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A man walks into a famous fast-food place in an airport, not because he’s a big fan
of this particular type of food, but because he has little time before boarding his flight
and there aren’t too many other food options.
His resolve not to eat a lot crumbles no sooner than he’s dazzled by all the familiar bright
colors around him.
He was sure he was going to be sensible, but 15-minutes after entering the place he’s
consumed 2,000 calories and doesn’t feel too great about it.
What he doesn’t know is exactly what he has consumed.
He’s also blissfully unaware of how his brain has been manipulated on several occasions.
He’s been prey to a business predator that doesn’t always tell you how exactly it goes
about its work.
Today, all will be revealed.
8.
This is your brain on a Large Oreo Shake You’ll all probably agree that sugar is
nice.
What you might not know is that researchers have pointed to its addictive qualities, something
fast-food restaurants are very aware of.
A hit of sugar, like many drugs in the world, releases feel-good chemicals in your brain.
When you eat sugar you get a small blast of opioids and dopamine and you feel ever so
slightly high.
That’s why sugar is loaded into many fast-food products.
You’re not just eating junk food because you like it, there’s also an element of
you needing it.
But it goes further than this.
You see, we humans evolved in a time when food was scarce.
We had to hunt for food, which was often hard, dangerous work.
Therefore, we hunted for food items that had a lot of calories and gave us the most energy.
These days, you don’t have to fight off a pride of hungry lions to get your hands
on a piece of beef.
In fact, fast-food restaurants are everywhere, and they are usually cheap.
The food items are packed with calories and so that’s one reason we go to those places.
Not only that, the food comes to you fast and so your brain’s reward system triggers
fast.
Convenience is also addictive, and that’s why you see so many fast-food restaurants
and why they offer the drive-thru option at certain places.
It’s all about getting a quick fix.
Lastly, there’s the Pavlovian thing.
You might have heard of Pavlov’s dog, which relates to experiments undertaken by the Russian
physiologist, Ivan Pavlov.
In short, he figured out that when a dog heard the sound of its dinner bell, the sound itself
made the dog salivate.
So, why do you think every time you go to a fast-food restaurant you see and hear all
the same things?
It’s because your brain associates all the familiar colors and symbols and sounds with
a rewarding experience.
You only have to look at a fast-food joint to start salivating.
The reason for that is the place’s consistency.
7.
They know how our minds work Studies have shown that when less energy is
put into ordering food we will make worse choices.
Basically, it is less likely you’d go for a large fries if the server didn’t ask you
if you’d like to boost the size of your meal.
In fact, you might not go for the fries at all if someone didn’t ask you, “Do you
want fries with that?”
Scientists believe that we feel less guilty when someone asks us to order a bit more since
there is less responsibility on the buyer.
They’re not asking you out of curiosity.
They’re manipulating you.
When we say ‘you’ we mean of course the company, not the server.
It works, too.
Some sources say in one year McDonald’s made an extra $28 million in revenue just
from upsizing its products for people.
As a consumer, you might go into a place with the best intentions of not eating too much,
but as soon as you are asked if you want more, you will get more.
As the New York Times once wrote, when McDonald’s asks you if you want fries with that it already
knows the answer.
It’s not just the spoken word, either.
Lately, some fast-food restaurants have invested in technology that shows customers many other
options on a bright screen stationed in front of where they are standing.
If you are visiting a drive-through restaurant, new technology can now recognize your license
plate and quickly understand what you ordered in the past.
That way, the company can know what options to flash up in front of you.
It will know if you are partial to super-sizing meals or buying a milkshake.
As one person told the New York Times, “These sorts of technologies are making it hard for
people to just find some reasonable moderation.”
It’s the same with Value meals.
The restaurants know very well that you’ll more often than not go for them even though
you went in with the best intentions of getting one solitary burger.
You see, when you look at prices a place in your brain called the orbitofrontal cortex
starts to fire up.
Scientists have found that when a person buys something knowing there was a better deal,
brain activity shows some amount of pain.
That’s the reason there’s always a good offer only if you spend more and eat more.
In a nutshell, as soon as you walk through the door there’s a lot of manipulation going
on, but as you’ll soon see, maybe that’s the least of your worries.
6.
The portions keep getting bigger Since the 1950s the USA and a slew of other
countries have reported an obesity crisis, and in some part, you can blame fast-food.
You can find lots of restaurants that have sandwiches that contain just under or just
over 1,000 calories.
And that’s before you start counting the calories in the drinks and the fries.
Burger King’s “The Rodeo King Sandwich” weighs in at 1,250 calories.
Dairy Queen's six-piece basket of “Honey Hot Glazed Chicken Strips” contains 1,600
calories.
A 12-inch Classic Italian Sub at Quiznos has 1,400 calories in it.
That’s a lot of calories to be consuming.
Try burning those items off at the gym and you’ll find yourself having to walk home
with the elliptical machine on your back.
Back in the day, there was no such thing as these giant meals.
We are living in an era of the mega-burger.
The thing is, we are suckers for punishment.
If restaurant A offers a bigger burger than restaurant B and they cost the same, we generally
go for the value option.
Remember it’s painful to not feel we have gotten a good deal.
The drinks are much bigger, too.
In the 50s, a soda was just 7 ounces.
These days a small soda is 16 ounces and a large, 32 ounces.
Some restaurants have been known to offer 64-ounce drinks, which might contain 800 calories.
Add to that a large fries, with around 460 calories in many places, as well as a burger,
and you’ve got yourself a meal containing almost as many calories than an average person
should consume in an entire day.
There’s also the fact that restaurants have over time re-named their drinks.
For some places, what used to be large is now medium.
What used to be medium is now small.
Customers think they are getting a great bargain, but you have to remember that food costs are
less than operating costs for the restaurants.
Giving you more doesn’t hurt them so much.
They just want you to keep coming back.
5.
Tattooed food When you order something that’s supposedly
been flame-grilled, it likely hasn’t gone through this process.
It will still have the black grill marks on it, but those have been added to the meat
during processing.
The marks are actually branded on by the supplier.
As for the smokey taste, that comes from the processing period, too.
It’s called adding “solution” to the patties, with some patties being made up of
around 20 percent solution.
This solution might consist of a bunch of preservatives, salt, animal fats, and flavorings.
According to the experts, it works, people love seeing those grill marks even though
they should know they are not real.
It’s good for the companies since paying for branded grill marks is a lot cheaper than
installing grills in restaurants.
Instead, the meat is blasted with hot air when it’s first cooked, and then it might
have a date with a machine that makes the grill mark, such as the “CM-40 II Charmarker”.
Now for something a little more frightening.
4.
What’s in a chicken nugget?
McDonald’s has taken a lot of flak over the years for its famous chicken McNuggets
and their lack of chicken, but if you go to the company’s website now you’ll read
that they contain “100 percent white meat chicken.”
Still, you can find a study published by The American Journal of Medicine in 2013 that
talked about many chicken nuggets that were tested by scientists.
The study didn’t mention which restaurants’ nuggets were featured, but said after testing
it found at most places the nugget consisted of around 50 percent meat.
So, what was in the rest of the nuggets, you might wonder with some degree of consternation?
The scientists wrote they found, “ground-up bone, blood vessels, nerve, and connective
tissue.”
Even worse, scientists at the University of Mississippi Medical Center said what can often
be found is a similar mash-up as what you might find in dog food.
This is the sludge-type meat you’ve all likely seen, sometimes called “meat slurry”
or “liquefied meat.”
There is something called “mechanically separated meat.”
This is basically a process in which all the meat left on the animal carcass is blasted
off and then put through a sieve.
The entire animal is not ground down and turned into mush, but all the edible tissue comes
off.
You might still find this kind of meat in things such as hot dogs and chicken nuggets,
or even some patties, but if what you’re eating contains mechanically separated meat
by law the packaging should state as such.
This kind of process doesn’t involve any beef since people were concerned about mad
cow disease.
When it comes to pork, only 20 percent of your hotdog if bought in the US can contain
the sludge.
With chicken, it seems the product could contain 100 percent of mechanically separated meat.
As for it being a public health risk, most experts say if the product has been made in
a safe environment then it should be as safe as any other meat.
It’s also usually treated with something called ammonium hydroxide.
This is to get rid of dangerous bacteria.
Still, the European Food Safety Authority said, “High-pressure production processes
increase the risk of microbial growth.”
3.
Would you like a finger with that?
You might not be surprised to hear that sometimes strange and even dangerous things are found
in the products at fast-food restaurants.
It was said in 2019, Mcdonald’s sold 2.36 billion burgers worldwide.
That worked out at around 75 burgers a second.
Burger King sells a similar number of burgers, so if you add up all sales from fast-food
restaurants, well, the numbers are mind boggling.
That’s one reason why sometimes things go wrong, and when they do, you can be sure you’ll
hear about it.
In 2011, it was reported that a man in the US was suing Burger King after eating a Triple
Stacker burger and finding a needle from a syringe had pierced his tongue.
During his 6-day stay in the hospital, another needle was retrieved from the man’s small
intestine.
In 2010, the media reported that a man had settled out of court after he bit into a Burger
King burger and discovered it contained a condom.
According to the guy’s lawyer, he “sustained pain and suffering, vomiting, nightmares,
mental and emotional distress.”
Sure he did.
In 2008, a guy in the UK had just opened his sweet chili chicken sandwich from Subway only
to find a four-inch knife baked into it.
His wife said later, “Something small like a hair you could understand - accidents happen
- but not a knife.”
The same year, at a Subway restaurant in New York City, a man said he found a 7-inch blade
in his sandwich.
He apparently only got as far as biting into the handle.
Other things found in fast-food meals have been band-aids, feathers, lungs, a human tooth,
chicken heads, a mouse, bullets, painkillers, household nails, human skin, and even a finger.
Quite a few bits of fingers have been found in fact, notably one at Arby’s.
A woman once tried to claim compensation from Wendy’s on another occasion, after saying
she’d found a finger.
The truth was, she’d placed it there herself.
She’d been given it by her husband who’d bought it from a co-worker who’d had an
accident at work.
2.
Healthy might not be healthier Ok, so you’re the type of person that only
eats all the healthy stuff when you go to a fast-food restaurant.
You know, items like a Taco salad.
Well, when you look at all the things those salads contain, they aren’t a healthy option
at all.
The average fast-food taco salad may contain 900 calories and 55 grams of fat.
That’s as much as the average burger and fries.
Then there are items such as McDonald’s “Fruit & Maple Oatmeal.”
This kind of thing was created to attract more health-conscious people to the restaurant.
It’s not actually that healthy, though, just because it contains a lot of sugar.
You’ll get some health benefits from such a meal, but it’s also like eating a full
candy bar.
The word “bland” is usually not in a fast-food chain’s vocabulary.
Maybe you like to go for the salad option, but the problem with fast-food salads is they
so often come with those tasty creamy sauces, bits of bacon, fried chicken, or tacos.
That’s the conclusion that was come to by “The Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine” when they went in search of fast-food salads.
McDonald’s “Crispy Bacon Ranch Salad” for instance, had more fat and calories than
a Big Mac.
Cheesecake Factory’s BBQ Ranch Chicken Salad contains 1,250 calories.
The same goes for some smoothies.
They can contain a lot of sugar, sometimes having as much as 900 calories.
The truth is, fast-food restaurants are just likely not the best places to go if you want
to eat healthily and are counting calories.
As for pizza, that most wonderful invention bestowed on humankind, doesn’t it sometimes
come with olives, onions, and other veggies that we can feel proud of eating?
Well, you should know that Americanized fast-food pizza is different from your traditional Italian
pizza, especially if it was actually made in Italy.
American fast-food pizzas usually contain much more bread, way more fat, way more salt,
lower quality ingredients and are generally just much more calorific.
Remember, this is all about you coming back for more and feeling you’ve got a good deal.
We looked at how many calories were in one slice of a fast-food restaurant’s 14-inch
large pizza.
It all depends on the style of the pizza, and of course what the toppings are.
One slice could be as low as 180 calories if it’s just cheese and tomato pizza, but
if you’re thinking about eating all eight or ten slices that’s still a lot of calories.
One slice of Pizza Hut's Supreme pizza contains 400 calories and 740 mg of sodium.
How many of those could you eat?
The American Heart Association says you should try and consume less than 2,300 milligrams
of sodium a day.
We are guessing some of our viewers could easily finish a full, large Pizza Hut pie.
Some other pizzas we found contain over 600 calories a slice and over 1,400 milligrams
of sodium.
Burger joints might find themselves being criticized the most, but in terms of sheer
calories, eating full pizzas is arguably the biggest enemy at the gates to your belly.
Then again, swing by Wendy's and grab yourself a “Pretzel Bacon Pub Triple Cheeseburger”
(1,520 calories, 1,910 mg sodium), and then head over to Sonic for an “Oreo Peanut Butter
Shake” (1,720 calories, 1,040 mg sodium), and get yourself the Cajun fries from Popeyes
(804 calories 1,761 mg sodium), and you won’t be faring much better than the pepperoni pizza
addicts of this world.
1.
Crowded burgers Some of you might think that when you eat
a slab of meat from a burger restaurant, you’re eating one cow.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Your patty could contain bits of meat from over 100 cows.
This doesn’t mean it’s any less ethical or more dangerous than eating a piece of steak,
but some people have said that we are so detached from what we eat that we don’t even think
about the hundreds of animals living on packed farms that go into one patty.
Fast-food firms seem to have cleaned up their acts somewhat when it comes to how cattle
are treated, but let’s be honest here, industrialized farms can’t be the best places in the world.
As for the slaughter, that sounds just awful.
Reports state that sometimes the transportation part is cruel, with one worker saying he saw
partly conscious animals being cut up after a terrible ride in the truck.
It’s hardly a secret that cattle and poultry on some of those massive industrial farms
sometimes have an existence from an animal nightmare, but fast-food restaurants would
rather show you cartoonish images of animals than chickens suffocating in their own poo.
We can’t speak for all farms in all countries of course, but we can’t deny the horrors
of factory farming.
Those farms are generally kept as far away from the consumer’s eyes as is possible.
For good reason, too, because they might turn you off the food.
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each group you should try to have the rest of the day.
So it won’t feel like you ruined your day just because you hit a fast food drive through
for lunch.
Go take your own free 30-second quiz using the link in the description and get started
on your journey with Noom right now!
Now you need to watch this, “What If You Only Drank Coke (Soda) and Nothing Else?”
Or, for something to make you laugh, “I Only Ate Fast Food For 30 Days And This Is
What Happened - Funny Challenge.”