If fast food isn’t particularly healthy, then why do so many people eat it? Our research confirms people eat it because it’s fast and convenient. This suggests becoming richer or poorer doesn’t have much impact on how often people eat fast food. We also found that people whose income or wealth changed dramatically up or down during our study period didn’t change their fast-food eating habits. Both numbers are not very different from the 85% rate for people with incomes in the middle. The corresponding figure for the poorest ten percent was 81%. Among the ten percent with the highest income, about 75% ate fast food at least once in a three-week period. Overall, 79% of the respondents said they ate fast food at least once.īreaking the respondents down by their income did not show big differences. Thousands of respondents were asked by interviewers how often they ate fast food during three different week-long periods. Instead it used a cross-section of young baby boomers living in the U.S from all walks of life. Our research didn’t look at famous people. President Bill Clinton was so fond of fast food, Saturday Night Live created a skit parodying his visits to McDonald’s. Trump even made a commercial for McDonalds in 2002 extolling the virtues of their hamburgers. There are rich and famous people, like President Donald Trump, who state they are fans of fast food. In retrospect, the fact that everyone eats fast food should not have been surprising. It seems when you ask people if they ate at a fast food restaurant like McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Taco Bell last week, the majority of rich, poor and middle class said “yes.” Moreover, the difference between the proportion of rich people and poor people who eat fast food was quite small. Our recently published research examined this assumption by looking at who eats fast food using a large nationwide random sample. Mark Bittman in the New York Times, summed it up nicely: “The ‘fact’ that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes.” Regulating fast food locations to improve health among low income Americans rests partly on a key assumption: that fast food is primarily eaten by poor people, who cannot afford nutritious but more expensive food. Because of this some government officials have considered regulating parts of the fast food industry to improve public health and reduce health inequalities across society.

It is not the healthiest type of meal since it is typically high in fat and salt. Eating fast food is frequently blamed for damaging our health.

85 million eat fast food daily