Persuasive Essay On Fast Food

Fast food advertisements can be found around the world, on newspapers, television, and even online. Children, teenagers, and parents have seen marketing focused on fast food. While adults may think little about such blatant advertising tactics that are solely designed to attract new customers, how are kids affected? People across the United States worry about the ever increasing obesity rates amongst children in recent years. A common explanation is the spike in popularity of fast food. Most kids and teenagers have eaten fast food at least once in their lifetime. But why has fast food gotten increasingly popular recently? Fast food has always been known to be very unhealthy, but kids still consume it anyway. The culprit: fast food advertising. In modern times, the majority of kids living in the United States have access to the internet or television, where they are easy targets for advertising. To prevent the nation from growing up obese, fast food companies should end all ad campaigns targeted towards children and focus advertising strictly on adults. These advertisements cause kids to consume fast food more often, to eat an unhealthy diet, and to grow up in a culture dependent on fast food.

On the other hand, the major concern right is to fight that problem starting with the children since as most of the children attend to become adults in following unhealthy food, drinks so they can become bigger so they can look older by getting that size faster. The other type of children are trying only following the same habit because of their parents, and that depends on the way the parent living. Parent are buzzy due to live demands, and most of them work two or even three jobs. That will lead the parent to rely more on the fast food rather than have some time to make a healthy homemade food.

Also, fast food has an abundant amount of calories out of an average diet of a teenager, leading to an unhealthy diet. Next, it was researched by scientists that eating too much fast food could lower the intelligence of a child. Finally, Many American children’s only balanced meal of the day is their school lunch and the rest of the meals are based around fast food. Then that means if a school serves fast foods such as McDonalds of Burger King, there would be nothing to balance out the child’s daily meal. Serving fast foods at schools would put more students into risk of their health.

Junk food is one of the main causes of obesity in America.It contains things that have unhealthy ingredients that could lead to illnesses in the future if a person consumes a large amount of junk food.But there are ways to eat junk food and still be healthy while enjoying your favorite junk foods . Over the years there has been a lot of history behind junk food and the effects of it. Some of these historical findings have started leading people to understand that the amount of junk food that they consume is something that is very important for the health.Usually a person who is young that consumes a large amount of junk food may see an increase in obesity cholesterol and high blood pressure. For a person who is older such as in their 30s and 40s they may then see those things as well plus other illnesses that could lead to things such as high blood pressure and heart disease .To avoid an unhealthy lifestyle in the future something that might be questioned. Is it possible to live a healthy lifestyle while still enjoying junk foods?

Because of parents using food as a reward, many children learn that being good means eating unhealthy. Combined with the advertising techniques used by the fast food industry, children begin to make a correlation between fast food and a reward. Ellen Gustafson further confirms that fast food contains “more refined grains, fats and oils and sugars than the 1980’s.” All of these components of fast food make it appealing to children. Furthermore, many parents do not have time to make healthy meals for their children because of our fast-paced society. As David Zinczenko relates in Don’t Blame the Eater, “lunch and dinner, for me, was a daily choice between McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. Then, as now, these were the only available options for an American kid to get an affordable meal.” This is not a rare situation. Many parents work long hours and therefore encourage their kids to eat fast food instead of taking the time to teach healthy habits. This has the ripple effect of overeating and lack of exercise. Without exercise, many kids gain weight, become obese or are at risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and asthma. (Childhood Obesity) Today, type 2 diabetes exists in 30% of childhood obesity. (Zinczenko 154) Gustafson further states in her presentation “1/3 of American children are overweight and obese.” When a child has obesity, their ability to participate in everyday activities like sports and play is inhibited, which means

Children in America are faced with different choices every day. Some of these choices can be either good or bad for them. But these children don't really know the consequences of their actions, but the school does. Schools are serving unhealthy and un properly cooked meals to children every single day. These food companies make big money from these schools because the schools just buy the lunches so the kids will eat something. The schools don't really care what goes into the students stomachs, but as long as the school meets the requirements it's okay. Then the students just eat it because it looks and taste good, but they don't have an idea of what their eating is made out of or where it has been before. The government needs to start making school lunches more healthy for these students, if not then then unfortunately the number of obese children will rise.

The current state of affairs isn’t ideal for school children as many schools offer children foods of minimal nutritional value with some schools still allowing fast food restaurants to provide their services in high schools and middle schools. The current policies actually contribute to the toxic environment that many children face both at home and at school as those most impacted by the obesity epidemic are minority and poor urban children who don’t have healthy choices at home or in school. Part of the problem

68 percent of students say they buy food from the cafeteria every day. Proper nutrition is tied to better academic performance. This means that kids will not do their best in school if they are fed unhealthy lunches (Black). The unhealthy lunches kids are given at school are the main contribution to childhood obesity. According to scientists, children who eat too much fat, sugar, sodium or processed food and too few vitamins and minerals are likely to develop a higher risk over time for several chronic health problems (Angela). These health problems include heart disease, and diabetes. At this time, more than ever, 55 percent of Americans are obese and 20 percent of Americans are overweight (Three Facts About School Lunches). Many schools offer healthy choices, but they did not decrease the calories in them, and they typically still offer unhealthy snack items (Three Facts About School Lunches). In a school cafeteria with both healthy and unhealthy choices offered to kids, most kids are not willing to choose the healthier choices over the unhealthy ones. So where an apple is avoided and a bag of potato chips is selected as a child’s first choice for a snack

Many schools around the nation are feeding unhealthy food products to children, such as fries, sodas, sweets from vending machines. It is shown that, “an estimated 17% of children and adolescents ages 2-19 years are obese according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”

Food companies make millions just from advertising junk food to kids. Food companies advertise using very known cartoon characters to appeal to kids that contain high-sugar levels that can cause many different disorders that can affect them in a server way. Kids tend to beg their parents for junk food and other types of foods just for seeing that they would receive a toy. In the article “10 Things the Food industry Doesn’t Want You to Know” states “On TV alone, the average child sees about 5,500 food commercials a year.” With these advertisements, kids can get the idea of going to eat in places that have unhealthy food. Advertisement like these can cause children to view fast food as something they can be constantly eating without having any problems.

What is this food doing to our children? The childhood obesity epidemic has increased because of the contribution of junk food that is being served in public schools. It has been found that children who eat fatty school foods are more likely to become obese than those who brought lunch from home. Why is this we may ask has a lot to do with the above student that I stated brought their lunch from home daily. You can count the intake of calories that is in your lunchbox but you have no idea what is in the food from you school, half of the time you will not even know what the food is. Also, the specials that are provided for students on special food days increases their calorie intake as well such as; pizza day or wing day. On these days children have shown to intake more food because these are the days that they provide greasy foods that taste swell and the children like them so they will gravitate to them because they do not have the proper knowledge to know what this food can do to your body.

As a nation, Americans revel in the consumption of junk food. These extremely unhealthy foods are often present during many various occasions, such as sports events, movies, and parties. When a person craves a quick snack, junk food is the ideal solution. However, beyond the satisfying taste of foods such as Doritos and potato chips lies a very serious problem. These foods can lead to physical disrepair, sickness, and even death. Yet many Americans remain oblivious to this nationwide issue and allow it to remain unaddressed. The crisis of junk food in America needs to be resolved immediately. To go more in depth, it is imperative that the nation resolves this issue relatively soon, primarily because the excessive consumption of

Obesity has substantially increased in the American population, affecting both adults and children. According to the Mayo Clinic, the definition of obesity is defined as a condition of increased body weight that is caused by an excessive accumulation of fat. Many factors contribute to weight gain such as the two important ones, poor diet and physical inactivity. As people are exposed to high fat foods and have very low physical activity, it’s so easy for that person to become overweight or obese. As in today’s society children tend to overeat, many changes in a child’s life are the reason why there is an increase in overeating. The place where children should be fed healthy and should influence them to eat healthy is actually where the problem starts. School cafeterias have been known to serve food with large fat content and low nutrition. School cafeterias even supply students with soda and candy machines (Kempster, 2004). According to a study done by King et al. (1999) has shown that fruits and raw vegetables given in school cafeterias has decreased substantially. Instead they provide unhealthy meals for these children like, pizza, tater tots, and many other numerous high level fat foods. At school children should have the access to eat healthy, however they are exposed to fast food choices everyday, making it difficult to support healthy eating (Kuntzman, 2004). The lack of physical activity is another major factor in the cause of childhood obesity. Due to the increase

The age old saying, “You are what you eat” still rings true today. Fresh fruit and vegetables have been replaced by french-fries and hamburgers. Children today do not know how to eat healthy. We, as a nation, spend hours and hours bombarding children with fast food commercials, sugary cereal commercials and cavity causing drink commercials. We than spend a fraction of that time telling kids these things are healthy only in moderation.

b. Each day, 1 in 4 Americans visits a fast food restaurant (Fast food facts).