Fast food is obesity's best friend. Diabetes loves fast food too, and so do the makers of cholesterol medication. Cancer likes it as if it's going out of style, and so does heart disease.

I used to love fast food. Rally's curly fries, Filet O' Fish sandwiches, Long John Silver's fried clams, Wendy's crispy chicken sandwich, and, of course, Mickey D's french fries. I ate this stuff alot when I was younger. It was cheap, I didn't have to make it, I could eat it while I was rushing from one thing to the next. I didn't stop to think what it was doing to me. I knew vaguely that it wasn't very healthy, but healthy food was expensive and took time. I'll worry about eating healthy when I'm older!

Well, now I'm older, and I got worried. Here's why you should be, too. This is what the FDA says is okay for you, your kids, and your body to consume.

Here are the ingredients for McDonald's french fry, taken from their website:



Let's start with the potato. This veggie/starch seems like an innocent bystaner to it's future massacre, but the potato slated to be a McDonald's French Fry is one special spud. As recently as 1999, due to consumer demand, McD's suppliers announced that they would no longer supply the company with GMO (genetically modified organism) potatoes. No more genetically modified spuds, which means that if you ate them before 1999 you were eating potatoes from a science lab, not a farm.

There are economic issues surrounding the potatoes, too, but if people don't care about their health they care even less about the economic impact of some vegetables so lets move on.

Let's go to ingredient numero duo. "Partially hydrogenated soybean oil". Hydrogenated oils have been in the news alot lately, and I'm glad because some people have stopped looking at me sideways. Sure, we've all heard that partially and fully hydrogenated oils are bad for us, but does anyone know what that means? It's a cheap way of getting more oil for your buck. You heat an oil and then in a science lab pass hydrogen through it. The fatty acids in the oil then acquire some of the hydrogen, which makes it more dense. This is a "trans fat". Skipping the science part because this is boring enough already, these trans fats enter your body, stick to your cells, and raise cholesterol levels, poison your body, inhibit Omega-3 fatty acids from doing their job. Too many of these trans fats in your system, unbalanced with the healthier fats, is linked with heart attacks, cancer, insulin resistance, asthma, lupus, schizophrenia, depression, postpartum depression, accelerated aging, stroke, obesity, diabetes, arthritis, ADHD, and Alzheimer's Disease.

Sure, eating cyanide is faster, by why would anyone educated eat any kind of poision? Why would a gov't allow it's citizen to consume mass quanities Conehead-style of this crap?

Let's go to citric acid, ingredient number three. Citric acid is Vitamin C. Hooray! You're getting your vitamins! You're going to need them, because the next ingredient is dextrose. Dextrose is a sweetener, a chemical derived from processing glucose. Want some artificial sweetener with your fries? We all know how healthy sugar is for our delicate systems.

Now we come to sodium acid pyrophosphate. What the hell is that? McDonald's says it's to retain color. But what is is, really? It's a white powder, and it's toxic in large amounts. Also known as disodium pyrophosphate, there is a myriad of horrific effects from excessive exposure. "The elderly, young children, and patients with renal insufficiency are at increased risk of toxicity". http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/sear ch/r?dbs hsdb:@term @rn 7758-16-9 Who let's their kids eat this crap?

Dimethylpolysiloxane. First of all, I don't eat anything I can't pronounce, unless it's a cheese from France. This stuff is a wax. It bounces. It's used in caulk. And McDonald's french fries.

Salt. Alright, something I can pronounce! Salt is fine, you need it to function. How much salt, though? I don't know, and after reading about wax and color agents and heart disease I've decided to get my salt by creating a salt lick on my plate instead.

That's what the fries are made of. They are cooked in, well, more hydrogenated vegetable oils and wax. TBHQ increases shelf life. Guess what? In high doses it's a carcinogen. So, these fries are cooked in crap, crap, and cancerous crap.

Can there possibly be more? How is this even a food anymore!?

Well, this is the good part. McD's used to cook their fries in tallow; that is, beef fat. Your fries didn't take like spuds, they tasted like meat. But this is expensive, and people thought unhealthy, so MD's replaced it with a "natural flavor" that contains hydrolyzed chemicals. Hydrolyzed chemicals are MSG. When made this special way, companies are not required to post that their food contains MSG, something many people (including me) are terribly allergic to. And hey, lookie here, McDonald's doesn't advertise that their food contains MSG because they don't want to lose some customers who are only allergic to their food.

Next time you pick up that humble fry, think about it. And if all that's just in a French fry, what in god's good name is in that Hamburger?

I'm going to go eat a salad.

(Sources are all over the internet and in books. I'll find 'em again if anyone is persnickity.)