Patrick

lupinx-Kassman said:

I am skinny, but that doesn't necessarily mean I live by a healthy diet. I eat junk food, exercise irregularly, and have a freakishly fast metabolism (although those don't last forever).

Ditto.

myk said:

A large percentage of the population doesn't have that the "benefit" of getting fat. While it's spreading with the spread of McDonald's and similar junk food, it's mainly a "developed world" phenomenon.

Dunno, I never understood this "Mc Donalds will make you fat" fad.

There are surely more cost-effective ways of getting fat than eating at Mc Donalds, at least with the prices and portion sizes I've witnessed in Italy and Greece. If anything, many people don't factor in the amount of calories from soft-drinks: a big 400 ml serving of iced coke can give you as many calories as that teeny-wheeny hamburger you just ate, and they will all be pure sugar, too. Diabetics' delight!!!

In fact, pretty much any mainstread Greek eaterie serving gyros, souvlaki, pizza etc. can make you fat quicker and cheaper than Mc Donalds can, and in a much tastier way, too.

A practical example: with 3-4 Euros in the Italian Mc Donalds you get something like 6 Mc Nuggets with some pityful pickled cucumbers and a few french fries, and that was in 2001. By comparison, with 3-4 Euros in Greece you can take TWO fully stuffed and flavoury gyros servings, jam-packed with fried, fat, oily meat, french fries, tzatziki, ketchup and mustard, for what must be at least 1200-1500 kcals, even though I know several people than can eat 3-4 of them in one go.

Will eating like that once or twice a week make you fat? Surely no. If you do eat like that EVERY day though and you do nothing but snaking at home or at a cafe watching football every day like a slob...then yeah, even Mc Donalds' overpriced and insipid shit will make you fat ;-)

In a way, we really do live in a fat world. You could say all this water and organic growth makes the Earth fat. Maybe healthy fat, although perhaps we humans are contributing some of the unhealthy fat :p

Maes said:
Dunno, I never understood this "Mc Donalds will make you fat" fad.

A fad? That would imply it's not true. It's more of a slogan. "Quick and cheap meat in bread with fried potatoes and soda." Sure, there are many other cheap fatty food places. I am aware of equivalents here as well, but they all occur due to the same phenomenon; the predominance of the meat and corn industry. Most are local and don't have the global implications of McDonald's or the like.

There's probably nothing better than McDonald's to point out the economic "model" all this works under, with an image in few words. It's enterprises like McDonald's that managed to first exploit and then spearhead the diffusion of mass-produced cheapened food.