[LinuxBender]

I am not an expert but I think it may be more nuanced in my opinion. Fast food started in the US in the 70's. Other nations followed after some time and I do recall seeing a funny chart ... not sure if I can find it tonight but it is an overlay of when people started eating fast food and when there was a dramatic increase of type 2 diabetes. One graph followed the other perfectly. There is a time window offset and I think that's why people have a hard time grasping the cause and effect. Other countries have similar graphs and they have the same time window offset but the graphs map onto each other perfectly with that same time windows offset. It's only gotten worse since then. A bored journalist at Ars should try to find those graphs.

[listenallyall]

Lots of people want to vilify fast food and blame it for any unhealthy trends. But the timing of fast food's emergence correlates with all kinds of other possible triggers - massive increase in availability of snack foods (cookies, Domino's, potato chips) in the home, far more sedentary lives and careers, introduction of plastic 2-liter soda bottles, increased use of seed oils, more sugar-based breakfast food, etc. So it is lazy and biased when you look at a few charts and assume it's all McDonald's fault.

[_heimdall]

Once you consider seed oils (many people still vilify saturated fats) the fast food timing gets even murkier. Fast food restaurants originally cooked in beef tallow where as its all seed oils today. If the oil type makes a difference and it wasn't necessarily the design of a fast food restaurant, the clock would have to start when chains got rid of tallow.

[trealira]

Why are seed oils unhealthy, though? I can't find anything that's bad about them in particular. I've only seen people commenting online saying to avoid them.

[_heimdall]

There's too much there for me to give a great answer here, but I can recommend Dr Michael Eades as a starting point. He wrote a couple books over the years on heart health and has been writing a newsletter for the last few years where he discusses various related topics in detail.

At a super high level, it has to do with how seed oils ("vegetable" oils, etc) are produced and how oxidative they are in the body.

[marinmania]

Fast food causing people to eat badly reflects poorly on US society as a whole, but not sure if it reflects badly on the US healthcare system. Especially if the stats show that the US is good at keeping these people alive.