The KFDA (Korean Food and Drug Administration) released a report on the levels of trans fat found in various local fast food restaurants and compared to Burger King, KFC, Lotteria, and Popeyes, McDonalds won the prize as having the highest amount of trans fat, followed by Burger King and KFC. An English article from the Chosun is here. The KFDC homepage is here.
This report comes at the same time a senior WHO health advisor has announced, in Hong Kong, that heart disease and strokes are set to become the leading killers in Asia. Cigarettes and a Western-style, fast food diet and a lack of exercise are listed causes of this coming pandemic:
. . . The two ailments are linked to risk factors like smoking, unhealthy diets and physical inactivity — habits that usually start early in life but can be corrected if proper guidance is given to children and teenagers.
Mackay (WHO advisor) said that while these were personal responsibilities, governments had a role to play.
“If children start smoking and don’t exercise, give 30 years and the state has to pay for all the medical healthcare. Not just their deaths, you have hospitals, loss of productivity. There is an immense cost to governments,” she said.
Thus, in addition to avoiding trans fat and getting more exercise, there is the issue of governments taking tax money from sales of tobacco products, compared to the eventual tsunami of health-related expenses and lost productivity from allowing a tobacco culture to flourish. Sooner or later the expense would undermine the healthcare system of any country, let alone Korea.
21 Comments
If they want to reduce smoking here, the best way would be to get rid of conscription.
As for trans fats, I pity those on their way to an early grave because of Lotteria. I’d rather be force-fed the scrapings from the fryer at KFC than eat another one of those rubbery hockey puck buh-guhs. I think it’s perfectly fair to fatten up your kids, so long as they have a good time eating it. Bring on the fudge!
it’s my understanding that korean instant ramyeon is very high in trans fatty acids, but i haven’t found statistics. anyone?
given the high price of beef in Korea, what the hell have they been using for hamburgers?
I remember when the foreign burger wave first hit Korea, I wanted a burger, just because I assumed it was gohgi and it was cheaper than buying goghi.
Maybe they’ve got a system going where all the cheapest and worst possible cuts of meat make up the burger.
houston fatsos will beat the ramyun fatso in girth
Modern style not Western style.
JJ, I also wonder how samgyupsal ranks.
After nearly 20 years in Korea, I have to admit that burgers have given today’s ajashi a much more feminine shape than a generetion ago.
Next doublecheesburger and fries for Miss Kim is on me
It’s fine to be concerned about these health issues, but I’m always worried that it becomes yet another excuse for governments to stick their nose in everybody’s business. Do we need to have a trans-fats police on the beat?
Consider Snow, that, in the US, we have industry insiders — former food and manufacturing industry executives — entrenched in the USDA, FDA, OSHA, resulting in government agencies that are pro-business, not public advocates of health issues. Bush and others have argued for allowing industry to be more self-regulating but the results so far have not been good for public health and safety, not to mention the long-term results, which can not be properly understood because it is impossible if not very difficult to have clinical trials done on the effects of today’s food industry. The US Government is under heavy pressure to not regulate such or to absolve the food industry from alleged frivolous litigation which is one of the few means of putting pressure to change on the food industry at large.
The independant film, “Supersize me” directly motivated the US food industry to lobby for legislation that would prevent lawyers from going after them, as happened to the tobacco companies, since the movie demonstrated clear linkage between unhealthy diets and fast foods — like the MacDonalds the film director ate.
I have read somewhere that smoking does not really increase healthcare and welfare costs for a society. Dying at a younger age does cut costs. A person who leads a healthy life is eventually gonna get sick and die of something, and society will be paying for that just as much as for a smoker.
Why should we have regulation to save ourselves from ourselves? I know that if I eat at Mickey D’s or any of the other fast food places that I’m not exactly going the ‘well-being’ route. Why not education instead of regulation? And that movie you cite, Supersize Me, is filled with crap according to reviews at the libertarian website Reason. One of their journalists did the same as the guy in the movie and she lost weight. The guy who made the movie is a Michael Moore wannabe who is happy to manipulate facts to get the biggest reaction. I also agree that agencies such as the FDA are ineffective in many ways, but I don’t want more and more regulation. There’s far too much of that as it is. And more litigation is not the way the US should go. It is out of control now and tort reform is badly needed.
Because beef IS so expensive, around 60% of a McDonald’s burger patty is soy bean.
100% beef is the name of the company that prints the paper wrapper….or so I have heard.
I’ve also heard that soy is bad for us. Does that mean that down the road we can sue because of the influence of the vegetarian agenda on us meat-lovers?
wow, so that’s how they do it. You’re getting vege fat/ppc in Korean burgers. Makes sense. Beef is too expensive. Thanks, chiamatt.
I think soy is bad depending on what genes you have.
People in that region where you’re sitting have been having it as part of the diet without much problems for generations.
Regarding 14, I’m not a great expert on soya beans, but I thought that soya beans had only been eaten in a fermented form in East Asia for centuries. There is something in the raw bean that makes them unsuitable for human consumption; however, about 50 years ago - perhaps around the time of the Second World War(?), someone/some company in the US developed a way of treating soya so it could be used in human foodstuffs - hence the explosion in its use since then. Although there is some controversy over how good it is for you (as well as the environment).
And yet people aren’t dying from eating soy. Some people also claim that canola oil is dangerous to humans because insects won’t eat the rapeseed plant that it comes from (based on their logic, then we poison ourselves every time we take antibiotics).
http://www.aces.edu/dept/extco.....23b01.html
wjk #4, “houston fatsos will beat the ramyun fatso in girth”
True. But the ramyun guy has to worry about subcutaneous fat - many Koreans are obese and they don’t even know it. Subcutaneous fat (think diabetes) is the Achilles’ heel of the svelte Asian figure.
Let’s bring on a nanny state in Korea and take the decision-making process away from the people and put it into the hands of bureaucrats. Obviously, the people can’t be trusted to make their own food choices.
The food culture in Korea is quite old, thus I do not think about Koreans getting heart problems from diet. Perhaps inactivity and smoking are the real problems, based upon what I’ve read in studies done in England. I do see some Korean parents feeding their kids western-style slop and that worries since that implies a lack of food education or a potential breakdown of the food culture, which is cheaper and mostly healthier than what passes for “food culture” in America (for example). One of America’s greatest problems is a food industry that has helped to create the general state of disease and is slow to change since self-regulation is a utopian crack pipe dream.
Any regulating in Korea should probably be performed on smoking since that is a killer of national budgets as well as of people.
“since self-regulation is a utopian crack pipe dream”
R.Elgin, self-regulation isn’t the point, it’s about people learning for themselves and taking care of their own health. As Wedge says, we don’t need more ‘help’ from the nanny state. Customers pushing fast food joints to provide better quality and cut trans fats and such is much better than regulation. Encourage people to educate themselves and to take responsibility for their own health choices.
“it’s my understanding that korean instant ramyeon is very high in trans fatty acids, but i haven’t found statistics. anyone?”
Can’t give you stats, but I can tell you since the ramyon is fried in refined vegetable oil, then it is probably high in not only trans-fats but cancer-causing acrylamides formed when high carbohydrate foods are fried or roasted at high temperatures. During the manufacturing process, ramyon noodles are fried in refined vegetable oil bleached to cover up the rancid smell. Some Koreans boil the noodles in one pan of water, and then transfer the noodles to another pan of water to make the broth. It is thought that harmful chemicals on the noodles leach into the cooking water.
“I’ve also heard that soy is bad for us.”
Natural soy products like tofu and miso are fine. It’s a soy derivative called soy protein isolate that has been linked to certain cancers. Soy protein isolate is found in many low-carb, high protein foods like energy bars. Many fake meat vegetarian products contain not only soy protein isolate but also MSG, hidden in other additives like yeast extract.