Is fast food good for health?

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Is fast food good for health?
Balanced diets have always been a source of concern, particularly with the realization that unbalanced diets have the potential for causing serious health complications such as goiter (caused by iodine deficiency), beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency), pellagra (niacin deficiency), scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) and blindness (vitamin A deficiency). In this case, the nutrient imbalance causes body distress and disruption of body functions. Realizing that nutrition was key to healthy bodies, the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) developed dietary uptake guidelines targeted at specific gender groups and stages. These guidelines are estimations since digestion and nutrient absorption vary among different individuals, irrespective of their age and gender similarities. Some of the guidelines include the globally accepted recommended daily allowance (RDA) and recommended daily values (RDV). While excessive uptake or deficiency of a particular nutrient from a diet may not necessarily be catastrophic, it is still a source of health concern (Bernhardt and Kasko 254-256).
Well-being, health, quality of life, and ability to live an active life all depend on how well an individual is nourished. In fact, good nutrition is the result of multifaceted correlated factors such as medical care, nutritious food, cost, safety, and adequacy. Granting that good nutrition is generally acknowledged as a basic human right, more than 60% of the global population is undernourished while 20% are starving.

According to literature, it is widely accepted that starvation is not a real problem, rather the suboptimal health and nutritional status is the concern. In fact, an analysis of nutritional status indicators such as mortality rates, life expectancy and disease incidence shows that food resources are not being ideally used. In this respect, a large proportion of the world’s population is undernourished as is evidenced by their nutritional status indicators (Sizer and Whitney 577-578).
The ideal diet is vital for individuals, especially because the body requires 23 vitamins and minerals, 8 essential amino acids and 2 essential oils that it cannot synthesize, and thus they must be supplied within the diet. To maintain a healthy body over a lifetime will require that the daily dietary uptake for nutrients vary depending on conditions such as gender, stage of life, habit and illness. In addition, the origins of a majority of ailments can be tracked back to nutrient deficiency and/or excess (Tulchinsky and Varavikova 291). As a result, maintaining a balanced diet ensures that an individual remains healthy over the course of their life.
Nutrient uptake is one of the methods that is widely used in determining whether an individual is eating a balanced diet. It involves measuring and scrutinizing what an individual eats and their diets to collect their nutrient intake and determine their nutritional status. Some of the key factors considered include energy, protein, fat, cholesterol, carbohydrate, dietary fiber, and other essential nutrients. In addition, it is used to: study the relationship between health, disease and nutrient intake; establishing nutrition goals for decisions on nutritional policies and foods; and evaluating the diets adequacy (Weiss, Stumbo and Divakaran 42-44).
Contrastingly, there have been debates that scrutinizing nutrient uptake does not facilitate health maintenance as is widely imagined and held. This is based on the argument that despite taking in healthy diets over the course of their life, a large majority of individuals older than 60 years of age will develop a debilitating condition that can only be managed through dietary changes. For instance, diabetes is common old age disease that resultant of sugar imbalances in the body, therefore its management would entail vigilant monitoring of dietary sugar uptake. The recommended daily uptake guidelines on nutrient balance are not the only consideration in diet analysis. Other considerations include food availability, variety, cost, eating habits, personal preferences, and daily activities that must also be considered in planning diets (Wang, Kogashiwa and Kira 1588-1593). Therefore, the dietary guidelines are simply minimum health recommendations that barely help an individual to sustain a healthy status, but do not contribute to the meaningful improvement of life quality.
As earlier stated, the nutritional position of an individual is dependent on how well their nutrient and energy needs are met. Needs and eating behavior – such as how often, when, where and what food is eaten – are determined by a great number of socio-economic, cultural, psychological, pathological and physiological factors. Based on this, it is evident that there is no single dimension that can provide inclusive nutritional status information. In essence, an amalgamation of approaches, containing clinical malnutrition signs, biochemical analysis, and anthropometric measurements, can be used to provide more comprehensive information. Firstly, clinical malnutrition signs are applied in health facilities with the intention of diagnosing illness and distinguishing between specific nutrient deficiencies and malnutrition. Some of the ailments that exhibit clinical malnutrition signs include night blindness, keratomalacia, corneal xerosis, and Bitot’s spots. Customarily, clinical signs are not applied in evaluating the incidence of over-nutrition consequences such as hypertension and obesity. But this does not take away from its usefulness as a tool for nutrient diet analysis (Gaw et al. 101-103).
Secondly, biochemical analysis involves analyzing the concentration of body fluids (such as urine, serum, plasma, blood and so on) and tissues (such as adipose, muscles, blood cells and so on) to provide information on the dynamics of nutritional status. Regrettably, no particular biochemical variable can infer nutritional status thereby necessitating the use of a combination of variables in conjunction with other measures of nutritional status. It is important to note that a single nutrient is not only influenced by diet, but also turnover factors such as excretion, metabolism, transport, and absorption. Furthermore, homeostatic mechanisms are also responsible for maintaining body processes in a narrow range to imply that biochemical analysis does not necessarily reflect nutritional status of a body (Mahan, Escott-Stump and Raymond 172-173). Finally, anthropometric measurements involve assessing body composition, proportion and size stratified for ethnicity, gender, and age. It is the most widely used tool since it is non-invasive, inexpensive and universally applicable as nutrition information collection tool. The basic nutritional anthropometric measurements are skinfolds, body circumference (upper arm, head, hip, and waist) and body mass (weight). The measurement results reflect overall welfare, health, disease, growth, exercise and food intake since any changes in measurements are noted and traced back to nutritional changes. Creating a comprehensive tool that combines all the listed measurement tools ensures that a more valid nutrient diet analysis is conducted (Mahan, Escott-Stump and Raymond 165, 877).
Based on the current discussion, it is evident that fast food is just that, food, and not a source of concern as long as it is incorporated with other foods to provide the right nutrient balance to satisfy the accepted RDA and RDV values. Simply put, a diet is a multifaceted experience variable that examines the multidimensional features characterizing the correlation between nutritional values and individual factors such as age, gender, culture, preference, cost and availability. In this respect, fast food can be considered as good for health only as long as it forms part of a meal that satisfies the RDA and RDV values for nutrients, to include the right proportions and amounts of proteins, vitamins, dietary fats/lipids, carbohydrates, minerals, and water as important nutrients.

Works Cited
Bernhardt, Nancy and Artur Kasko. Nutrition for the Middle Aged and Elderly. New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2008. Print.
Gaw, Allan, Michael Murphy, Robert Cowan, Denis O’Reilly, Michael Stewart and James Shepherd. Clinical Biochemistry: An illustrated colour text (4th ed.). London: Elsevier, 2008. Print.
Mahan, Kathleen, Sylvia Escott-Stump and Janice Raymond. Krause’s Food & the Nutrition Care Process (13th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Saunders, 2012. Print.
Sizer, Frances and Ellie Whitney. Nutrition: Concepts and controversies (11th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thompson Higher Education, 2008. Print.
Tulchinsky, Theodore and Elena Varavikova. The New Public Health: An introduction for the 21st Century (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press, 2009. Print.
Wang, Da-Hong, Michiko Kogashiwa and Shohei Kira. ‘Development of a new instrument for evaluating individuals’ dietary intakes,’ Journal of American Dietary Association, 106 (2006), pp. 1588-1593.
Weiss, Rick, Phyllis Stumbo, and Ajay Divakaran. ‘Automatic food documentation and volume computation using digital imaging and electronic transmission,’ Journal of American Dietary Association, 110 (2010), pp. 42-44.