By Anna Forostenko, The fast food industry has claimed a new victory. US experts from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention have discovered that in the last 50 years the portions in fast food restaurants have quadrupled in size. This applies even to children’s portions. Fifty years ago a child’s serving of soda was 225 grams and now even the smallest glass contains 340 grams of liquid. At the same time, in the last 25 years the number of overweight children in the US has tripled. At present, obesity problems affect every sixth child in the US and given the popularity of fast food in other countries, obesity could soon become a major worldwide problem.Even today, obesity is the second major cause of premature deaths in the US, the first one still being smoking. However, it is wrong to assume that Americans are the most overweight nation in the world because Australians currently outstrip them in this respect. Still, it is true that the American fast food model has become popular all over the world. Although prototypes of fast food diets existed in Ancient Rome, at the time they included dates, beans, flat bread and meat. Americans happened to be the first nation to realize that it was not enough just to feed someone, it was important to make people consume this kind of food on a regular basis. As a result, they came up with the modern version of fast food which entailed big portions containing a lot of fat and sugar and very little fibre. So now, when a customer eats a hamburger on the run he consumes half of the recommended daily allowance of calories. Source: Voice of Russia.
