A movie triggered a new round of fast food nutrition controversy.
In mid-May this year, a documentary called "SuperSizeMe" was released in the United States, which gave a little stimulus to this industry that people love and hate. The director also won the documentary director award at the 24th Sundance Film Festival.
In the film, director Morgan? Spool Locke interviewed experts from 20 American cities (including Houston, the fattest city in the United States), from surgeons to fitness coaches, from school chefs to legislators. Respondents shared with the audience their research, opinions and complex feelings about the growing obesity in the United States.
Not long ago, the fast food professional committee of China Cuisine Association specially held the "expert forum on fast food nutrition" and invited some experts to discuss the right and wrong of fast food. In fact, as early as 1983, some studies by Chinese and American researchers proved that the diet of China people was better than that of Europeans and Americans. One reason is that fast food makes westerners fat. Some experts pointed out that people become obese because the calories provided by foreign fast food greatly exceed the needs of the human body. There was an argument about fast food nutrition at that time. However, some experts pointed out that eating fast food is not the root cause of the increase in obesity.
Will eating fast food make you fat?
For the long-term health problem of fast food, many nutritionists have pointed out that the culprit of obesity is bad diet and living habits, not a certain food. The United States has clearly pointed out that the key cause of obesity is overeating. Whether it's fast food, dinner or eating at home, as long as you often overeat high-fat foods and don't pay attention to exercise, you will be overweight or other health problems. Due to the great abundance of food in modern society, the lack of physical activity and the increase of static lifestyle, as well as the habit of overeating aggravate the imbalance between energy consumption and intake, obesity has gradually become a serious public health problem.
Some experts believe that foreign fast food can be roughly divided into three categories. First, the main meal, including all kinds of instant noodles, hamburgers, baked goods, bread, frozen food, fried chicken pieces, beef slices, sausages and so on. Second, drinks, including beer, soda, cola, fruit juice, instant coffee and so on. The third is snacks, such as French fries, salads, shrimp slices, nuts, ice cream and other fried puffed foods.
When we eat fast food, what specific factors affect our health? Experts believe that there are three substances that can increase the content of cholesterol in blood, thus increasing the incidence of thrombosis and heart disease. One is saturated fatty acids in food; The second is the reverse fatty acid (TFA) in food; The third is cholesterol in food. For healthy people, the calorie intake from saturated fatty acids should not exceed 10% of the total energy intake. The content of saturated fatty acids in animal fats such as cream, lard, ice cream and butter that people often eat is very high. In addition, many fast food products contain high TFA, especially fried food. So the intake of these foods should be controlled.
To maintain normal metabolism, the human body needs to take a certain amount of nutrients from food, including carbohydrates (rice, flour, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, sugar, etc. ), fat (soybean oil, sesame oil, vegetable oil, lard, butter, butter, beans, nuts, etc. ) and protein (milk, yogurt, meat, beans, seafood, eggs, etc. ) At the same time, food also provides the calories needed to maintain the body, which is necessary for the human body. But the key point is that the intake and consumption of nutrients and calories must be relatively balanced.
If some fast food, especially fried food, only provides people with more fat than they need, which makes them easy to get fat, we can solve this problem by adjusting the number of fast food, reasonably matching other foods and strengthening exercise. However, for those harmful and highly saturated fatty acids and TFA, only by increasing the content of saturated fatty acids and trans fatty acids in the oil used by food manufacturers can we ensure that some fast food not only meets the taste of the public, but also does not cause potential harm to health. Of course, consumers can also choose fast food according to the proportion of the food pyramid. Avoid eating too many fried foods (French fries, fried chicken) and biscuits, as well as high-sugar soft drinks.
Generally speaking, a woman weighing 60 kilograms needs about 1800 calories a day if she exercises moderately. Among them, carbohydrate (4 calories per gram), fat (9 calories per gram) and protein foods (4 calories per gram) are the main sources of our body calories. It is generally believed that fat, as the energy source of food, should not exceed 25%~35% of the total energy source. Fat consists of saturated fatty acids (from animal fat, coconut oil, etc. ) and unsaturated fatty acids (from vegetable oil, fish oil, etc. ). Eating as much unsaturated fatty acids or oils with high percentage of unsaturated fatty acids as possible (such as olive oil and sunflower oil) is very beneficial to health, and you can also pay attention to this selection index when eating fast food.
Recently, Yan Yu, vice president of China Cuisine Association and executive deputy director of Fast Food Committee, said at the "Symposium of Fast Food Nutrition Experts" that the modern fast food industry should attach importance to the advocacy of nutrition. More than a dozen well-known fast food industry leaders at the meeting all introduced their own methods to deepen the nutrition problem in fast food, and also promised to put the nutrition problem in the first place. Moreover, the Nutrition Professional Committee of China Cuisine Association is also stepping up the formulation of "Nutrition Standards for Fast Food Industry" to give our consumers a specific fast food diet guidance and give fast food enterprises a standard to abide by.