Fast Food - The High Cost to Our Health
It’s been a busy day. You’re tired, hungry and really don’t feel like cooking. Or, maybe your mornings are crazy getting the kids off to school and making breakfast seems like an impossible task to fit in. So, you go out somewhere to eat. Maybe it’s something you know is bad, like McDonalds, but maybe it’s something that seems healthier, like Subway. Subway can’t be that bad, right? Unfortunately, no matter where you go, even if it seems healthy, it is likely high in sodium.
In terms of the health effects of eating takeout, there is one big issue: sodium. Sodium is actually a healthy mineral. The problem is not with sodium itself, the problem is that as a society, our balance of potassium to sodium is horribly off. We are eating way too much sodium. Sodium is very high in all processed foods, takeout, and we usually add salt when we cook also.
Take, for example, a bowl of chili. It seems healthy to go to Tim Hortons and get a bowl of chili, right? Shockingly, you can eat an entire pot of home made chili and you would consume less than half the sodium of one serving of Tim Hortons chili. Once in a while, that’s no biggie; we have kidneys to filter out extra sodium. However, having too much sodium in our diets all the time causes our kidneys to overwork; leading to high blood pressure, kidney failure, etc. Our kidneys are important for survival and they cannot repair themselves. Once the damage is done, you can only make changes to slow the progression of kidney failure. If you’ve let it go too far, you will be forced to visit the hospital regularly to have dialysis treatments in order to live. Since your kidneys are unable to remove the waste from your body, a machine needs to do it for you. Sounds fun, eh?
The problem we have as a society is that we are not just doing this once in a while. We are eating foods high in sodium (and sugar!) on a daily basis. Check out these two comparisons:
Processed Food Sample Meals:
Breakfast: Tim Hortons Breakfast Sandwich with Hashbrown
Lunch: Canned chili with a whole wheat bun
Snack: Blueberry muffin
Dinner: M&M Boneless, skinless chicken breast with BBQ sauce, seasoned vegetable medley and Uncle Ben’s chicken flavoured whole grain brown rice (1/2 of package).
Evening snack: Lay’s BBQ chips (1/2 of 235g bag)
Total Sodium: 5,620mg (240% DV) - 2.4x Recommended amount!
Whole Foods Sample Meals:
Breakfast: 3 hard-boiled eggs, with fried potatoes, raw green onions
Snack: Fruit smoothie
Lunch: Homemade chili
Dinner: Baked spiced chicken breast, basmati rice with soy sauce, green beans and broccoli
Evening snack: Oatmeal with cinnamon
Total Sodium: 1,333mg (36% DV) - significantly less sodium!
The whole foods also have significantly less sugar/preservatives, and significantly more nutrients and fiber. This is how our diet determines our health. Convenience food is only convenient for today. We may save time today but we will waste even more time later when our health suffers. Making our meals from scratch is one of the best things we can do for our health. It takes some planning, but it really isn’t that time consuming. There is nothing that tastes better than a home made dish.