Monday April 16, 2001

Fast Food Nation

It's as American as baseball and apple pie. Fast food. And we just can't eat enough of it. According to our report, more than a hundred burgers are consumed by everyone each year!

But when you bite into your burger are you really getting more than two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun?

Have you ever wondered exactly what's in the in the hamburger meat served from your favorite fast food chain? Eric Schlosser wanted to know and so he wrote the book, "Fast Food Nation."

"If you get a fast food hamburger today there are probably pieces of dozens if not hundreds of cattle in that one burger. If one of those cattle are sick, and gets ground together with all the other, there's a much better chance that food born pathogens are going to spread."

Schlosser says about 100,000 of us get sick each year from bacteria in beef. And that says these animals we eat are what they eat. Despite fears of "mad cow" disease, federal law says it's still okay to feed them such food as dead pigs, dead horses, dead poultry and poultry waste.

There's also another potential problem, according to our report. If you don't get sick, fast food could just make you fat. Schlosser says, "The United States eats the most fast food in the world."

We're the weightiest warm bodies in the Western Hemisphere and as a result we're all becoming super-sized. This is causing big problems for the kids who are really growing up and out. In the last twenty years, the obesity rate in children has nearly doubled. Children now get one quarter of their daily vegetable servings from french fries and chips. Teenage boys get ten percent of their daily calories from sodas.

Schlosser admits beating the fast food "McMarketing" monster will be tough. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized worldwide than the Christian Cross. Despite concerns about fast food, lots of us will still say, "amen" to that.

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