The Problems With Fast Food
Things found in their natural form are usually better than the ones we’ve messed with. Foods which are scientifically engineered to get us hooked are everywhere. In the most extreme of cases, take heroine, which comes from poppy seeds, cocaine from the coca plant (1), and alcohol from grains or fruits. We are now capable of refining and concentrating harmless plants so much that it can make people lose complete control of themselves.
We love our fried chicken, our french fries, our samosas, our pizza puffs, our hashbrowns, our deep-fried calamari, our doughnuts etc. Our prehistoric minds love foods high in fat, as they provide the biggest bang for your buck in terms of energy (at 9 calories per gram, versus carbs and proteins which contain only 4). (2)
Fat in itself is definitely not bad. There is nothing bad with any of the three macro-nutrients. We need all three of them. What is more likely to cause the terrible health problems we see today are processed foods. The more processed something is, the worst it’ll be for you.
So what’s so bad about fried food other than the extra calories it brings? Let’s look at the chemistry behind frying.
To the naked eye, the process of frying involves placing a breaded chicken, for example, onto a pan of oil, where the hot oil intensely bubbles until one lowers the heat and decides that the chicken is brown and crispy enough. Here are the behind-the-scenes frying:
Most recipes require the oil to be heated to temperatures around 350 degrees Fahrenheit (178 degrees Celsius). You can verify this by dropping placing your breaded chicken onto the oil, and it starts bubbling. That bubbling is not the oil boiling, but rather the moister boiling off from the surface of the food (3). With the loss of moisture comes not only the formation of a crispy crust, but also space for the food to absorb the oil it’s being cooked in. This increases the calorie count (on top of the batter/flour typically used during frying).
Notes:
(1)
Fun fact: Coca-Cola is a combination of two words: “coca” (the same coca leaf used to make cocaine, because yes, in fact, they did use cocaine before 1903, when there was pressure to remove it due to racism (read)), and “cola” or today known as “kola”, i.e. the kola nut from which caffeine is made. Due to its illegality, cocaine is removed, and replaced with the legal but lethal sugar.
(2)
I love evolutionary arguments, so here’s one: back in our hunter-gatherer days, we would need foods high in calories to give us energy to hunt. Fat happens to have 9 calories per gram, while carbs and proteins have 4. So fatty foods were good for us, but carbohydrates were also good for us because it is the quickest form of energy we can have (broken down into “glucose”). For foods high in carbs, think of sweet foods, and back in the hunter-gatherer days, these were mainly fruits and honey.
Notice how these foods are “sweet”, which is a “good” taste. This is so because our taste buds have evolved to like these foods and to associate them to a pleasurable experience, because evolutionarily, these were the foods to provide us with a lot of energy. It is in our body’s best interest to signal to the brain which foods are good (sweet and calorie-dense) and which are bad (like a toxic berry, which could have been “sour”, and hence why we don’t like sour food).
It is by no coincidence today that most foods sold to us are high in carbs and fats. Corporations are taking advantage of our evolutionary. The industrial and technological revolution hit us fast, and our brains did not have the time to evolve with the environment. Our sedentary lifestyles do not require us to eat as much (since we move less on average), and so we end up storing all the extra carbs as glycogen in the liver. Once the liver is full, that glycogen is stored as fat.
But not all carbs are bad. “Complex carbs” are those which raise the blood sugar level slowly and leaves you feeling “full” for longer (think multigrain bread, brown rice, lentils, beans). “Simple carbs” are the bad ones which raise blood sugar levels quickly and don’t satisfy hunger for too long (think candy, fruit juice, honey). That is why it is recommended to eat “quickly digested carbs” when you have low blood sugar levels, (because they get the job done fast).
(3)
Oils typically boil at almost twice the boiling temperature of water. See this chart.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTNlHyjip94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S6-v37nOtY https://wa.kaiserpermanente.org/healthAndWellness?item=%2Fcommon%2FhealthAndWellness%2Fconditions%2Fdiabetes%2FfoodBalancing.html https://healthguides.healthgrades.com/take-charge-of-your-diabetes-treatment/what-to-eat-when-you-have-low-blood-sugar