In this day and age, everything is at a fast pace. Messages to be sent across the globe do not take weeks or months as it used to be. It takes but mere seconds for information to travel all throughout the globe. Our daily grind has gone up a notch and with it so have our lifestyles. People who have much better things to do end up not having enough time to prepare their own food. So the logical move is to buy, to eat out. And with the rate we are going, fast foods are the way to go.

Fast foods are generally food that is pre-prepared and cooked at discretion. Even in this day and age, nutritious fast foods are quite uncommon. Even with the push of a lot of vegan and pro-nutrition motions, health is not always the choice. Fast foods are fast, convenient, and economical. We pay more in restaurants than at the ole’ hotdog stand. This is one of the reasons why a lot more people choose to eat at fast foods for less than they would at other restaurants.

Currently, the US stands at the 12th position in the world in the percentage of the population that is obese and the most obese country in North America according to World Atlas. That stands for about 36% in the whole population of the United States. There have been studies since the 2000s about the effects of how eating out at restaurants and fast foods have contributed to the rates of obesity. As the country grows so has been the supply of calorie-rich processed foods. Since people have so little time, so does their awareness of a more nutritionally balanced diet. This results in the continued consumption of calorie-rich food. In the 1980s there were about 850 million overweight or obese people across the world. At around 2013, that number has more than doubled with a number exceeding 2 billion, these statistics are according to hundreds of published studies in the Lancet. As obesity rates continue to rise up so does the number of food eaten outside of the home, 20% during the 1970s to more than 30% before 2010. This information runs from the US Department of Agriculture ( food surveys around 2009.
As we move faster with all the technology that we have, our rate of becoming overweight or obese flies along with it. We should start thinking of our health as much as we think of the next iPhone, because there will come a time when obesity will become the norm for US citizens and that does not bode well for us as a country.