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Fast food is, in general, not terribly healthy, with all the sugars and fats and salt and artificial ingredients we associate with the products. But does it have to be this way? Is it possible to combine the fast food values of rapid service, low costs and plastic chairs with nutritious wholesome food that won't make you feel as though you've betrayed your colon within ten minutes of eating it? Can we have our deep-fried saturated fat cake and eat it?

While it is possible to cook healthy food for yourself at home very cheaply, the sad fact is that unless the price of sheep's eyelids and cow's willies rockets dramatically due to the global economic crisis, it is cheaper for restaurant chains to serve us up the unhealthy rubbish. And it is we, the consumers, who insist on those low prices. We are complicit in our own poisoning, and just so we have enough change from our meal to buy a newspaper on the way home. In other words, the answer is no, we can't have our cake and eat it.

Having ranted, it can be said that some chains are healthier than others, but there are certain caveats with all of these.

1) McDonalds. There never used to be anything healthy in McDonalds, you knew exactly what you were going to get. A choice from one of the six 'value' meals with fries, a drink and a McFlurry for dessert. Then Morgan Spurlock made his documentary Supersize Me, which centred around the 'surprising' revelation that eating three large McDonalds meals a day would make you put on a lot of weight.

Now, you can get fruit juice, and fresh (well, quite fresh) baguette sandwiches. They serve mineral water. Some of the salad looks as though it might have once actually been growing in the ground. However, it's all just window dressing, and the chain has made little effort to adjust the staggering salt/fat content of its basic menu. Nutritional information on the calorie and fat content of their meals is now displayed in many McDonalds restaurants, but you rarely if ever see anyone even glance at these statistics, sadly.

2) Subway. An international fast food chain that consists of freshly-made sandwiches filled with quality ingredients! Who saw this coming? A firm favourite in city centres across the world, wherever there are a lot of office workers who eat lunch at their desks a lot, you will see a Subway. You even get to choose what sort of bread you want in the larger branches!

It has to be said though, that even though you can't really fault the basic business model of

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