UK Fast Food Chains Commit To Healthier Eating

Almost certain to be useless.

"The big six fast food chains seen on high streets in the UK: Burger King, KFC, McDonald's, Nando's, Subway and Wimpy have promised to make changes that make it easier for people to eat healthy restaurant meals."

And how will they do this?

"According to a report in the Daily Mail, the FSA estimates that the UK diet has 20 per cent too much saturated fat, and this contributes to the 200,000 deaths a year from heart disease...

The projects include:

* Reducing salt and saturated fats.
* Changing sauces, dressings and frying oils to alternatives that contain less saturated fat.
* Increasing healthier choices on menus.
* Giving customers more nutritional information."

So here are some of the issues.

Reducing saturated fats by (most probably) replacing them with unsaturated fats will do zero to mitigate the overweight/obesity problem since all fats contain about the same number of Calories per gram, i.e., nine.

Also, it is unknown whether this reduction in saturated fats will make any difference in the incidence of any disease.

Why?

To the best of my knowledge, there is no known threshold for saturated fat intake that does not result in disease. This is to say, that just because people consume less saturated fat when they go to a fast-food place, does not mean that they don't consume so much at home that this effort will make any difference.

Arguably, the experience with ketogenic dieting demonstrates that it may not.

Ketogenic diets, e.g., Atkins-type or "low-carb," are usually laden with saturated fats and the studies, to date, have failed to show definitive increases in the incidence of death related to the diet.

This will be argued for years.

Bottom line for those of us who want to succeed at "eating healthily"...

Focus on the real prize which is getting to and maintaining a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9.

How you get there makes no known appreciable difference.

If you are interested in a plan, see here.