The Dark Side of the Fast Food Industry

0:00Let's talk about the dark side of the fast food industry. There are all sorts of dirty little secrets that you need to know about. An average American consumes between two and three of those fast food meals every single week, which comes out to like 150 to 200 meals per year, totaling between $1,500 to $2,000 a year. Now if we compare it to other countries, especially France, we spend three times as much on fast food than they do. And you might have this idea that it's like it's really cheap food, but you're not going to walk out of a fast food restaurant without at least paying $10 per person, which is pretty surprising when sometimes you go in there and you're choosing food from the dollar menu or the value meals. The perception is you save a lot, but actually you're going to pay a lot. A good portion of the ingredients in this food, which is subsidized by the government, aka your tax dollars, pay for a lot of these ingredients, especially all these grains that actually feed the animals and they actually are put into products, which you end up buying at

1:00this fast food restaurant. And then you actually pay for your health problems that you're going to have to solve created by this type of food. They're so convenient. I mean, it's still up in 24 hours a day. In fact, when you drive up to one of these facilities, you don't even have to get out of the car. But not only that, you don't even have to drive to these places. You can order it from your home and have it delivered the speed at which they make this food is mind blowing. And you can actually personalize the food. You can tell them how you want it cooked. You can take certain ingredients off of it. You can add certain things on there. However, there are so many tricks in things that they do to get you to eat more of this stuff. I mean, even the colors yellow and red aka McDonald's. The color yellow stimulates impulsivity. It also will increase serotonin and happiness. Because apparently it kind of gives you this perception of there's some really cool flavors involved. And then the color red stimulates the speed of eating. So you're going to actually want to eat faster.

2:03But the combination together will increase more appetite. A lot of this is designed for kids. Your kids have been advertised too so much. And if your child is demanding that you stop off at the fast food restaurant, chances are you might give in. And of course, when you go there, there's a play ground. There are free toys. There's also a lot of tactics and tricks that they do to get more money from you. There's something called a loss leader, which basically they kind of might sell something at cost or even at a loss to then upsell you. A lot of times the loss leader is a small soda. And then if you supersize it, the profit goes way up by 80% because glucose syrup or hyphurus corn is so cheap. It's wild. The markup on these large sodas is 1,150%. That's the profit margin. Then you have other techniques like upsell techniques by asking someone, would you like fries with that? They found that you can actually increase the profits by 22%. Just by asking, even the mobile apps

3:06when people use them will increase profits by 20%. Having a combo meal like a complete meal can increase the profits by 30% versus buying them individually. And also, if the cost of the meal involves the number nine as in 199 or 299, they tested that as long as it has nine in there, they can increase profits by 24%. Now, there are certain products with very, very high margins, a lot of profitability. And of course, the high margin products really are the soft drinks, which is about 90%. The french fries are about 80% margins. But the products with the lowest margin, which is the most overhead, is the beef, the animal meat. And so the margins on beef go down to 30% with chicken. It's a little bit less. And cheese is very, very high. In fact, the cheese is like the biggest overhead 40%, but not if they do cheese products, right? Or something that resembles cheese. McDonald's is one of the largest buyers of beef in the US. The big problem with this beef at McDonald's and other places is this beef comes from factory farms. 70% of all the

4:12US cattle is this type of farming. 80% of all the antibiotics go towards animals, not humans. But McDonald's buys 1.7 billion pounds of beef every single year. Chick-fil-A processes their own chicken, like four million chickens per year. And the problem with the chickens is they don't can have a lot of space to live. They literally have about 0.6 to 0.8 square feet of room to survive in. Putting them in a space of a half of a foot is literally insane in torture for these poor chickens. As far as the cattle goes, they are sometimes put in the feed lots, you know, four to six months before they're slaughtered. In the feed lots, this is where they give them a lot of grains to fatten them up. There are basically four companies that own 80% of all the beef in the United States. And a few of these companies cross over. Two of the biggest are Tyson Foods and JBS. They're both

5:14involved in chicken and beef. Then we get to the quality of ingredients in fast food. Let's first talk about the same called high-fruit toast corn syrup. Corn syrup is very unique. And it affects the body very differently than other types of sugar. In other words, it creates a lot of inflammation. It secondly, it doesn't have a satisfying effect. So you can drink a tremendous amount, like a super-sized container, and not really feel filled up. The effects in the liver are similar to drinking alcohol as far as the toxicity levels go. And it's absorbed much quicker than other sugars as well. So you have high-furtous corn syrup. There's a lot of corn oil, soy oil, seed oil is involved in these foods. You have potatoes fried in this seed oil, which is very, very dangerous. And then you have the famous chicken nugget. Okay, what's in a chicken nugget? It's a mystery. Is there any chicken? Maybe. There's a lot of corn flour. There's corn starch. And then the chicken is fed corn. Basically, you're eating a lot of byproducts from corn when you go to a fast food restaurant. Then you have all different types of sugars that are

6:19corn-based. Something called Dextrose, corn syrup. But I didn't mention in the 32 ounce, there are 74 grams of sugar. That's 18.5 teaspoons of sugar in that one soda. You know, it takes 7 pounds of corn to make one pound of beef. Then you have a lot of the fillers and thickeners as in multi-dextrin, modified corn starch. You're basically eating something that is highly processed. It's highly inflammatory because it's a lot of omega-6 fatty acids. The deep frying involved, they don't just use that one time. Sometimes they use it for weeks, maybe a hundred different times. So you have the animals that are fed with corn. You have corn in the breading. You have corn in the condiments and sauces. You have corn in all the soft drinks because it's hypertose corn syrup. So I hope that you're shifting your viewpoint on a fast food restaurant. I used to go there all the time. I used to go there for the lost leaders when I was in college to save a little bit of money. I would get the two burgers

7:23for one dollar. And I did that for a long time. And no, I did not feel very good when I ate that food. And of course, I justified. I said, I'll eat healthy when I graduate. But that didn't happen. The truth is that you can find healthy foods at the grocery store and make them yourself. It might appear that you're saving a little bit of money and it's very convenient. And it might make you temporarily feel good because of all the chemicals and the MSG that gives it all this flavor. But in the long run, it comes with a price. I think the next step that you need to know is what to eat. Okay. To turn things around. And for that, watch this video right here.