch I have a meat-only hamburger (tastes fine to me) and every second day I’ll also have some fries with more seasoned salt than most people could tolerate. Sugar-free soft drinks are my drink of choice.
Now, being devoid of all of the other usual contributing factors to preventable early death, we seem to be left with just the fats, salt, MSG etc. consumed in one meal of the day. Is my body able to process and eliminate the excess salts, MSG, “bad” fats (or other) contained within my lunch, or are there well understood biological processes causing an permanent accumulation and damage within my body? Simply, do we know as fact that something intrinsically bad and useless within the food is being packed away in my body, or causing irreversible changes, which may pop up and kick my arse one day?
No, we pretty much know as a fact that no such thing is happening. Fast food tends to be high in calories, particularly fats, and high in salt, compared to many other types of food, so it tends to make make you fat and to temporarily raise salt and possibly cholesterol levels. If you have elevated salt and cholesterol levels over a long period, that can damage your arteries and make heart disease more probable (although the actual dangers of both salt and cholesterol are often much exaggerated). There are no “poisons” or “toxins” in fast food that are going to accumulate in your body (no more so than in any other type of food, anyway) and eating it occasionally will not harm you at all. Eating it all the time (and especially the same sort all the time) might not be such a good idea, but that is more because of necessary nutrients, such as certain vitamins, and dietary fibre, that it generally lacks, or contains only in insufficient quantities (and the fact, already mentioned, that, because it commonly contains a lot of fat and carbohydrate compared to many other foods, it tends to make you fat more than those other foods will).
It’s all about averages. The limits and tolerances are those that apply to the general population. How many units of alcohol, how much salt, how much or how little of everything. The point is that we are all unique, so what may kill me, may not affect you.
From my distant memory of 6th form, just about everything that affects human beings can be demonstrated as a bell graph - the ones on the left are pretty much doomed, and the ones on the right will survive almost any abuse. The vast majority in the centre can help themselves by moderation.
Teeth are a good example - some people religiously brush twice a day and get all their six-monthly checks, but still lose all their teeth by the time they are 50. Others don’t brush or floss, avoid dentists like the plague, but keep their teeth well into their old age. The rest can make them last longer by giving them some care. Not to mention the social benefits:)
You skipped right over the carbs and, ironically enough, sugar-free sweetener. Eating an entire day’s worth of carbs at one sitting means your blood sugar is spiking within an hour after you eat. Plus, the sugar-free sweetener fools your body into thinking you just ate a bunch of sugar, so your body pumps out an extra-large dose of insulin to deal with all these carbs. There are only three main things your body can do with glucose: store it in cells which use it as fuel (and, since you don’t exercise much, you don’t need to replenish much), store it in the liver as glucagon (an emergency reserve in case you skip a meal, which it doesn’t sound like you do), and store it as fat. Guess where it ends up?
I’m interested in learning more about this. Are you talking about an effect happening when a person injests carbs and artificial sweeteners at the same time? Or are you saying this effect happens when a person injests artificial sweeteners only? Could you point me towards some articles/experiments that proved this?
The OP is right, the meat on a bun is a piece of meat with some bread, its not toxic at that dosage.
The only problem then is whats missing - fibre , vitamins and minerals.
Your body may crave more food to get vitamins and minerals… you train your brain that it needs to eat more to get the proper nutrition… so then you crave food and become a glutton.
The alternative is that you have malnutrition and feal weak and tired, and even get sick… you might have unhealthy skin, gums, lips, finger and toe nails… or just sleep a lot or just be grumpy , depressed…
And then you want to eat some more.
Too much of the soft bread with no fibre can lead to constipation, which may be related to colon cancer (injuries lead to scar tissue growth…)
If this is directed at me, I did mention carbs, and fast food (as opposed to what you might or might not drink with it) does not generally contain sugar free sweetener, the dangers of which are, anyway, so far as I can see, far from being well established. Most of the carbs in fast food are starches, and thus do not lead to rapid spiking of blood sugar (although some drinks, if they are not sugar free, but sweetend with a lot of sugar or HFCS, will). Furthermore, many ‘slow’ foods contain a lot of carbs too, and a healthy diet will generally contain quite a lot of them. Like many things, too many carbs are not good for you, but too few are not so great for you either.
Furthermore, if you actually look at the OP’s fast food habits, he is not actually getting all that many carbs from it at all. Most of his calories will be from fat and protein.
Yes, fast food can make you fat, if you eat too much of it. Any food will make you fat if you eat too much of it.
I’d also wonder about the OPs “typical breakfast and dinner”. That could cover a lot of ground. A culturally typical breakfast for somebody from, say, Mississippi, Minnesota, and California will be quite different. Much less from China or Germany.
The OP’s other two meals could by either the “antidote” to his burger and fries, or could be the incremental contribution to excess refined carbs & sodium that drives him to diabetes and or heart disease.
Hint to OP:
I was like you: Mid 40s, naturally slender, living in a part of the country populated by mostly heavy folks, and slowly developing a high BMI while still looking pretty “normal” by comparison. And I thought I ate fairly healthy vs. the “typical” American. With a couple standard “cheat meals” I enjoyed about once a week.
Then I got my blood sugar checked and discovered I was well along the path to diabetes. Major lifestyle changes ensued to stop that chain reaction before it got too late.
So a quick check of that possibility will let you know whether your diet is in fact harming you or is, like several people upstream have said, probably well within your body’s ability to cope.
Most fast food, such as that containing meat or cheese, certainly has some vitamins in it, but it is true it probably does not have the full range of those we need (and might not have enough, even of those that it does have). This again, however, is true of all foods, and is only an argument showing that eating only fast food, or more particularly, only one type of fat food, is unhealthy.
Most minerals we require (and indeed vitamins) are needed only in small quantities, so, again, you would have to be on a fast food only (or even one type of fast food only) diet, for quite some time, for this to cause any problem.
The only mineral or vitamin deficiency that I am aware of that causes cravings (except in some very extreme circumstances) is sodium deficiency, and typical fast foods contain plenty of that. (They also contain reasonable amounts of potassium, the only other mineral we need in relatively large quantities. Maybe you could get a potassium deficiency through eating nothing but certain fast foods for a long time, but it would take quite a while.) Some people - though not the OP, I think - certainly do eat too much fast food (and it is more fattening per gram than many other types of food), but they do not eat too much because of any mineral or vitamin cravings, they do so because it tastes good (largely because of all the fat, carbs and salt in it), and because it is easy to get.
So it sounds like my major dangers are not so much what I am consuming (some fats, salt, MSG etc) but rather what I may not be consuming: fibre, vitamins, minerals? I do take a fibre supplement and some multivitamins and have a usually pretty lean meat & veg dinner (no potatoes or rice). Perhaps I do need potatoes and rice. I’va always been a very fussy eater and I don’t doubt that I’m not consuming a wide enough variety of foods/nutrients hence the fibre supplement and multivitamins.
If you eat a big mac meal that’s 123 grams of carbohydrates (51 of them sugar). That’s a little more than the liver can store but only a third of what muscles can store. If you’re reasonably active and haven’t eaten recently I’m pretty sure your muscles can easily absorb half of that and the liver the other half. So that glucose isn’t going to be circling your arteries looking for a place to park.
Yes, the liver stores carbohydrates as glycogen and then releases them back to the blood when the rest of the body needs glucose. But that’s not an emergency system. Unless you get up to eat a couple of times each night, this is the system that lets you get through the night. Or through the day, unless your meals all have enough carbohydrates in them to last you through your next meal.
Back to the original question: as others have said, fast food isn’t poisonous, it won’t kill you. Eating too much can lead to diseases that can kill you (diabetes, heart disease, cancer).
However, eating a good amount of fruit and fiber has shown to be helpful, and fast food doesn’t have too much of that. (Vegetables too? Not sure.) Also, I subscribe to the food palatability theory of obesity: we tend to overeat food that tastes good. Few people get fat on eating sugar cubes and drinking vegetable oil.
You don’t need potatoes and rice. (Not that there’s anything wrong with them.)
Have you had your blood glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol measured in the past few years? If all of these are ok then you’re doing better than most of us so just keep doing what you’re doing.
Believe me, as a child I tried. I ate white sugar, straight, by the teaspoon, from the sugar bowl and loved it. I don’t know why I stopped actually. I could do it right now.
I have had my ‘bloods’ done about 7 years ago, and probably need to do it again soon. Blood sugar and cholesterol were ok (doc didn’t worry) but thyroid function was borderline low. I purchased a BP monitor recently to watch myself after a little ‘white coat pre-hypertension’ episode. In my own home just now it was 120/80 average left & right arm and 53 pulse rate (@12pm). I did have to chart my BP for the doc and in the comfort of my own home I couldn’t get a high reading even after riding my bike home briskly and uphill which makes me think that my monitor could read too low. I’ll get that done in the doc’s office again to compare.
Yeah I never believed that was a thing until I got 200/100 during a hospital follow-up one time… Or maybe I should have used the elevator rather than walk six flights of stairs. :smack:
Fast food only “kills” people by fooling them into eating way more calories than they need, and by being cheap enough for poor people to eat to the exclusion of more micronutrient rich foods. If you’re not significantly over- or underweight, and your diet is varied enough to get the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) it needs and the right proportion of macronutrients (carbs, protein, fat), then you can eat fast food daily with no problems.
A macronutrient is a macronutrient. It doesn’t matter if your protein comes from McDonald’s or the tofu aisle at a vegan health food store. It doesn’t matter if your carbs come from a whole grain organic loaf of bread or the fryer at Burger King. So long as you get the right amounts and proportions of each, and there’s enough variety to get the vitamins and minerals you need.
I’ve quoted the two next to each other because the answer to the first also includes a response to the second.
Individual meals are not a problem. Nor are individual foods. It is not a question of not being able to process “bad fats” … the issue is the impact of ongoing nutrition habits as complete wholes. Your limited exposure to fast food (a regular plain burger sometimes with a regular fries) is only a problem depending on how typical the rest of your diet is. Typical Standard American Diet typical? You are in deep shit, but not much more so than you already were. Actually a reasonable selection of food the rest of the day, one that includes foods with fiber including a decent amount of vegetables? No worries.
Yes, as stated, item one is that the fries and hamburger is high calorie and high palatability (fats, salts, and sugars, especially combined, trigger the centers that say “eat lots of me”) and low satiety (little trigger to the centers that say “fulla uppa”). Together just one Big Mac with large fries have 1040 calories, another 280 if you drink a large soda with it. Together they have 51 grams of total fat, which is pretty close to the total advided for consumption over a whole day. Go with the Double Quarterpounder with cheese along with the fries and the soda and you are up to 1530 calories, 68 grams of fat, 612 fat calories. Want a little sweet for the road on the way out and grab a Strawberry McCafe, just a medium? Another 690 calories. And indeed all relatively low in fiber (the fries have some modest amount anyway) and very low in vitamins and minerals and the host of other good stuff in what many of us like to refer to as “real food.” (Nutrition information source.) McD’s btw is scarcely the worst. A large fries at Five Guys is 1464 calories by itself with little nutrition for all of it. It is very difficullt to not take in an excess of calories when eating this stuff.
The “real food” comment brings us to item two: the packaging does matter; a macronutirent is not a macronutrient. Despite DrCube’s assertion, you need more than the right amounts and proportions of each, with the vitamins and minerals you need. The packaging impacts how the food is delivered to different portions of your gut and thus how it impacts your system endocrinologically and how it impacts your microbiome which impacts your in many ways including endocrinolgically and immunologially. It comes with more than the now well identified and mostly understood vitamins and minerals but in real foods of some diversity including vegetables and fruits, a host of other substances with a host of other impacts of which we are only beginning to get a handle on. Hence complete diets high in vitamins and minerals adequate for all macronutrients are associated with excellent short and long term outcomes, longer life and better physicial and cognitive function including into that old age. But diets full of foods merely adequate for those micronutrients and supplemented with a pill containing the usual multi stuff, also adequate for all macronutrients, are not associated with those excellent outcomes.