by Russell Waldron

Created on: June 08, 2009

Fast food is a global enterprise. From McDonald's chicken burgers in New York City to McDonalds's curry burgers in New Delhi India, deep-fried squid and peanut satays in Phuket Thailand, to Subway in Sydney Australia, fast food now accounts for approximately 50% of food revenue around the world. Unfortunately it's changing the way we think about food, our average body shape and our attitude towards the way we eat. Nutrition has been left along the wayside while KFC and a host of other popular fast food restaurants lure us to their doors.

Even developing countries are now talking of fast food restaurants and this concerns many nutrition experts. Why? Because the consistent promotion of fast foods has many of us mistakenly thinking that if it is so popular, surely it must be good for us. Fast food is convenient, relatively cheap, quick and basically over-rated. There are no health benefits to these foods other than a fast-fix when the hunger pains hit. Those burgers dripping all over your car seat and down your chin are full of fat which harden the arteries, yet the world seems totally oblivious to that fact.

Ok, there might be a small slice of pickle to be a found in your cheese burger and if you dig deep enough you may find a minute piece of lettuce in their somewhere. But surely you don't believe that fast foods are a good substitute for a healthy home-cooked meal? Baby boomers are throwing their arms up in despair and wondering what happened to home-cooked meals we once shared with our families. The traditional roast has now been replaced by a large family sized barrel of chicken with side dishes of fatty fries, shakes, ice-cream drowned in hot fudge and humongous M&M covered cookies or double cheese burgers and an upsize of fries and cola.

These are high in fat, salt and sugar, no wonder the majority of the world's population is suffering from obesity, chronic ailments, diabetes, blocked arteries and other illnesses. Behind the scenes farmers are battling to keep up with the demand for crops, beef, chicken and so forth. The world's population is now fixated on fast food and it's not going to change in a hurry. Millions of dollars are spent on fast food each day; it seems ironic that even while the world is reeling from the shock of a global economic crisis, we still see that the lines in the fast food restaurants are just as thick.

What the public fails to see or be aware of, is the fact that just one meal at a fast food restaurant can have

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