Recently I was out with some friends and they wanted to stop at a fast food Restaurant. I really don't like fast food, but sometimes everybody else wishes to go there, so you just have to make the best of it and find something reasonably healthy. If you're required to eat fast-food, here's a tip to ensure that you're not causing much stress on your body...ALWAYS AVOID the soft drinks and anything deep fried this includes french fries, hash browns, and anything breaded like chicken nuggets, chicken patties, or breaded fish burgers. These are all absolutely drenched in deadly trans fats from the industrial hydrogenated vegetable oils they use to fry all of these .

Remember, as I've said before, I've seen studies showing that as little as 1 gram of trans fat per day can have severe degenerative effects on your body like inflammation, blocking and hardening of the arteries, heart disease, numerous forms of cancer...not to mention leading to more fat on your belly. That's as little as 1 gram! A typical fast-food meal of a breaded chicken burger (or fish burger), along with an order of fries can have as much as 10 grams of trans fat! Add on a cookie or small portion of pie for dessert (which are commonly made with deadly margarine or shortening), and now you're up to about 13 grams of trans fat with that whole meal. If 1 gram a day is destroying your body, imagine what 13 grams is doing to it! And this is only one of your meals. Some people are consuming 20-30 grams of trans fat per day, and not even realising what they're doing to their bodies internally. Please realise that no-one, I mean NO-ONE, is looking out for your Body, with the exception of YOU.

Back to the idea of how to avoid this junk and eat a reasonably good meal on the unusual event that you're forced to eat fast-food. As for drinks, avoid the soft drinks...they're nothing but highly processed high fructose corn syrup which will just end up as more belly fat. Water is always the best thing to drink, but if you need something with taste, try unsweetened iced tea. At breakfast, a good choice is an egg, ham, and cheese on an english muffin (not on a croissant, which is packed full of dangerous trans fats!), or a fruit & nut salad. At lunch or dinner, the best choices are a grilled chicken sandwich, the chili, a grilled chicken salad without croutons (again...croutons = more trans fats), or even just a basic cheeseburger. The major take-away idea from this little fast-food piece is that the worst things at most fast food restaurants are the soft drinks and anything that is deep fried.

For any of you that have seen the film "Super-Size Me", you saw how eating fast food every day was very bad for the guys health, but did you notice the one guy that was the king of eating big macs (or something like that)? I don't recall what kind of burger it was, but this guy has eaten these fast food burgers almost every day of his life for the past 30 years. Did you see that he said that he almost never eats the fries or soft drinks, even though he eats the burgers every day? And he's not necessarily overweight. Now I'm not telling you that fast-food burgers that are made with their processed white bread and low quality beef and cheese are the best thing to eat, but the idea is...it's the fries and sodas that are the genuine health disaster.

So if you're out at one of these restaurants, remember these tips and choose well!

From 2006 Mcdonalds has added a nutrition label to all of their wrappers. Remember that as much as one gram of trans may negitively affect your internal organs and now you can actually see how many grams of trans fat you're eating right on the food wrapper. You can now make the right choices and look after your body.