The film Super Size Me - Essay Example

My current fast food intake is once or twice per month. The fast food restaurant is usually McDonald's or a local fast food place called Pop's, which serves burgers and Italian beef sandwiches. The first fact I would like to mention is that obesity is now second only to smoking as the leading cause of death in America. Obesity is a common problem in the United States, as many Americans are sedentary in their jobs, and do not make time for or do not have time for exercise. On top of this, as a nation we are consuming a mass amount of junk food as well as frequenting fast food restaurants with regularity.

This is unhealthy. From a nutrition standpoint, we should be cooking more meals at home, which is healthier, and trying to eat balanced diets which include fresh fruits and vegetables, a small portion of meat if that is acceptable, and whole grains, with a minimum amount of fat which isn't trans fat or polyunsaturated fat. An emphasis should be placed on a balanced diet with a certain number of small fats and oils in the diet, which are necessary for the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Obesity is a problem in America not just because of the fact that people are not getting enough exercise. The diseases that come along with obesity-such as heart attack, stroke, and diabetes-are all risk factors that one engenders when one is not at a healthy weight. At the current rate, one in three children born today are at risk of developing diabetes. That is an alarming rate that we should be worried about as a nation. One of the obese men in Super Size Me was getting laparascopic surgery to reduce the size of his stomach and to eliminate his diabetic problems.

He admitted to drinking two gallons of diet soda per day. That is a red flag right there, but it leads me to my next point, which is a continuing problem: the proliferation of sugared candies and sodas. Here is a second astonishing fact. According to Super Size Me, the average American child sees 10,000 food advertisements on television per year, and ninety-five percent of those are for sugared cereals, soft drinks, or candy. Advertising for McDonald's and soda and candy companies, according to the movie, was obviously tremendously high.

Children didn't know who Jesus were but they sure knew who Ronald McDonald was! That just goes to show the power of advertising. The danger of advertising these high-fructose products to kids are that they will get addicted at an early age to sugar, and that will feed into a life-long need for candy and sodas that will breed itself in adulthood. It is a precursor to medical conditions that are silent killers-cancer, heart failure, stroke, and diabetes. Now, here is fact number three. Each day, one in four Americans visits a fast food restaurant, and 46 million visit McDonald's daily-that is more people than the population of Spain.

The fact that so many people