Hamburgers and Ground Beef

Hamburgers and Ground Beef

Each individual in America has a goal he or she wants to accomplish. Whether it’s to purchase a new car or a huge home, it’s a goal wanted to be reached. However with the amount of fast food that Americans eat today, they will have a hard time accomplishing these goals because of the obesity or even disease they’ll have from the fast food. One major fast food that we like to eat while on the go is hamburgers. If it’s breakfast we grab a burger, if it’s lunch we grab a burger and even when it’s dinner we will grab a burger and might throw in some fires and a huge soda to go with it. Hamburgers are one of the leading causes of obesity and disease catching food.

In the Bio Analogics article it states that nearly two-thirds of residents of United States are overweight, and since 1991 the incidence of obesity has risen from 12 percent to more than 25 percent. This is due to the amount of junk food and burgers, we ate daily. To see if I am also one of these fast food consuming eaters, I composed a diary of what I eat daily and I discovered that within my weekly schedule, that’s between school and work- I eat hamburgers at least three times a week. I ate these burgers not just from one place, I ate them from four different places. The first one I ate was at In-and-Out. The second one was at Fuddruckers. The fourth day I had one in McDonalds and on the sixth day in which my friends and I went to Applebee’s after work and I still had the nerve to order a hamburger even when there were other items on the menu.

Hamburgers come from ground beef, which in reality if you consume a couple of hamburgers per month, it won’t harm you, but it states in ConsumerReports.org, “Americans show their affection for ground beef and burgers by consuming approximately 30 pounds of ground beef per person per year. Ground beef's saturated fat can contribute to heart disease, and the bacteria it sometimes harbors can sicken or kill someone who eats beef that is not cooked thoroughly.” With this information available to Americans daily, we still do consume the ground beef and even have the nerve to tell ourselves and our friends that we plan to cut back on it any day now. This also proves that what we consume daily isn’t only based on what our taste buds want us to eat, it’s also based on what the media tells us to eat.

I can prove this with the example of my own study of myself with the diary I conducted of what I eat. During the week I ate four hamburgers, in four different places. The first time I’ll admit, I wanted to eat a beef hamburger, but the other three times were from me watching too much television , and the media sending signals to my brain that this food looks great and needs to be eaten before it’s all gone and on top of all that it’s cheap and fast. I had to go to four different places until the media satisfied my desires for hamburgers. What surprised me the most is that at every place, I found a mishap in my hamburger. It was either to small, not cooked right, or cooked all the way, or it didn’t have all the condiments I wanted on my burger; but I still kept eating the burger. That’s not only me because at every place I went to go eat, there were at least two other guys with me who did the same thing- we all kept eating that addictive, heart disease promoting burger.

This leads to Ellen Shell’s article called An Arm’s Reach from Desire, which states, “Choice is what a free society is all about, and these marketers and advertisers offer all the choices we customers can handle. Or rather, the perception of choice.” This proves that the media only makes us believe that we as Americans have a choice in what we eat and consume. That is true, but they don’t give us pure choice, they only give us the perception of choice of how, where and when we want to eat our food. It is true that what I want to eat is truly up to me, even if the marketing industry has some play