You Should Avoid Fast Food, Right? Not So Fast … I’ll Show You How to Feast On REAL Fast Food

By Al Sears, MD

It’s easy to be tempted by dollar menus and drive-thru windows – especially when you’re juggling a job and family-life. But the truth is these foods are not really fast. They take months to prepare before they get to the restaurant. Even worse, the chemical additives and fake fats put you on the fast track to chronic disease.

Real fast food – what I call whole foods – are foods that come to you as nature intended – without corporate or chemical interference. But you don’t have to sacrifice on taste, flavor or satisfaction. How about a grass-fed New York strip or a marinated chicken breast with mango salsa? These whole foods are fast and easy to prepare. And they represent real value.

Exposing the Big Lie in Your Drive-Thru Bag

When you pull away from the drive-thru window, your son reaches inside his kid’s meal, and visions of a fresh, hot hamburger dance in your head. But what’s really inside that wrapper is far from what you’re imagining.

Imagine growing up on a farm as I did. You’d savor the smell of a fresh hamburger cooking and couldn’t wait to sink your teeth into it. From start to finish, that burger was the result of a very simple process:

• A cow was born.
• It grew up eating grass in the pasture.
• You took the cow to the butcher at full maturity (usually 3-4 years).
• You brought the fresh hamburger meat home and cooked it.

That’s it. That was the complete lifecycle of a hamburger. It was a whole food – complete in nutrition … nothing altered or stripped from what nature intended.

Now let’s take a look at the lifecycle of a modern drive-thru “junk food” burger:

• A cow is born.
• Ranchers rip the un-weaned calf from its mother and send it off to a commercial feedlot.
• The calf lives with tens of thousands of other cows among giant mounds of manure. It gorges daily on a concoction of corn (a completely unnatural food for cows), antibiotics (to fight the bacteria of its living conditions) and hormones (to make it grow fatter faster).
• The cow begins to get sick from the unnatural diet and living conditions (12-32% of all cows at slaughter have abscessed livers[i]).
• It’s given more antibiotics and a hormone implant.
• At only 14 to16 months old, they send the sick and obese cow to slaughter.
• An industrial slaughterhouse processes as many as 400 cows per hour. The speed of the lines in the name of profit makes it difficult to keep manure out of the meat. This is why, out of all foods, ground beef is the leading source of E. coli infections in the United States.[ii]
• The slaughterhouse sends the meat to a food-processing plant, where they mix the ground beef with chemical flavorings, preservatives and other ingredients.
• They cook the meat, freeze it, package it, and ship it to your local junk food restaurant.
• Your junk food vendor re-heats your burger from frozen to done in around 40 seconds.
• They top your burger with chemically enhanced condiments. McDonald’s mayo has 19 ingredients including preservatives and coloring. The pickles and ketchup are also laden with chemicals. They wrap your burger and put it under a heat lamp where it sits for an undetermined amount of time until you pull up to the window.

Discover the Holy Grail of Life-Saving Nutrition

The “processing” of whole food is simple. Mother Nature grows it; the farmer harvests it; you eat it. What could be simpler – or faster? It is food the way nature intended you to eat it.

With whole foods, there is no giant “processing plant” between the field and your stomach, no factory making chemical preservatives to inject into your food, and no laboratories inventing ways to enhance the flavor or color.

Big corporations focus on profit – not nutrition. Massive food-processing plants smash, grind, boil, nuke and chemically alter your food in the name of convenience and flavor. When they do that, they destroy vital nutrients in the food … the nutrients your body needs.

Think about this for a moment. Which one is a whole food: an apple or applesauce? Here’s the “process” of eating an apple: You (or a farmer) pick an apple from a tree and you eat it … that’s it. It’s perfect … whole … nutritious ...

But to sell you a jar of applesauce, “mega-food” corporations grow nutrient-poor apples (due to over-farming and using chemical fertilizers and pesticides). Then they wash the apples in a chemical bath, peel them, cook them, and finally add chemical preservatives, colors and flavors.

Check out this table. It shows you just how much of the nutrition is lost from common processing methods.

Source: USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors (2003)

As you can see, you lose a lot of nutrition when you process foods using even traditional methods. But here’s the thing … the giant food-processing plants that make your modern food are processing to the extreme.

My Top Five Whole-Food Favorites for Super-Charged Health

1. Grass-fed beef – Your body relies on protein for nearly every function it performs. And beef is one of the best sources of whole-food nutrition there is. The emphasis here is on grass-fed beef.

Most commercial beef is grain-fed, which causes an imbalance in the fatty acids of the cow. You get an unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids when you eat grain-fed animals. It’s that imbalance, not animal fats in general, that contribute to heart disease.

You can find grass-fed beef at health food stores or online. I prefer U.S. Wellness Meats. You’ll find a link on my website at http://www.alsearsmd.com/health-resources/ .

2. Raw milk and butter – It’s a great misconception that animal fats are the cause of high cholesterol. You’re cheating yourself of critical nutrients if you avoid them. Raw milk and butter deliver powerful heart-healthy nutrition, but raw is the key.

Homogenization and pasteurization destroy the most beneficial nutrients found in milk and butter. You may have to dig a little to find raw products, as laws vary from state to state regarding whether it can be sold for human consumption.

3. Eggs – Eggs offer the most complete source of protein of any food. They contain all the amino acids (the building blocks of cells) used by the human body.

It’s important to eat eggs that come from free-range, natural-farming methods. Commercial farming practices have hurt the healthy nutritional make-up of eggs, too.

4. Dark-green veggies – Dark-green vegetables are a great source of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. A few of my favorites are kale, spinach, celery, eggplant and especially… broccoli. In addition to many other nutrients, broccoli is rich in magnesium and calcium.

And yes, commercial farming has even managed to mess that up, too. For example, today’s broccoli has less than 50 percent of the calcium it did just 10 years ago.[iii]

So, just like other foods, be sure to get organically grown produce. Local is even better.

5. Nuts – In addition to being a good source of protein, nuts also contain omega-3 fatty acids that help ease inflammation. I like Brazil nuts, almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, and my personal favorite: walnuts.

I grew up eating walnuts. In addition to being the highest source of omega-3 of any other nut, they are full of heart-healthy flavonoids and arginine, which helps dilate the blood vessels.

You should know that peanuts aren’t really a nut. They’re a tuber, and they promote inflammation.

So avoid nuts that have been processed and/or cooked with peanut oil. And don’t eat them with other processed ingredients like sugar coatings, colors and preservatives.

In the end, if you feel you must eat what the mainstream calls “fast food,” be conscientious about it. Choose the healthiest option you can.

Boston Market offers decent nutrition in a hurry. Their selections have little trans fats or processed carbs, and there are several high-protein choices.

But if you can’t avoid the drive thru, try to keep these things in mind:

• Choose the leanest red meats – The saturated fats of quality beef are actually healthy for you. But that’s a far cry from what you’re getting from fast-food chains. Fast-food chains are all about profit, and that means buying the cheapest beef possible from commercial sources. The fats in this beef are out of balance, and are quite harmful.

• Pitch the bun – The processed carbs in white bread are high in glycemic load, and cause a host of problems with your blood sugar and arterial damage. Eat your burgers “naked.”

• Skip the dressing – Even the dressings for the “healthier” salads offered by fast-food chains are a toxic nightmare. Full of artificial and chemical flavors, they are also full of trans fats, a big culprit in hardening of the arteries.

• Drink water – It’s an automatic reflex for most people to order a soda with that meal deal. But look before you leap. The amount of sugar in a typical soda is shocking. You’re drinking around 12 teaspoons in a 16-ounce soft drink. Now, do the math on how much you’re getting once you’ve been “super-sized” to that 64-ounce cup!

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Dr. Al Sears, M.D. is a board-certified clinical nutrition specialist. His practice, Dr. Sears' Health & Wellness Center in Royal Palm Beach, Fla., specializes in alternative medicine. He is the author of seven books in the fields of alternative medicine, anti-aging, and nutritional supplementation, including The Doctor's Heart Cure.

[1] Young, Serena K., Clell V Bagley, D.V.M, “Audit of Liver Condemnation at Slaughter,” Beef News Sept. 2001

[1] "Disease Listing, Escherichia coli," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2006

[1] Farnham M., “Calcium and Magnesium Concentration of Inbred and Hybrid Broccoli Heads,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science Feb 15, 2000

[i] Young, Serena K., Clell V Bagley, D.V.M, “Audit of Liver Condemnation at Slaughter,” Beef News Sept. 2001

[ii] "Disease Listing, Escherichia coli," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2006

[iii] Farnham M., “Calcium and Magnesium Concentration of Inbred and Hybrid Broccoli Heads,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science Feb 15, 20