Fast Food Genocide

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

Let’s start with the basics: “Fast food” is, literally, fast food. That means you can get it fast, eat it fast, digest it fast, and assimilate it into your fat cells fast—all with minimal effort.

Addiction to fast food is likely the most far-reaching and destructive influence on our population today. As I show in the following pages, this addiction has had an increasingly and dramatically negative effect on our society. Certainly, given what we know about the health effects of cigarettes, you have to be insane to smoke, but in this book I explain why the health effects of regularly consuming fast food may be even more severe than smoking.

I define fast food in two ways: First, it is the food served at commercial chain restaurants, where processed meats, pizza, burgers, French fries, pretzels, soft drinks, and rich desserts are made in an assembly-line process, with commercial ingredients that are duplicated and dispersed all over the world. Second, it is any commercially made food that includes artificial ingredients, processed grains, sweeteners, salt, and oil, with minimal nutrient content.

Most of us are aware that many chain restaurants aren’t serving up healthy foods, but the second definition of fast food is often confusing to many and just as lethal. These “fake” foods—the frozen waffle, the deli sandwich, the frozen pizza, the bag of chips, and much more—are easily available at our local supermarkets and convenience stores. Processing foods removes and destroys the fragile micronutrients and phytochemicals we need for cellular normalcy, and also adds toxins.

Toxins added to fast foods and processed foods include artificial colors, artificial flavors, preservatives, pesticides, antifoaming agents, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and thickeners. These ingredients give foods the texture and consistency that consumers expect. Added toxins also include cleaning chemicals, whitening chemicals, and packagsing components. Fast foods are toxic; they accelerate death through these added toxins but also by supplying concentrated calories without substantial fiber or the micronutrients humans need to sustain a normal life.

This book is not an exposé about fast food restaurants. Fast food includes all types of junk food too, regardless of where it is purchased. These human-created fakes are not only served at fast food restaurants, but in almost every food store across the country. After all, fast food restaurants could decide now, or in the future, to serve healthy (or healthier) foods. Instead, this book is a condemnation of the fast food style of eating—the consumption of mass-processed convenience foods in general. These foods include commercial and preserved (deli) meats and cheeses, cold breakfast cereals, sandwiches that use bread and rolls made from white flour, burgers, pizza, soft drinks, ice cream, doughnuts, cookies, marshmallows, and candies. These, and other “recreational” foods, have drug-like effects that are damaging the emotional fabric of our country and creating an immense and growing burden of human health tragedies. When I use the terms “fast food” or “junk food” throughout this book, I refer to this broad definition—not merely the foods served at quick-serve, take-out restaurants.

Obesity affects approximately 35 percent of Americans. This means that a staggering 100 million people are obese in the United States, and 100 million more are significantly and dangerously overweight, but not yet obese.¹ This is not just a cosmetic issue; fat on the body is indicative of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer lurking within, if not now, then in a few years. Fast food causes disease: The more you eat of it, the fatter and sicker you become, and the faster you age. Eating fast food kills more people prematurely than smoking cigarettes.²

Gallup polls have shown that today in the United States, 19 percent of adults smoke, which pales in comparison with the 45 percent of adults who smoked in the 1950s.³ Compare this 19 percent of Americans who smoke to the proportion of Americans who eat fast food: 16 percent eat fast food several times a week; 28 percent eat fast food about once a week; and 80 percent eat fast food at least once a month. Only 4 percent say they never eat fast food.⁴ But this is only the tip of the iceberg because they are using the narrow definition of “fast food,” considering only food purchased in fast food restaurants when over half the American diet is nutrient-barren processed foods not purchased at fast food establishments.

A person who eats fried foods, fast food, and processed foods has at least ten times the heart attack risk of someone who eats reasonably healthy food.⁵ This link between unhealthy foods and heart disease was confirmed in the Harvard Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which showed that if we follow men over time, those making healthier lifestyle choices are associated with a 90 percent drop in heart disease risk, while women making healthier lifestyle choices had a 92 percent drop.⁶ This huge drop in heart attacks underestimates the benefits of healthy eating, because although the diets evaluated were better than average, they were far from ideal. Based on epidemiologic studies, survey studies, and clinical evidence, a person following a Nutritarian diet style (which I will describe in detail in Chapter 3 and Chapter 7) has at least a hundredfold less risk of developing heart disease than one eating the SAD.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.⁷ Researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health evaluated the frequency of more than fifty thousand individuals eating Western-style fast food and their risk of dying of heart disease. They found the following:

•Eating fast food two to three times per week increased the risk of dying from coronary artery disease more than 50 percent.

•The greatest risk was found when subjects ate fast food four or more times weekly; the risk of dying from coronary artery disease rose to 80 percent under those conditions.

•Even eating fast food just once a week increased heart disease risk by 20 percent.⁸

These heart disease deaths, and the risks reported, were also greatly underestimated, as the participants were followed for only about fifteen years. Plus, all the unhealthy, processed food eaten outside of fast food restaurant settings were not included in the analysis. The participants were not eating anything resembling an ideal cardioprotective diet, which could have offered dramatic protection against heart disease.

The faster the calories of a food enter the bloodstream, the higher the release of fat storage hormones and the greater the increase in dopamine (a driver of addiction in the brain). Because of these hormonal effects, fast foods initiate and perpetuate food addiction and cravings. The chief fat storage hormone is insulin, and the excessive insulin response to fast food leads to the promotion of fat storage, weight gain, cellular replication, and eventually cancer.

The glycemic index, or glycemic load, considers the rate at which glucose builds up in the bloodstream over time. The more rapid and concentrated the elevation of glucose in the blood, the more significant the risk of life-threatening disease developing. The more quickly the brain can sense that rush of sugar into the bloodstream, the more its pleasure center gets stimulated and trained to direct more sugar-seeking behavior. Eating sweets and high-glycemic carbohydrates enhances the desire and craving for these foods. This influences decision-making and makes stimulating, addictive behaviors desirable. Despite the known dangers of these foods, the American public has demonstrated that they will fight to maintain their favorite addictive substances—sugar and white flour—and ignore the undeniable amount of accumulated evidence revealing the dangers of these substances.

In contrast, the more subtle levels of sugar in natural foods, in conjunction with the fiber and phytochemicals that slow the entry of sugar into the bloodstream, make for a very different biological and neurological experience that does not feed addictive behavior and addictive eating.

Similar dangers are associated with fat entering the blood quickly. The oils and concentrated fats from animal products can enter the bloodstream rapidly; in contrast, the fat content of seeds and nuts is absorbed over several hours. This slower absorption rate allows more of the calories to be burned for energy, rather than stored as fat, and can delay and reduce the body signaling for calories (the feeling of hunger).

In other words, oils give you calories fast, so they do not trigger satiety signals to stop eating—they actually induce overeating—and neither do they keep you satisfied for very long, compared to consuming a similar number of calories ingested from eating nuts and seeds. When you use nuts and seeds, which are a whole, natural food, as the major source of fat in your diet, you get anti-hunger and weight-favorable benefits. In addition, when you eat nuts and seeds, all the fat calories consumed are bound to plant fibers and not fully absorbed, resulting in a significant percentage of calories that are removed from the body via the stool and deposited in the toilet.⁹ A hallmark of the fast food diet style, which promotes obesity, is a high amount of fat calories coming from oil and very little from natural nuts and seeds.

Processed fats and oils are certainly bad for you, but sugar and white flour take the cake as the most dangerous fast food ingredients. According to accumulating evidence, these high-glycemic carbohydrates, with their huge glycemic load, are the most powerful obesity-causing, diabetes-causing, heart disease–causing, and even depression-causing components of fast food.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Commercial baked goods containing white flour are devoid of nutrients and have almost the same glycemic load as pure white sugar.¹⁰ Eating breads, rolls, pizza, and pastries is not much different from sucking on a cube of sugar or eating candy. These foods not only promote obesity, heart disease, and diabetes—they also promote cancer.¹¹

Fast food is not just loaded with sugar, sweetening agents, and chemicals; it also contains high-fructose corn syrup and other products made from white potato and white flour. To make things even worse, fast food is usually fried in oil, which increases its glycemic rush, obesity-promoting potential, and toxicity. Fry white flour, sugar, and artificial flavorings and colorings in oil, and you have a doughnut—a Frankenfood linked to a high risk of death.¹²

According to the American Heart Association, the maximum amount of added sugar (other than what is contained in fruit and other natural plants) that you should have in a day is 25 grams or 100 calories. According to me, you should have none. Nevertheless, a 64-ounce soda, which equates to a large size at many fast food restaurants, can contain as much as 200 grams of sugar. That is mass addiction in action—and it’s legal. Even worse, many sugar-addicted parents give these harmful substances to their children.

Addiction can be a powerful drive and difficult to resist, but food addiction is particularly insidious—it destroys people’s health, leads to medical dependence, and splits families apart. There is an epidemic of junk food addiction in many of our inner cities, where lack of access to fresh produce keeps segments of society sickly, sluggish, and mentally burdened—and thwarts their chances for educational and economic opportunities.

Consuming fast food is legal and socially acceptable. But these foods, rich in added sweeteners, salt, oils, and artificial flavoring (called “highly palatable foods” by scientists) have addictive properties. Eating a little makes you want more. Overeating and substance/drug abuse share important common characteristics, including tolerance (needing greater amounts over time to reach the same “high”), unsuccessful efforts to cut back on consumption, and use of the substance despite negative consequences.¹³

Sugar-izing all foods to reach the “bliss point” that maximizes pleasure (and purchases), leads to a gradual deadening of the taste buds. Over time, this has two negative consequences: First, you crave more and more sugar; and second, the level of sweetness in natural foods (such as berries and carrots) no longer has any appeal. Children raised on fast food meals, soda, and frequent junk food treats do not like fruits and vegetables. Why? Because they can hardly taste these foods. Their taste buds have been shut down by excess salt and sugar and simply can’t register the nuances of flavors in real food.

Fast food prevents you from tasting the naturally delicious flavors of fruits and vegetables; therefore, the very foods that provide the body with the necessary nutrients to thrive and live a long, healthy life are made less desirable by human-made processed foods designed to cultivate addictive consumption.

Feeding sweetened soda, doughnuts, cake, and junk food to children is practically the same as handing them a shot of whiskey or lighting up a cigarette for them. There is just a small degree of difference between one addictive, dangerous substance and another. The same brain centers are stimulated by cocaine, narcotics, and super-sweetened foods. It is debatable which is more deadly, as so many people eat super-sweetened foods multiple times a day, every day.

Drugs and food can have similar effects in the brain.¹⁴ We don’t eat solely because we’re hungry; we crave the pleasurable feelings we derive from food. Dopamine is a neurochemical that regulates motivation, pleasure, and reinforcement related to certain stimuli, such as food. The amount of pleasure we derive from eating a food correlates with the amount of dopamine released in the brain.¹⁵

In the long-ago past, the dopamine reward system was a survival advantage, driving early humans to consume calorie-rich foods so they could store up energy for times when food was scarce. However, the effect of today’s processed, Frankenfood environment on these drives is a dangerous experiment thrust upon our species. Not only do these fast food calories shorten life span, but they slowly destroy the brain (see Chapter 2). Fast food calories affect intellectual function and judgment and can contribute to depression, aggression, and memory loss. Fast food intake also promotes drug addiction. Since fast food consumption can depress mood, decrease intelligence, and affect judgment it makes it more difficult to break free from food addiction. People become caught in a vicious cycle of brain stimulation with dangerous foods, which makes them more susceptible to all kinds of addiction, including dependence on prescription drugs.

When someone abuses a substance—whether it’s alcohol, a drug, or addictive food—the brain reduces the number of dopamine D2 receptors, which is thought to result in a diminished reward response and a higher tolerance to the substance. In the case of overeating and obesity, for example, frequent consumption of ice cream has been shown to reduce the reward response. This means that over time, lesser amounts are no longer satisfying, and the consumption of more sweetened calories is needed to elicit the same amount of pleasure.¹⁶ The more fast foods people eat, the more they lose dopamine receptor function. This enhances the drive for more and more fast food and contributes to other addictive behaviors. The desire for fast food actually becomes more intense the more often it is eaten, because it excites impulse pathways in the brain. This drives the deadly cycle of overeating, weight gain, and more overeating.

In addition to the effects on the brain, withdrawal symptoms from toxins that accumulate in the body because of fast food also contribute to overeating and food addiction. Toxic metabolites are waste products produced by the body that can cause inflammation and disease if allowed to accumulate. Consuming a diet low in micronutrients and phytochemicals results in inflammation, oxidative stress, and the accumulation of these toxic metabolites, including free radicals.¹⁷ The more fast food eaten, the higher the amount of toxic waste products in the body. The toxic load to the body and the simultaneous lack of micronutrients and antioxidants inhibit repair and removal of waste, leading to chronic inflammation and the inevitable development of serious diseases.

Fast foods contribute to a constellation of substances that can congest our cells and lead to disease. Some are wastes produced by the body from consuming such foods, and some are toxins in the food itself.¹⁸

•Potassium bromate is used in bromated flour and sold to commercial bakers to make dough more flexible and allow for higher rising. Bromine interferes with the body’s ability to metabolize iodine, promoting thyroid disease. It also induces tumors and cancers in rats.¹⁹ Bromated flour is considered a class 2B carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and has been shown to cause malignant tumors and to damage human DNA. It is banned in most of the world, including the United Kingdom, Europe, India, and China. Even though many fast food chains have stopped using it, bromated flour is still one of General Mills’s best sellers; the company supplies it to bakeries, supermarkets, and commercial food manufacturers within the United States.

•Sodium phosphate or phosphoric acid is added to most fast foods and processed foods for leavening and to add moisture, color, and flavor. The least expensive processed foods, fast foods, and baked goods contain the most added phosphorus.²⁰ In other words, the food purchased at convenience stores and fast food establishments are loaded with phosphorus. High levels of phosphorus in the blood are not just linked to the development of kidney disease in the future and death in kidney disease patients; high normal serum phosphate levels have been a predictor of cardiovascular death. This additive is associated with intravascular inflammation and calcifications as well, weakening bones.

•Artificial coloring agents, such as Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, and Red No. 40, are added to just about every fast food menu item. The yellow colorings supply a golden hue to sauces, cheese, puddings, and soft drinks, while the red color is added to meats, shakes, and desserts that contain fruit.

These toxic food additives mix with the metabolic toxins that accumulate in the body from eating a low micronutrient diet, leading to immune system dysfunction, autoimmune disease, and chronic degenerative diseases. The amount of toxins in the body rises with fast food consumption in proportion to the amount of fast food consumed. These toxins are linked to lower IQ, fibroids, endometriosis, thyroid disease, and the development of serious autoimmune disease.²¹ Unfortunately, not many people recognize the link between the accumulation of cellular toxins and poor health, serious autoimmune disease, premature aging, and excess weight and obesity.

When digestion is complete after eating a meal, the body attempts to mobilize and eliminate accumulated waste products. This causes uncomfortable symptoms such as headaches, light-headedness, irritability, and fatigue. I call these withdrawal symptoms from an inadequate diet toxic hunger. Since eating halts this detoxification and removes the symptoms, people mistakenly believe that these uncomfortable withdrawal sensations indicate hunger.

I have been researching this phenomenon for the past thirty years. During this time, I have observed that my patients’ perceptions of hunger change as they improve their diets. Their feelings of hunger become less frequent, less uncomfortable, and morph to be mainly felt in the mouth and throat, rather than in the head or stomach.

My observations and conclusions have been documented in a study of 764 individuals published in a 2010 issue of Nutrition Journal. In the study, we showed that enhancing the micronutrient quality of a person’s diet, and removing processed foods, led to changes in the experience of hunger and a reduction in uncomfortable symptoms associated with hunger, despite a lower caloric intake.²² A diet of healthy food does not produce withdrawal symptoms; when the body is fed mostly vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds, there is nothing to detoxify. With natural healthful foods, toxic metabolites are minimized, and people no longer feel the need to overconsume calories to keep their energy up. When you eat healthfully, with adequate colorful produce, you don’t feel hungry between meals. When hunger eventually does kick in, it is because your body has a real biological need for calories.

True hunger does not cause fatigue; it is not painful, and it is not uncomfortable. True hunger is a signal that directs the body to the appropriate amount of food it needs to maintain a healthy weight. True hunger does not drive overeating behavior; only toxic hunger does that. Responding to, and satisfying, true hunger cannot cause obesity. True hunger symptoms, felt mainly in the throat, only occur to maintain muscle mass, not to store fat. Improving the nutritional quality of your diet is the most effective and sustainable way to achieve—and maintain—a normal body weight.

The only way to break an addiction is to abstain from the addictive substance, and that can be difficult at first. The period of discomfort associated with breaking your ties to addictive foods usually lasts two to three days, and then the discomfort lessens considerably. Two to three days of discomfort is a small price to pay for breaking away from food addiction.

Trying to eat fast foods or sweets in moderation almost always fails, because your toxic hunger symptoms and addictive drive kick in. This is evident in the fact that most randomized controlled trials on weight loss have reported only a 6- to 13-pound sustained weight loss after two years.²³ Compare that to the average 50-pound weight loss after two years reported by individuals who started out obese and switched to a high-nutrient diet.²⁴

To achieve sustainable weight loss, you need to pay attention to nutritional quality and eat a sufficient amount and variety of nutrient-rich, natural plant foods. If you continue to eat fast foods and try to lose weight by attempting to reduce calories, you are highly likely to fail. Eating unhealthful foods that cause toxic hunger will leave you forever fighting against powerful addictive drives that urge you to eat more, and to eat more frequently.

Natural plant foods are not as intensely sweet and salty and as fatty as the processed fast foods that are purposely engineered to excite your bodily reward systems. When you consistently base your diet on healthful foods, in time your tastes change and the addictive desire for junk food fades away. Plus, as you continue to take care of your body and know that you are taking care of your future health, your self-esteem rises. Eating right is self-care, not deprivation.

People should be aware that withdrawal symptoms from unhealthy foods, especially excess sugar and salt, can sometimes be severe. Fatigue, headaches, itching, low-grade fever, sore throat, and mild anxiety are common. Because people initially feel so ill when they try to eat healthfully, many are deterred from sticking with it. But as I’ve said, these symptoms rarely last longer than three days.

The slow poisoning of the body from fast food does not merely occur from the toxins within the food. As a higher and higher percentage of our caloric pie is taken up by foods with empty calories—that is, calories that provide energy but very little nutrition—it becomes impossible to meet our requirements for micronutrients. Plus, for the body to digest and assimilate those empty-calorie foods, is uses micronutrients that are then subtracted from the body’s stores of nutrients. Modest micronutrient insufficiency is ubiquitous in the United States and is a major cause of immune system malfunction and chronic disease.²⁵

Fast food restaurants add high amounts of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to everything. It is not just in milk shakes and sweet desserts; HFCS is also hidden in breads, pizza crust, tomato sauce, and salad dressing, and even in the chopped meat used for burgers.

HFCS is much sweeter than simple cane sugar, and it’s also cheaper. In addition, it acts as a preservative, extending the shelf life of foods. Fructose is highly soluble and does not crystalize, so it can remain effective in processed foods forever and not cause the food to harden. This allows products like cookies and candy to stay soft. HFCS is cheaper than sugar because of government corn subsidies, so the average soda size has ballooned from being 8 ounces to 20 ounces at little financial cost to manufacturers. But the human cost—increased obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease—is great.

Any type of sugar causes obesity, diabetes, and heart disease; sugar is also a major cancer promoter when used in excessive amounts. The person who regularly eats fast food and processed foods can be exposed to the equivalent of 100 teaspoons of sugar a day or more. Just one large soft drink or milk shake may contain the equivalent of 50 teaspoons of sugar. That is more sugar than our ancestors would have been exposed to in a month of eating natural fruits.

Interestingly, for more than fifty years, the soft drink industry and the sugar industry have provided millions of dollars of research funding to academic and governmental researchers to influence and cover up the health risks associated with consuming sugar. A recent medical investigation published in JAMA Internal Medicine and reported in the New York Times revealed that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, have been largely shaped by the financial influence of the sugar industry. “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of the JAMA paper.²⁶ Information regarding the dangers of modern processed foods is effectively suppressed by powerful economic interests that spend lots of money to influence public perception.

Biochemically, HFCS is only slightly different from white cane sugar, and the dangerous effects on your health are the same. Regular table sugar (sucrose) is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose, and HFCS contains up to 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Fructose is a naturally occurring substance, but it never occurs naturally in the concentrated and isolated way that it does in soft drinks and other processed foods. In whole foods, most of the fructose and glucose are usually bound together as sucrose and are always balanced with micronutrients and fiber, which reduce the glycemic effects of sucrose and the insulin response by the pancreas.²⁷

Although consuming fructose by itself doesn’t excite insulin secretion, consuming concentrated fructose, in foods containing HFCS such as soft drinks, baked goods, breakfast cereals, and snack foods, is dangerous. That’s because instead of being taken up by muscle cells all over the body, the fructose goes right to the liver and triggers the production of fats such as triglycerides and cholesterol. This is called lipogenesis. This is why the major cause of liver damage in this country, which affects 70 million people, is “fatty liver.”²⁸ The liver was not designed to metabolize the large quantities of fructose found in artificial commercial foods.

HFCS has been shown to increase insulin resistance. This means that it interferes with the removal of other sugars from the blood, requiring the pancreas to produce more insulin to do so.²⁹ The explosion in the occurrence of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the past fifty years was caused (partially) by this high exposure to sugar and HFCS in fast foods and soft drinks.³⁰ Excess HFCS—and fructose in particular—also contributes to high blood pressure, not only by its promotion of plaque buildup (atherogenesis), but also by inhibiting a key enzyme called endothelial nitric oxide synthase, which is important for maintaining normal vascular elasticity.³¹

Exposure to HFCS has created a nation of metabolically challenged individuals who are overweight, diabetic or prediabetic, and have high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. This is called metabolic syndrome and is a condition that has led to a health crisis of unprecedented proportions. Fructose-induced insulin resistance is linked to both diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.³²

HFCS and other fast food ingredients increase advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, which age tissues, destroy the insides of the eyeball, and create nerve damage, kidney damage, and other complications of diabetes. If this weren’t bad enough, HFCS is manufactured using chemicals that are commonly contaminated with mercury, and mercury residue has been found in significant amounts in such products. This is especially concerning for long-term problems developing in children exposed to these products.³³

AGEs Age Us Rapidly

Advanced glycation end products, also known as glycotoxins, are a diverse group of highly oxidant compounds that cause cumulative pathogenic damage and are a significant factor in chronic disease development, premature aging, and death. AGEs form within the body as metabolic toxins when we eat sweets and have higher blood glucose levels, but we also consume them from dry-cooked fast foods, particularly commercially baked products. Dry heat in cooking promotes new AGE formation by tenfold to one-hundred-fold above the uncooked state across food categories. Animal-derived foods contain the most AGEs and produce high additional amounts of AGEs during dry cooking, especially broiling, frying, and roasting. In contrast, high-water-content fruits and vegetables or water-based cooking such as steaming or cooking in soups or stews prevents AGE formation.

When AGE formation occurs from the darkening of food, the reaction is known as the “Maillard” or “browning” reaction. The disease-causing effects are not only related to the ability of AGEs to promote oxidation and inflammation; AGEs also bind with cell surface receptors or cross-link with body proteins, altering their structure and function.

The types of foods and cooking methods that fast food restaurants favor promote the production of AGEs. In particular, grilling, broiling, roasting, searing, and frying propagate and accelerate new AGE formation. When these foods are infused with HFCS before cooking, they become even more potent in their disease-promoting effects.³⁴

This constellation of risk from HFCS, AGEs, heterocyclic amines (see the Grilling Up Some Cancer section), chemical colorings, and nutrient deficiency from fast food leads to an accumulated toxic burden, resulting in “brain fog.” This is characterized by difficulty in concentrating, loss of the ability to work a full day, and loss of memory, and it will likely lead to eventual dementia.³⁵ More and more people with dementia are flooding nursing homes, and many require round-the-clock care.

Processed foods are also linked to the incidence of strokes.³⁶ The epidemic of stokes, occurring at younger and younger ages³⁷ has sparked an entire industry of health care facilities that cater to impaired young people who have destroyed large sections of their brains with fast food. The incidence of strokes before the age of forty-five is five times more common in black populations, likely due to the increased consumption of fast food.³⁸

The combined effect of the fast food and processed food industries has resulted in an explosive epidemic of obesity and diabetes, with its resultant kidney failure, limb amputations, and heart problems. Medical bills to treat diseases associated with obesity alone are more than $185 billion annually.³⁹

Long-term studies with hundreds of thousands of participants have established that diets rich in animal products are associated with a higher incidence of heart attacks and cancers.⁴⁰ Animal products also do not contain antioxidants and phytochemicals that offer protection against disease and protect the brain.

But there’s worse news about animal products. The processed meats (and other meat) available and prepared at fast food restaurants present a different level of danger because of the way they are processed, the chemicals and flavorings added to them, and then the way they are prepared. These processed meats often contain sodium nitrite, a known carcinogen, and also contain heterocyclic amines, which are linked to colon cancer. Heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and lipid peroxides are chemicals formed when muscle meat, including beef, pork, fish, and poultry, is cooked using high-temperature methods, such as pan frying, grilling, and barbecuing. These compounds have been found to be mutagenic—that is, they cause changes in DNA that increase the risk of cancer.⁴¹

Substances that enter the body along with cooked red meat also include N-nitroso compounds, which have been shown to damage genetic material, leading to cancer. The heme iron in red meat promotes lipid peroxidation and the formation of reactive oxygen species and N-nitroso compounds, all of which contribute to the development of cancer.⁴² Increased consumption of processed meat, and meats cooked with typical fast food cooking techniques, correlates positively with the likelihood of developing breast cancer as well as colorectal, pancreatic, and prostate cancers.⁴³

If you choose to eat a small amount of animal products in your diet, it should never be breaded, deep fried, pan fried, barbecued, or grilled. These are the ways that animal products are traditionally prepared by fast food restaurants and street vendors—and these are the most dangerous way to incorporate animal products into your diet. Fast food–style animal products also lack eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and (docosahexaenoic acid) DHA, the two omega-3 fatty acids found in seafood and small wild animals.

The problem is clear: The American food industry has succeeded in its quest to “hook” Americans—especially populations in the inner city, where healthy foods are not as available—on the most dangerous and destructive foods ever devised. It has taken the most disease-causing foods and found a way to make them even worse.

The processed food and fast food industries are also responsible for increasing salt intake. The excessive level of sodium in the modern diet has caused an epidemic of high blood pressure. Living in the United States, your lifetime probability of developing high blood pressure is higher than 90 percent, with accompanying increased risks of heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.⁴⁴ High salt intake causes scarring of the heart, called coronary fibrosis, which further increases the risk of developing a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat.⁴⁵

The important issue is that your lifetime salt intake correlates best with your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in later life. This means that feeding kids, teenagers, and young adults salty foods is not without risk, even though their blood pressures have not elevated yet. All the salt they consume when they are young cumulatively adds up and results in damage to the body’s vascular system.⁴⁶ People pay a steep price for the high salt fast food they eat when they are young, with years of suffering and chronic diseases down the road. Excessive salt intake also increases the risk of developing asthma, autoimmune disease, stomach cancer, osteoporosis, and kidney failure.⁴⁷

Shockingly, salt is added to almost every fast food. Even soda, ice cream, milk shakes, and other desserts contain added salt. Salt is a natural preservative, but the real benefit to fast food vendors is salt’s effect on their customers’ thirst. The more salt hidden in a fast food meal, the more the customer will drink. And drinks are the most profitable item on a junk food menu, selling for five times the price of gasoline, even though they are mostly water, chemicals, and sweetening agents, and they put salt in them too.

The highest amounts of salt are found in fast food fried potatoes, which can hardly be called potatoes anymore, as fast food French fries have as many as twenty-three ingredients in them, including sweeteners, salt, antifoaming agents, preservatives, and colorings. They are more a potato-chemical slurry, with extra HFCS and salt mixed into the batter—and after they’re fried, they’re coated with even more salt.

The burgers aren’t just meat; HFCS and salt are mixed into the meat before it is fried or grilled. One fast food meal gives you such a dangerous amount of salt, that even if you were to eat nothing else and drink only water for the rest of the day, you would still be in the salt danger zone. For example, a Big Mac from McDonald’s, with no salted fries or soda, already supplies 950 milligrams of sodium.⁴⁸ A typical meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) supplies more than 3,000 milligrams of sodium—and that’s just one meal.⁴⁹ One box of popcorn at a movie or ballgame has so much salt in it that you’ll find yourself waiting in long lines to buy drinks to satisfy your increased thirst.

Salt is also just like the other “white stuff”—sugar: When you eat salted foods regularly, you deaden the taste for salt, you like salty foods, and you crave more and more salt. People like lots of salt because when they were young, they routinely ate lots of hidden salt in all their foods.

Manufacturers also add salt to their foods because it makes people eat more food; scientific studies confirm that salted foods increase appetite and caloric intake. The results of careful investigations indicate that salt intake shuts down the cues to stop eating when full.⁵⁰ Salting food prevents people from knowing when they have eaten enough food and induces overeating and obesity.⁵¹

The “Processed Food Era” started about two to three generations ago, right after World War I. Soon, heart attacks and stroke rates skyrocketed. Yet there are still areas of the world where people eat a more natural diet, and salt intake is comparatively very low. Pockets of people live on diets without added salt in New Guinea, the Amazon Basin, and the highlands of Malaysia—and high blood pressure is unheard of in these regions.⁵²

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), consuming less sodium is one of the most important ways to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Salt reduction to 1,200 milligrams a day is estimated to prevent fifty-four thousand to ninety-nine thousand heart attacks each year in the United States.⁵³

Our addiction to fast food has invaded college campuses, high schools, and even elementary schools. Chicken nuggets, pizza and hamburgers (with bromated flour), soda, and French fries are common fare on school lunch menus. For example, a California statewide sample found these fast foods at 71 percent of schools, and more than half even served brand name products from chains such as Taco Bell and Domino’s Pizza.⁵⁴

Furthermore, your child’s public school lunch may be held to a lower quality standard than even fast food restaurants. Millions of pounds of meat judged unfit to serve in fast food restaurants makes its way into our school cafeterias. Meat that is only fit for pet food or compost is being served at schools, according to a USA Today investigation. The newspaper reported that the Agricultural Marketing Service, which purchases meats for schools, bought meats with levels of E. coli and other bacteria that exceeded acceptable levels for fast food outlets.⁵⁵

Hidden dangers lurk in foods commonly served in school lunch programs around the country. For example, look at these ingredients for a hotdog bun marketed to school lunch programs:

INGREDIENTS: ENRICHED BLEACHED WHEAT FLOUR (WHEAT, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID, POTASSIUM BROMATE), WATER, SUGAR, WHEY, DEXTROSE, VEGETABLE SHORTENING (PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN & COTTONSEED OIL), SOY FLOUR, SALT, MONO & DIGLYCERIDES, EGG, YEAST, SOYBEAN OIL.

MAY CONTAIN 2% OR LESS OF: SODIUM STEAROYLE LACTOLAYTE, WHEAT GLUTEN, FOOD STARCH, AMMONIUM, DATEM, L-CYSTEIN, VINEGAR, CALCIUM PROPIONATE, (PRESERVATIVES), MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE, CALCIUM SULFATE ASCORBIC ACID, AZODICARBONAMIDE, ENZYMES. CONTAINS: WHEAT.

Note that these buns contain partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils. Many countries have banned these trans fats because they have been demonstrated to be dangerous and to greatly increase the risk of heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled in 2015 that partially hydrogenated oils are not “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) and will require these oils to be phased out from processed foods by 2018.⁵⁶ But in the meantime, since nobody is looking, trans fats are fed to our kids. Heart disease and increased aggressiveness are both associated with consumption of trans fats.

The bun ingredients also contain potassium bromate, which is not only a carcinogen, as we have seen, but is known to impair iodine metabolism, which can lead to iodine deficiency and potential brain damage.⁵⁷ The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that iodine deficiency causes an 8- to 10-point drop in the global IQ.⁵⁸ Even though potassium bromate is banned in other countries, and even by most fast food restaurants doing business abroad, we here in the United States somehow see it as permissible to serve it to young children in our schools.

Corn dogs are another popular menu item in public school lunch programs. According to a company that manufactures corn dogs for school lunches, their “100% Whole Grain Chicken Corn Dogs on a Stick” are “Smart Snack Approved,” with portions and nutrition levels that meet school standards. The nutrition label, and the ingredients on the company’s website, tells a different story. It’s a pretty low standard of excellence, if you ask me.

CHICKEN FRANK: MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, WATER, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SPICES, SALT, POTASSIUM LACTATE, POTASSIUM ACETATE, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, FLAVORINGS, SODIUM DIACETATE, SODIUM ERYTHORBATE, SODIUM NITRITE.

SIX FOODS WITH THE HIGHEST AMOUNT OF AGEs AGE/KU	PER 100 GRAM	PER SERVING
1. Beef frankfurter, broiled 5 minutes	11,270	10,143
2. Beef steak, pan fried in olive oil	10,058	9,052
3. Chicken back or thigh (no skin), roasted and barbecued	8,802	7,922
4. Chicken breast, breaded and then oven fried	9,961	8,965
5. Chicken back or thigh with skin, roasted and barbecued	18,520	16,668
6. Bacon, fried 5 minutes	91,577	11,905