Junk food is still one of the most common diets American people turn to and that has to do a lot with the fact that healthy food is so expensive

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Junk food is still one of the most common diets American people turn to and that has to do a lot with the fact that healthy food is so expensive

The United States of America have been dealing with the issue of obesity for a very long time and their attempts at making people eat healthier seem not to have worked at all.
Although ads and campaigns have been made around the subject, fast food is still the most appealing thing for the American people. When it comes to choosing between fruits, veggies and junk food, junk food wins detached. That happens in places where there are few or no supermarkets at all and where people do not have much of a choice. Still, even though there are a few shops which could provide them with healthier food, the researchers said that people would always go for the fast food instead for anything else. According to the researchers, people seem to find fast food the most convenient way to eat nowadays. Furthermore, in big cities, where there are many stores and supermarket where shopping can be made, people seem to shop for food, unrelated to healthy eating. “It’s not enough to say we will build it [supermarkets] and people will come,” said lead researcher Penny Gordon-Larsen, from the University of Carolina.
What Gordon-Larsen and his team of researchers analyzed some data gathered from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study, which looked at the difference between fast food consumption and fruits and vegetables consumption among Americans. That was, of course, based on how many fast food restaurants and supermarket there were around. The study concentrated on cities like Minneapolis, Oakland, Chicago and Birmingham. Then, the researchers asked about 5,000 people from these cities how often they ate fast food. The participants in the study were also asked to describe what kind of diet they had in the last week and overall, in the past month.
The biggest finding of the study is linked to the fact that low-income has a lot to do with the people’s habit of eating junk food. It seems that fast food is cheaper and easier to procure, so most people who come from a low-income class tend to eat more fast food than others. Furthermore, there has been also found a link between living close to a fast food restaurant and eating more fast food, but nothing of the kind prevailed when people lived close to supermarkets – that did not make them eat more fruits or vegetables, according to the study.

People should start eating more healthy food, otherwise their health will get poorer and poorer

The most important thing, Gordon-Larsen said, is for producers to make healthy food cheaper. Given that not all people can afford eating healthy, this should be the main concern right now. Probably, if the price on healthy foods such as vegetables and fruits were lower, people would not turn to fast food so much. Moreover, according to Dr. Paul A. Simon, from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, it seems that this particular study comes in the support of previous studies which show the same thing: frequent fast food consumption is one of the biggest factors when it comes to obesity. Moreover, Simon also talks about the fact that supermarkets are not linked to healthy eating because people can go in and not buy healthy foods. The main reason for which this happens is because people do not have the necessary money to eat healthy all the time and fast food restaurants, where prices are really cheap, are the best solution.
What supermarkets should do, according to Simon, is to put their healthy merchandise, such as fruits and vegetables, on more popular places of the supermarket, reduce their prices and also make them look more attractive to people. Otherwise, people can always go in and out of supermarkets without even looking for any sort of healthy food. Still, this is very much concerned with education and people in the United States of America should be educated when it comes to healthy eating, because if they had some good knowledge about it, obesity rates would not have been so high.
Although there are many countries in the world which face the same problems related to obesity, the United States of America is among the top countries which have the highest rates of obesity in the world. According to the CDC, treatments and expenses related to obesity cost about $75 billion a year, which is enormous. There are many organizations which try to help people from becoming overweight and others which are trying to help obese people lose weight, but the obesity rates are still high. Hopefully, through good educational programs and healthy diets, people would start losing weight and the problems of obesity would be no more such a big concern for the American people, after all.

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