High calorie fast food

Fast food is associated with a diet that is high in total energy and energy density (calories) but low in micronutrients density.

A typical fast food meal provided more than one-third of daily recommended calories, total fat and saturated fat intake.

Although fish, chicken and potatoes alone are relatively low calorie foods, they become high fat, high calorie foods when dipped in batter and fried.

If the fat used in cooking is beef tallow, fried foods – regardless of their source - are also high in cholesterol and in saturated fat, believed to promote clogged arteries.

Pasta salads are usually high in fat because of added dressings, cheese or processed meat toppings.

According to NASH (National Adolescent Student Health) survey, they found that from 11,000 eights and tenth graders, 88% of the girls ate at least one snack the previous day with almost one-fourth (24%) eating four or more snacks.

Almost two-thirds of these snacks (62%) were categorized as high-fat or high-sugar foods (chips, soda, candy, ice cream, cake).

Human passion for high-fat high-salt and high-calorie fast foods has become a major threat to human health.

Heart disease remains the leading killer of North America, largely due to elevated insulin and artery inflammation, both of which are caused by diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates as well as saturated and transfats – the hallmarks of most fats foods.
High calorie fast food

Fats

Fats
If proteins have been dubbed ‘Beauty’ by advertisers, fats are surely ‘The Beast’, for few nutrients have been subjected to as much suspicion by the health profession. This suspicion is sometime justified, although often for wrong reasons.

The confusion is understandable since the chemistry and metabolism of fats is more c0mplex than that of proteins and carbohydrates, that is, up to the point that need interest us.

There are two obvious characteristics of fats about which we are all aware. First, they are not soluble in water, hence the need for detergents to clean up after a fatty mixed grill.

Secondly, some fats are solid at room temperature, say butter, lard or margarine, while others are liquid, mainly the oils – olive, corn, peanut, etc.

These are good starting points for the study of the nutrition of fats, in that we must explain how fats, insoluble in water are digested and metabolized in the largely watery environment of the body and how the chemistry of fats can explain their physical properties.

The basic units of fats are known as fatty acids, but fat molecules are not made up of repeating fatty acid units. Fat molecules are known as triglycerides and are comprised of glycerol with fatty acids attached to the top, middle and bottom of the glycerol molecule. Hence fatty acids come in threes.

Like –proteins, there are no rules as to what fatty acids must occupy what positions on the glycerol molecule, or what mixes of three fatty acids should cling to a molecules of glycerol.

Three grouping of fatty acids:

• Saturated fats

• Monounsaturated

• Polyunsaturated fats

If you purchase a sample of pure saturated fatty acids from a chemical supplier you would find that they were solid at room temperature. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids would be liquid. Therefore the hardness or softness of a dietary fat depends on temperature and the balance between the three categories of fatty acid.
Fats