If you eat fast food often enough, it can make you obese. In fact, you would have to walk ten miles to walk off one Big Mac meal - this means one Big Mac, fries and a milkshake.
Nutritionists in Great Britain have determined just how far you need to walk to jettison the 1,411 calories from the Big Mac lunch – just under 10 miles.
London’s Sun newspaper reported that even the McDonald’s salads require a 2.5 mile walk to make up for the extra calories, and this is attributed to fatty salad dressings that can have as many calories as some of the burgers.
Here is a compiled list of several fast food items and how many miles you would have to walk to get rid of the extra calories:
• Meat pizza: 930 calories requires a 6.2 mile walk
• Kentucky Fried Chicken meal: 910 calories requires a 6.06 mile walk
• One apple equals 45 calories and requires a 0.3 mile walk
• One stick of celery is 2 calories and requires a 0.013 mile walk
Needless to say, if you eat at McDonald’s, KFC, or Burger King on a regular basis you are going to gain weight and could actually become obese. The reason is British researchers from the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Center and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have published what they consider a good explanation: Fast food not only contains many more calories than traditional food, but also is more likely to undermine normal appetite control systems, which was reported by The London Times.
The undisclosed reason fast food makes us fat is it has a very high energy density–roughly 65 percent higher than a typical diet and twice as high as recommended healthy diets, which will make us eat more than we otherwise would. Energy density is the amount of calories an item of food contains in relation to its weight. Food with a high energy density confuses the brain’s control systems for appetite, which are based solely on portion size.
It has been reported that fast food restaurants are feeding the obesity epidemic by tricking people into eating many more calories than they mean to.
