After reading “Fast Food Nation,” I went on to read “Fat Land” by Greg Critser. Below I’ve compiled a list of the more interesting quotes. Really read these, don’t gloss over them. They are quite astonishing if you realize the implications.
“A serving of McDonald’s french fries had ballooned from 200 calories (1960): to the present 610. In fact, everything on the menu had exploded in size. What was once a 590-calorie McDonald’s meal was now 1550 calories. By 1999 heavy users people who eat fast food more than twenty times a month accounted for $66 billion of the $110 billion spent on fast food.” pg. 28
“The single most telling statistic came from the USDA. We calculate that if food away from home had the same average nutritional densities as food at home: Americans would have consumed 197 fewer calories per day. Put another way, that’s an extra pounds worth of energy every twenty days.” pg. 33
“Between 1989 and 1994 consumption of soft drinks by kids soared. The USDA estimated that the proportion of adolescent boys and girls consuming soft drinks on any given day increased by 74 percent and 65 percent, respectively.” pg. 49
“The firm estimates that about 30 percent of young women in the United States wear a size 14 or bigger.” pg. 60
“The risk of death increased by two percent for each pound of excess weight for ages 50 to 62, and by one percent per extra pound for ages 30 to 49.” pg. 99
“The most important risk factor for type 2 diabetes was the body mass index. Even a body mass index at the high end of the normal range was associated with a substantially higher risk [than a lower body mass]. More than 61 percent of all cases could be directly attributed to overweight.” pg. 107
“By the mid-1990s the consequences of boundary-less America were everywhere apparent. Physicians in inner-city hospitals were seeing unprecedented numbers of children with type 2 diabetes. (Until then type 2 had been a disease seen almost exclusively in adults.)” pg. 109
“By 1993, 41 percent of all Saturday morning kid show ads were for high-fat foods.” pg. 114
“A boy who never ate at a fast-food restaurant during the school week averaged a daily calorie count of 1952; while those who ate fast food three times or more a week (one fifth of the studied) consumed on amazing 2752 calories a day.” pg. 115
“See, the idea is to make the store accessible, easy to get into and out of from the street, but just a tad away from the, eh, mainstream so as to make sure customers are pre-sold and very intent before they get here. We want them intent to get at least a dozen before they even think of coming in.” pg. 128
“In 1992, for example, most pediatric diabetes centers in the United States reported only 2 to 4 percent of their diabetes patients as type 2. Two years later that figure jumped to 16 percent of new cases. By 1999 the figure in some parts of the country would zoom to nearly 45 percent of new cases.” pg. 133
“The calories from just one extra soft drink a day gave a child a 60 percent greater chance of becoming obese. One could even link specific amounts of soda to weight gain. Each daily drink added .18 points to a child’s body mass index.” pg. 140
“There are, first and foremost, the premature deaths of more than 280,000 Americans every year, the figure the American Medical Association now believes reflects the number of obesity related mortalities. There is the $100 billion annual price tag for the care and treatment of diabetics, the majority of new cases being a direct result of excess weight.” pg. 147
“They found that a kindergarten BMI was highly predictive of obesity at later dates. A child with a low kindergarten BMI of 16.5, for example, would have only a 21 percent chance of becoming obese by fifth grade. While a kindergartner with a BMI of 23.7 would have a 91 percent probability of becoming obese.” pg. 164
“In 1993 the ever-up-for-sale Louisiana legislature halved its existing soft drink tax in return for Coca-Cola’s pledge to build a new bottling plant, then repealed it entirely in return for Coke building a bigger plant. At about the same time in Maryland, legislators caved in to threats from the Frito-Lay corporation not to erect a new plant there and repealed the state’s snack food tax.” pg. 174