I’m not sure what your idea of a small portion size is, but empirical evidence suggests that portion sizes have been growing for decades and that the typical diner is very bad at estimating the size of a reasonably healthy portion.
The human body can handle grease, fat, and salt in moderation. However, because those things don’t occur often in nature, human physiology craves them. This encourages (but is not necessary to) the excessive consumption of foods that have those things in them. So yes, in that sense, foods with those things will lead to fatness.
However, you can also get fat from eating too much food that doesn’t have any of that stuff in it–foods that aren’t as addictive, but have the potential for causing fatness nonetheless. You might not get the host of other dietary issues that stem from fatty/heavily salted foods, but we are specifically talking about weight gain.
But didn’t you just say it was because of ignorant poor people who eat at Taco Bell?
With so many responses saying that fast food is cheap, has anyone ever realized that it actually isn’t? Do you know how much pasta, with good homemade sauce, you can make for a few bucks? A tuna sandwich might cost you about a buck and fill you up more than a whopper, and if you wait for a sale on ground beef you can make burgers twice as big as fast food for the same price. Shit, I go to BK and Wendy’s too, but I don’t think I’m getting some kind of good deal or anything.
Large portion sizes are the result of restaurants attempting to lure customers under the premise that more food= more value. This is hardly the result of some depraved plutocratic food lust.
@^ Fast Food frequently seems cheaper in the short run because someone in pinch says: 3.00 for a cheeseburger meal, or 18 dollars spent buying supplies for X cheeseburgers, when I need X for X bill tomorrow. Poverty math operates under different rules
pps: Subway tastes like ass. Lame whitebread, turkey based ham, cheeses refined from vegetable oil. Fucking terrible, no reason to go there unless it’s genuinely the last resort. I saw these ‘‘angus melts’’ in there the other day. Little beef wafers coated with fat hanging around in a plastic tub, waiting to be microwaved. Gross.
Taco Smell and others of that ilk are a deadly combo of convenience, economy, and pop culture. Practically no one knows or gives a shit about eating healthy because that’s not what we teach or readily make available. “Restaurants” gloat about the size of there portions, advertising there products by weight. Rather then carry around lunch, why not buy a one pound burrito from up the block for a few pennies, and I hear they even take food stamps now, sweet! So you wind up eating a high calorie meal/high sodium meal. Prepared by people who are way underpaid and are more likely not to give a shit how they prepare the food. What could go wrong? I don’t think fast food is to blame for fat people, but its not making anyone healthier, just like having a liquor store on every third block doesn’t help most neighborhoods.
Me and my Dad both talked about this today and we honestly don’t care. Be nice if they can bump that beef content up 5% but really unless it’s actually detrimental to our health I’m not going to care. It’s cheap and it gets the job done.
Convenience dummy, convenience! I can’t make a tuna fish sandwich, grill a hamburger, or cut some fries while I’m driving to class/work. I know personally that your dollar goes a longer way at a market but on the flip side you are responsible for making the edible. Spend five minutes paying for and getting my food at Wendy’s or Spend at least 30 mins going to market, buying the food, and coming home to prepare it. It’s obvious why fast food is so beloved.
As soon as someone figures out how to make fast healthy food I’ll be all over that shit.
Well, you can’t get fast food while you’re driving to work or class either. Five minutes to stop or five minutes to make a sandwich are the same thing. Plus you don’t go to the supermarket every single time you want a meal, so you’re kind of being disingenuous there. And there’s nothing I hate more than people being disingenuous about sandwich preparation!
But I know what you’re saying. You’re tired at night and you know you should make a quick meal for the next day, but you say to yourself that you’ll just do it in the morning. Then you hit the snooze button in the morning and a few hours later you’re in line at McDonald’s. It happens to the best of us. The worst of us, full of self loathing, go to Taco Bell.
In agreement. If you eat out a lot, they pile so much damn food on your plate that no one should attempt to finish in one sitting. My wife and I love to eat at the Cheese Cake Factory, and they are infamous for serving you LOTS of food. Lately we have decided to only order ONE entree and share it between the both of us. Whenever we do this, the waiter ALWAYS scoffs at us as if we are peasants on the street who don’t deserve to eat in the establishment. AND they have the nerve to ask if we want dessert!!! WTF?
They use to call that class Home Economics, or Home Ec for short. These classes are getting phased out, kind of like arts classes are being phased out because the money isnt there and are considered non essential.
You have the fucking internet. Stop being lazy and learn how to turn on your stove. Shit. Cookings really not that hard. I think people get intimidated by it…or are lazy. Or both,
I meant I could have used those classes in High School instead of some of the other BS classes I went through. I am actually learning to cook right now.
Oh well um…good then. I don’t really think those kind of classes are the kind that should be required in school. It’s the kind of thing people should be learning when they are at home.
