http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/humana/template.MAXIMIZE/menuitem.81bcaef8c3ef11fb5952808ce6908a0c/?javax.portlet.tpst=9ff621d8690788b98ba06d8dfc6b79af_ws_MX&javax.portlet.prp_9ff621d8690788b98ba06d8dfc6b79af_viewID=news_view&javax.portlet.prp_9ff621d8690788b98ba06d8dfc6b79af_newsLang=en&javax.portlet.prp_9ff621d8690788b98ba06d8dfc6b79af_ndmHsc=v2*A1199883600000*B1231454901000*DgroupByDate*J2*N1006772&javax.portlet.prp_9ff621d8690788b98ba06d8dfc6b79af_newsId=20081231005280&beanID=2040694801&viewID=news_view&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken
Humana estimates these costs at the following for 2009:
• $19.39 in added health care costs for every overweight pound;
• $1,037.64 for every overweight individual;
• $127 billion added to the national health care bill.
Work Less
Time is a huge factor in our lifestyles that needs to be changed. People are working longer and longer hours than ever and fast food seems like a good choice. Unless you have a wonderful spouse that will have a healthy meal waiting for you when you get home, is it really worth it to make a few extra bucks? Not only do you have more stress in your life working more, but also you are becoming unhealthier through horrible eating habits.
Make Meals at Home
Start making more meals at home. The big misconception is that you have to spend hours preparing and cleaning up a meal that it is not worth making it yourself. That is further from the truth. If meals are planned properly throughout the week and you use minimal utensils, it can take about the same time as going out to a restaurant. It’s also far cheaper to eat at home. It may seem cheaper to buy fast food, but making a hamburger or chicken sandwich is just not that expensive and can easy to make on your own. Healthier meats and better ingredients can also be used to ensure that they are far better for you.
Healthier Fast Food
When you are on the run, fast food may be the only option. Not all fast food establishments are unhealthy and some use more sustainable materials in their packaging. I sometimes eat at Noodles and Chipotle’s that use fresher ingredients. Even if you do have to go into some of the more common fast food restaurants, you can inquire about the ingredients that are in each item or choose healthier options. Also, watch your portion sizes and try to avoid the side items like fries and sodas.
http://www.paystolivegreen.com/2009/02/cutting-back-fast-food-for-greener-lifestyle/
There are a lot of programs out there that help you create a healthier lifestyle for yourself. Many have steps that you can take and information and guides that you can look to. http://www.examiner.com/x-777-Nutrition-Examiner~y2009m1d10-Setting-lifestyle-goals
America’s obesity problems can be attributed to people’s lack of self-control and genes, but more importantly is the overabundance of fast-food restaurants along America's roadways, the constant barrage of fast food on television. What's needed instead, are broader-scale policy fixes that promote healthier foods and behaviors across American society. From a public health point-of-view, where we're not so concerned with how overweight an individual is, but how overweight the population is, genetics is what permits the problem to occur, but environment is what drives it.
* Unnutritious foods reign
* Serving sizes keep increasing
* The food industry has run amok.
* Physical activity has declined.
Obesity has risen notably in other countries, including China, and that migrants to Western countries have much higher obesity rates than their relatives back home. Soda companies and fast-food outlets increasingly ink contracts with schools and gear advertising to kids. The most intrepid parents can't win this fight, they can't win it alone, but they might stand a chance through the following proposed policy changes:
* Make activity more accessible, by, for example, building communities to allow more walking or biking.
* Regulate TV food ads aimed at children and mandate equal time for pro-nutrition messages.
* Ban fast foods and soft drinks from schools, instead forging school contracts with sports-related companies.
* Restructure school lunch programs to include more healthy foods.
* Subsidize healthy foods and drive down prices of fruits and vegetables by 70 percent.
* Discourage consumption of poor foods through a "fat tax," earmarking the funds for nutrition and recreation.
Brownell believes such measures would take the blame off people with obesity and are the only "real path to doing something constructive about this problem."
http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec01/fastfood.html
Waste caused by individuals and companies.
There are many ways that restaurants can save and help the environment by practicing pollution prevention and becoming “green friendly” restaurants. If these steps are taken the restaurant can improve its public image, as well as becoming more environmentally sustainable. Offers ideas based off of a booklet put out by the state of California. These ideas were developed for food service establishments offering suggestions that restaurants can use to reduce the amount of garbage they throw away. The booklet is meant as a tool for restaurants to think about how they can positively impact the environment and their pocketbook.
http://www.deq.state.mi.us/documents/deq-ead-p2-food-restp2wr.pdf
http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/Publications/BizWaste/44198016.pdf
One way of helping lessen the environmental footprint of restaurants, as well as supermarkets and manufacturers, is by Vegawatt. Vegawatt is a fully automated cogeneration system for restaurants, designed to run on waste vegetable oil. This allows for the disposal of waste vegetable oil into electrical power through a generator that runs on the waste oil, providing enough power to possibly cut business electricity expense by 25%.
http://gas2.org/2009/01/19/owl-power-company-launches-the-vegawatt-wvo-generator-for-restaurants/
Some 18,000 tons of carbon emissions are generated by food-related road traffic each year, much of it linked to restaurants; 75 per cent of the 600,000 tons of glass bottles junked every year by restaurants, cafés, bars, hotels and clubs never gets even close to a recycling plant; and a third of the food ordered by the trade is thrown away. There are many restaurants, mostly in the UK, that are focusing on sustainability and the environment. The restaurants have their own gardens, recycle 100% of leftover food, buy local, purify their water on site, use rainwater to flush urinals, and the list goes on. They have made themselves independent of the transportation of goods from distant manufacturers; they have become sustainable and have drastically decreased their carbon footprint.
http://www.squaremeal.co.uk/feature/restaurants-environmental
In North Carolina, any individual, business or company can purchase carbon offsets. Carbon offsets pay to subsidize a clean energy program, such as a municipal landfill that traps seeping methane and reroutes the gas to generate clean electricity. For example, I man that owns a restaurant in Raleigh pays $200 a month in carbon offsets, equivalent to 196.5 tons of carbon dioxide emission that his restaurant emits each year. By buying the equal amount of carbon emission the man is able to say his restaurant is carbon neutral.
http://www.nrn.com/offthewire.aspx?menu_id=1370&id=363310
The portion sizes at American restaurants have been increasing over the decades. With the larger portion sizes comes a larger amount of food waste. Many chains have such draconian and ridiculously wasteful policies that have become the norm in the corporate food industry. Tons of food is wasted by being thrown out into landfills, instead of allowing the food to be given to the poor, composted or used for animal feed.
http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2008/04/14/why-does-so-much-food-waste-happen-in-restaurants/
The Green Restaurant Association offers a 12-step program to help the restaurant industry minimize its negative environmental impact. The response and savings to the program is pretty substantial. One restaurant saves about $2,000 a year just from reduced trash costs due to increased recycling. The environment wins big, too. For example, for every ton of the 100 percent post-consumer waste napkins, paper towels, toilet paper and take-out boxes used in place of their virgin counterparts, 17 trees are left standing, 7,000 gallons of water are conserved, 4,100 kwh of energy are saved, 60 pounds of pollution is kept from fouling our air, and 3 cubic yards of landfill are saved.
http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0197/et0197s5.html
Simple reduction measures can often have substantial impact on waste quantities. Some examples of waste reduction efforts in national restaurant chains include:
Red Lobster is now requiring all of its locations to use linen napkins and placemats in place of paper. This is saving 40,000 tress and removing 47 million pounds of paper from the restaurant’s waste stream annually (Nations Restaurant News 1995).
Wendy's took the ink out of its napkins and now saves 56,000 pounds of waste every year. Changes in packaging of pickles, mustard and mayonnaise removed an additional one-million pounds of waste. Switching from Kid's meal boxes to bags, eliminated another 1.4 million pounds of waste. Ketchup dispensers in restaurants reduced individual packaging waste (Wendy's corporate pamphlet 1996).
Since some of the nation's largest beverage companies are now restaurant owners, one of the best things their industry can do for recycling is set an example. At PepsiCo's Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC restaurants, aggressive packaging recycling, source reduction and "buy recycled" programs are underway. Recently all three restaurants cut paper usage by reducing the size of customer napkins and checks. Other strategies included dispensing beer from an on-tap system rather than bottles, and replacing disposable coffee filters with reusable wire filters (Stack 1996).
McDonalds switched from bags to cartons for its hash browns. The change resulted in a 74% decrease in paper usage, and kept 3.4 million pounds of material from becoming waste. McDonalds also implemented a nationwide program, which officials say will reduce its waste generated by one million pounds (500 tons). The reduction comes from changing the weight of the paper used to wrap sandwiches. Another project to reduce waste involved reducing the size of napkins by one inch (Egan 1996).
http://ndep.nv.gov/recycl/incntvs.htm
Average American throws away 1.3 pounds of scrap everyday. U.S. EPA has developed a food waste recovery hierarchy that shows how to put excess food to productive use. The food waste recovery hierarchy comprises the following activities, with disposal as the final option:
• Source Reduction – Reduce the volume of food waste generated
• Feed People – Donate extra food to food banks, soup kitchens and shelters
• Feed Animals – Provide food to farmers
• Industrial Uses – Provide fats for rendering and food discards for animal feed production
• Composting – Convert food scraps into a nutrient rich soil amendment
http://www.epa.state.oh.us/ocapp/food_scrap/index.html
http://www.epa.state.oh.us/ocapp/food_scrap/brochure.pdf
McDonalds Environmental Strategy
http://www.umich.edu/~nppcpub/resources/compendia/CORPpdfs/CORPcaseA.pdf
~how to reach different life styles(i.e. children, parents, etc.)
Kids have their own purchasing power, they influence their parents' buying decisions and they're the adult consumers of the future. Spending of kids marketing went from $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000.
"Pester power" refers to children's ability to nag their parents into purchasing items they may not otherwise buy. Marketing to children is all about creating pester power, because advertisers know what a powerful force it can be.
Using research that analyzes children's behavior, fantasy lives, artwork, even their dreams, companies are able to craft sophisticated marketing strategies to reach young people.
While fast food, toy and clothing companies have been cultivating brand recognition in children for years, adult-oriented businesses such as banks and automakers are now getting in on the act.
Many companies are using "buzz marketing"—a new twist on the tried-and-true "word of mouth" method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or "street marketing," as it's also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the savvy and elusive teen market by using trendsetters to give their products "cool" status.
Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways
The Internet is an extremely desirable medium for marketers wanting to target children
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/parents/marketing/marketers_target_kids.cfm
http://www.marketingymedios.com/marketingymedios/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000694974
~Difference between a low food restaurant(applebees, red robin, etc.) and a fast food restaurant. This means environmental impact, food quality, etc.
Concerns about the calorie content of restaurant food have focused on fast food. However, there is no specific evidence that fast food is worse than other food eaten away from home (FAFH). We use the Continuing Survey of Individual Food Intake to compare fast food and table service meals. We find that both are larger and have more calories than meals prepared at home, with table service exceeding fast food, possibly due to different pricing methods. However, for the full day, both result in similar calorie increases relative to no FAFH, with fast food perhaps somewhat worse.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217123823.htm
This site has a lot of data comparing fast-food items, with everything from pizza to chicken nuggets to burgers. Could be useful in the future.
http://www.acaloriecounter.com/fast-food.php
Most all fast food contain MSG, preservatives and additives. For, examples Taco bells rice contains dimethylpolysiloxane, which according to Wikipedia, dimethylpolysiloxane is optically clear, and is generally considered to be inert, non-toxic, and non-flammable. It is used in silicone caulk, adhesives, and as an anti-foaming agent.
http://www.naturalnews.com/022194.html
We take Joe Camel off the billboard because it is marketing bad products to our children, but Ronald McDonald is considered cute. How different are they in their impact, in what they're trying to get kids to do?
http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec01/fastfood.html
http://www.thelifestylecompany.com/articles/articledetail.asp?publicationid=15
TAGLINES:
Smart food. Smart health.
Fast Health.
Food for Change.
Shifting Lifestyles.
Save the Food.
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