14 February 2011
Ratio Between Fast Food Restaurants to Grocery Stores
I guess Heidi beat me to this but I also was curious about the ratio of fast food restaurants to grocery stores so I decided to do a little experiment. After class on Monday, I decided to count the number of fast food restaurants, not including sit down restaurants, and the number of grocery stores between Speedway and Campbell and Speedway and Swan. I found that there were 18 fast food restaurants, 3 ice-cream parlors, and a shocking 2 grocery stores. Surprisingly enough, neither of the 2 grocery stores were one of the 3 major chains: Fry's, Safeway, or Albertson's. The two that I past were Whole Foods Market, which as much as I love what's inside that store, it is way to expensive for the average Joe. The other was Sunflower Market which I found exactly on the corner of Speedway and Swan. Sunflower Market was surrounded by: Pizza Hut, Whataburger, Jack in the Box, and Magpies Pizza. The first thing that came to my mind was the game Monopoly, this whole situation was just a bad game of Monopoly. Secondly, I thought that there should be a law that prohibits more than I fast food restaurant per block. I found this all to be incredibly disturbing after we had discussed that in actuality, shopping at the grocery store would be cheaper than fast food. I never really thought about it that deeply, until yesterday when I saw two shows on the food network: Sandra's Money Saving Meals, and Ten Dollar Dinners which both showed how a good hearty meal could cost just $2 per person. Even the dollar menu can't provide you with a whole meal for $2, perhaps just a hamburger and fries. Anyways, so I was curious if the media had noticed this problem at all so I searched obesity and fast food restaurants on google and came across this article: http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/2009no1/w14721.html . It's called Do Fast Food Restaurants Contribute to Obesity. I found the article to be interesting, but now I'm opening the floor and want to hear what you all think!
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SO I went ahead an looked further into the groceries vs. fast food. I have been going to the grocery store for every meal and cooking despite the "inconvience" since we talked about it. So from my own expiriment this week here are some results and recipes. With one package of ground beef, 2 tomatoes, a green chile, a onion, 1 bundle of cilantro, salt, pepper, and chile powder which all totaled about 13 dollars. I was able to make taco stuffed tomatoes. Withith the left overs from that I had a nice salsa and enough meat to make a speghetti sauce. The speghetti with sauce and noodles only cost 4 dollars because the meat was left over from the last meal. The next night I made greek chicken. For this I bought 2 lemons, an onion, 2 red potatoes, a red bell pepper, and two garlic cloves. The total cost was about 18 dollars. It seems kind of expensive, except that I bought a whole pack of chicken to use later on. With the things already bought I was alble to make two dinner for free. One was chicken lettuce wraps where I put chicken and salsa with some of the left over veggies in the wrap. The other almost free meal was tex mex this chicken cilantro and cheese backed on a slice of bread dinner. Yes the lettuce and cheese were about 4 dollars so not really free but I already had those. So approximately 40 dollars for 5 well rounded meals. Oh I also forgot to mention that my fiance ate with me. So it was for two of us. That brings the total down to 20 dollars each. So unless when you visit fast food resturants you spend less than 4 dollars with each meal, it reall isn't a better deal.
ReplyDeleteI read the article "Do fast food restaurants contribute to obesity", and I also thought that the findings were very interesting. The percent increase in obesity was a little lower than what I expected, but still significant. Also, it seemed logical that proximity had more of an effect for children than adults, but the actual numbers were telling. Like they stated in the article, reducing access to fast food restaurants near schools may help lower fast food intake in teens, but it wouldn't necessarily have an effect for adults since they would still be able to travel to nearby restaurants.
ReplyDeleteI found another lay article on MedTv called "Fast Food and obesity", and they claim that fast food does not cause obesity, because even though people are taking in more calories, they could in theory burn them as well. Also, they say it is not the type of food itself, but the portion sizes. I strongly disagreed with the claims this article was making, because it's not just the amount of calories, it's where they are coming from. In addition, with the amount of excess calories that people intake by eating fast food, I think it would take more exercise than is practically possible in one day to burn them.
So, I did some calculations for how many extra calories people would be getting by eating fast food. I went on McDonald's website for this information (http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/nutritionexchange/nutritionfacts.pdf). For example, if you eat every meal at McDonald's for a day: Breakfast (Big breakfast w/ hotcakes and an orange juice) would be around 1,400 calories, while lunch and dinner (big mac, medium fries, and soda) would each be 1,200 calories, with maybe a dessert at 300 calories. Total for the day, that would be 4,100 calories. That is 2,100 calories in excess for a person on a 2,000 calorie per day diet. An average form of exercise, running, only burns about 650 calories per hour with the normal level of exercise (http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calories_burned.htm). This means a person would need to run roughly three and a half hours in order to burn all of their excess calories. Most people don't have the time or energy for this kind of exercise daily, so eating fast food with the expectation to burn off all the extra is just not practical, as this article I looked at claims. Overall, I think that because of the high concentration of calories from fat in all the food, fast food restaurants definitely contribute to the problem of obesity. Soda is another large issue. In addition, the study discussed in the article "Do fast food restaurants contribute to obesity" clearly shows a link between proximity of fast food restaurants and weight gain.
A link to the article: http://weight-loss.emedtv.com/obesity/fast-food-and-obesity-p2.html