Is there any evidence to suggest a correlation between class or education level and consumption of fast food?
I don’t have the statistics around or anything like that, but there’s no question. By and large, when you’re talking about fast food, you’re talking about the food of ordinary working people, and the food of the poor. And you know there is a class component to the consumers if you look at it in the huge aggregate. The good things about fast food are that it’s inexpensive and it’s convenient. The bad thing is how unhealthy it is if you eat it all the time. How unhealthy is fast food? You’ve just got to look at the obesity rate in this country; we are now the fattest nation on earth. Sixty percent of the adults in America are overweight or obese. And the health costs of obesity now exceed the health costs of smoking. One other depressing statistic is that 300,000 Americans die every year from being obese or overweight. So if you look at the rise in obesity, and you look at the rise in fast-food consumption, then you put them on a graph, they parallel one another very neatly. Have you see
