Crystal Yu
106723669
WRT 102-08

Increasing Tax on Fast Food

Fast food, the quick, convenient, delicious food, is being selected by most people. It plays an important role in the lives that people perfectly lay out for themselves. Siting in the restaurant and ordering a regular meal, cost people more time and money than purchasing fast food. However, at the same time, fast food brings many unhealthy dangers to people. It becomes a big factor that contributes to obesity and diseases in America. To induce people not to binge on unhealthy food, an increase price on fast food is necessary since people are sensitive about money. Such a tax might encourage consumers to live healthier lives. Increasing tax on fast food is contributed.
Fast food, known as junk food, is just like how people name it. Fast food is popular because it serving filling foods that taste good and doesn’t cost a lot of money. The concept of fast food is obviously, food ready-to-eat and served quickly. Fast food is made with highly-processed ingredients to give it a long shelf-life, to hold consistency, and to enhance flavor. These highly-processed ingredients are altered from their original healthy forms which would nourish the body to denatured forms that lack of any nutritional value whatsoever. Fast food is also highly processed with a wide array of additives. Some food and color additives have induced allergic reactions, while others have been linked to cancer, asthma, and birth defects. People should stop buying those unhealthy foods and begin to pick something healthier.
Unfortunately, Americans have become dependent on fast food dining even though they know it has negative effects. One way to make people to choose healthier food is to raise the tax on fast food. Increasing the price of fast foods can affect people’s behavior, and steer them toward healthier diets, lower weight and less risk of diabetes. Since “Sin tax" is already widely applied to many substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, and it was successful in the case of smoking cessation efforts, it could also be helpful on fast food. If the price of unhealthy food were brought up to match or exceed the price of healthier alternatives, people who use the money generated by fast food purchases to subsidize the prices of healthy food, such as fruits, vegetables and fresh fish. By making the unhealthy food more expensive, healthy food will be cheaper in comparison, which would result in an increasing number of people choosing healthy food.
Americans are getting fatter and fatter every year. It is estimated that as many as one in five Americans is obese. Most fast food is typically high in calories and the portions are large, it does promote eating too many calories, and its ingredients contain more energy, total fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates and added sugars than healthier food of the same weight. As a result, eating fast food is directly associated with both being overweight and exceeding the recommended levels of fat and sugar. Besides, other major diseases is developed due to being obese, such as heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility and strokes.
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