Areas that would yeild the direction

Advertising

Advertising for fast food is like dressing yourself up in really nice clothes. Expect, your dressing your self up in a lot of sodium, trans fat, and artery clogging types of food that is no good for you. Fast food advertisers are extremely smart in what they do. Their job is to sell the product and that is what they do. By showing and image of chicken or a skinny salad, or a nice fat juicy burger; and making it look so delicious that its killing you as well as your insides. Fast food advertisers are really smart in a way that McDonald makes it a treat or an award to go their and eat. Example: One commercial is that you see a little boy getting good grades the mother wants to reward her son by taking him somewhere delicious to eat so she takes him to McDonald's. Where you see Ronald eating chicken nuggets and playing in the ball machine. Advertisers target it towards Mothers and Children so its a fun and exciting place to go. "full of family fun". "Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood.The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week. Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent." http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_pape/2007/0106_1015_2004.pdf
The elimination of the tax detectability of this type of advertising would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be banned completely from television.

Alternatives/Healthy lifestyles

Major thing for alternatives is the dollar menu. Almost every single fast food chain has a dollar menu. According to the article "Rating fast food dollar menus" It is extremely hard to find lunch under 5 dollars these days. So, Wendy's started the craze in 1989 when it launched its Super Value Menu. Since then, Burger King, McDonald's and Taco Bell have all grouped together items that sell for about $1. The chains make little profit off value-menu items, particularly the sandwiches, but the deals bring in customers who are likely to also buy sodas or french fries, said Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic, a restaurant researcher and consultancy."They're almost considered a necessary evil," Tristano said of the cheap eats boards.
As you can see eating off the dollar menu is so cheap and easy for people that are busy, can't cook, or really can't afford grocery's. If you wanted to compare healthy vs fast food fast food. Fast food wins any day. Half of us cant even afford healthy fast food so we don't buy. Plus if we have been eating fast food our whole lives and then one day we eat a piece of organic chicken and vegetables we are probably going to throw up because we are not used to eating stuff like that. http://www.spokane7.com/food/stories/?ID=4426

Environmental

fast food chains waste so much daily. And they wont even think a minute about cutting back or changing the way they do things especially when it comes to environmental issues. Fast food places use more plastic than any other household or company business. It takes about 800 years or more for plastic to biodegrade. Landfills and recycling centers are full of plastic and trash that is piled up and there is nothing we can do about it because we over consume so much waste. Yet the fast food industry is one of the main causes and they still dont care. Here are some people's opinion on the issue. "Some material can be recycled. But, it is made and packaged in a FACTORY which lets out air pollution. And it costs a fair amount of moola, but isn't that how it effects the economy, YES IT IS!!!!! Also plastic is made with this one material that is technically toxic. When it melts, to form the plastic packaging, it let's out pollution or hydrogases that cause global warming.
it costs alot to be made,

"it then takes machinery which produces toxic gases to be made

it then uses fuel to be shipped to places to be used (pollution in the air)

it then gets wasted when its used as still the majority of people refuse to recycle it- and some packaging cannot be recycled

and so goes to a landfill where it wont rot and disintegrated for 100 years or more and thus causes pollution while its there, and emits toxic gases while it slowly does disintegrated"

"With such demand for land use and products, not only do the locations themselves affect all areas, but also the way the food is processed. An example of these effects is pollution leading to bio accumulation; which is caused when chemicals from fast food packaging get absorbed into the ground." http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080518055413AAFLfKY

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