Yes or No for fast-food restaurants?

I don’t know how I stand when we talk about fast-food restaurants..I can’t condemn them nor approve of them.
Everybody is eating from fast-food even if we all know that the food is not good for our health. But some of us are hiding the fact that we are going to fast food places and say that we don’t.

Do fast food restaurant have a bad image? I think that lately in Romania, people started to be aware of their health and there is a trend here to check the ingredients and to choose a healthier product. We can not name them healthy products because nowadays nothing is natural..healthy:)

But in the way of a healthy life style, stands a piece of paper (or plastic in Romania :) ) called money. Not so many people afford buying eco products and we still don’t have an ecological thinking and behaviour. We are searching for cheaper products....and by cheap we understand also not healthy. So the balance between health and money is leaning towards money in our society, at least for now. So I think that Romanians are looking for cheap stuff, more now during the recession. Fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC have a bad image because fast food means a lot of calories, weight problems, heart diseases etc. But nevertheless they are full all the time....people are aware of these things but they still want to have cheap meals and socialize in the same time.

In Romania, the most visited ones are the two restaurants mentioned earlier. It seems somehow that KFC is chosen for the chicken wings and crispy stripes- thought to be actually meat not as in McDonald’s where we have mincemeat-. I think that’s why KFC is more crowded sometimes. But in the same time McDonald’s is preferred because of its hamburgers, menus and shakes.

Their image is not so bad as in other countries. I had the chance to visit one McDonald’s from Denmark and the disappointment was big. All the fast food restaurants there are completely dirty. You can’t stay there because of the greasy stuff on tables, chairs and floor. The fast food restaurants are considered to be cheap so only poor people go there. The same image they have in Greece, USA and more others. But in Romania is not like that. It’s a place where especially youngsters gather and chat..have a snack.

I think the fast food is good, cheap and not healthy. I approve of them because the food is quickly cooked, it is cheap, tasty and..how can u say no to a Big Mac or Crispy stripes?! Sometimes we need this unhealthy food to remind us of living and not care about so many things that burden us.

But in the same time I think is not good because we can have serious health problems. The restaurants avoid saying the ingredients of their products. And I am wondering why? Everybody knows that they are full of shit..let’s be honest and tell the truth. If you think about Big Mac, how many ingredients do u think it has? Mincemeat, tomatoes, pickles, bread, mayonnaise, lettuce, onion..hm like 7..? But, in fact, it has only 67 ingredients. What do you think about this? Do we know the ingredients? No and actually I don’t think that we will understand them because of their scientific names as xanthan gum, monosodium glutamate and so on.

If you want to read more about the most used 10 ingredients in fast-food please click here: http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/10-ingredients-fast-food.htm .
Not only fast food have these ingredients, also salami and other “mezeluri”- meat products have them. And we are still eating them. I think that they should be more opened about it because we will still go and eat a hamburger.

So do I say yes or no to them?
I say both: let’s go there but not all the time, just once a month or something. I think that eating so rare we will not have severe health problems. But we should pay attention to what we are eating. Not only fast food is unhealthy. Thinking about eating “mici” (like meatballs), drinking Coke, colored sweets etc..these are the enemies because they are a part of our life and we eat them all the time.

Stay healthy! Eat products with fewer chemicals in them!

P.S. Tell me are u against fast food or not? Tell me why...(I will also make a poll).