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Survey

Introduction

This survey was targeted at children of age 9 – 12. The aim of this survey was to find out whether children of today had any knowledge of fast food and their health effects. It was also to gauge their concern about fast food’s detrimental health effects. 30 children were asked to take our online survey. This would help us find out more about the public’s opinion towards fast food as well. We also conducted surveys targeted at other age groups of the public.

Results and Analysis

Question 1: How many fast food meals do you consume per week?

Question 1 was to find out the average amount of fast food children had per week. As compared to teenagers today, most children eat fast food less frequently. Most teenagers eat fast food 2-3 times a week while most young children eat fast food less than once a week.

Question 2: On the scale of 1-10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, how concerned are you about the health effects of fast food?

Question 2 was to gauge the concern of youths about the connection between the fast food they ate and their overall healthiness. On the whole, most replies were around 6 -7. Even though they did not really understand the real and complicated health risks of fast food, they still maintained the fundamentals in their mind, albeit weak. One reason for this could be parents preaching this to them. It seems that today, more youths are educated about the effects of eating fast food.

Question 3 and 4: What is your weight? What is your height?
Question 3 and 4 were on weight and height classification. It was to see if fast food contributed to general body mass. We averaged out the results of the weight and height tests. Most of the children tested were of optimal weight, according to the BMI Check (21 – 25 is optimal). However, several of them can be considered overweight. Perhaps it is due to their lack of concern.

Question 5: Are you aware of the various health effects that fast food causes? If Yes, what do you think the health effects might be?

Question 5 had asked whether the people surveyed knew of the “various health effects that fast food causes.” This question was open-ended, allowing for more replies per person. We had to find out today’s children’s fast food knowledge. Apparently, young children know that overeating fast food can mainly cause cardiac (heart) problems. However, answers such as “cancer”, “diabetes” and “hypertension” were given as well. These complex terms are getting more well-known today as they pop up in the news now and then. Surprisingly, teenagers do not use, or know these terms, but describe them in a vague manner. More youths are educated about the effects of fast food nowadays. Parents could have told them about these effects from the newspapers as well.

Question 6: What are your reasons for eating fast food?

This question aims to find out the main reason for eating fast food today. What exactly was the reason why fast food is so popular? The majority of children eating fast food claims that the “nice taste” of fast food contributed to their eating most of all. Some had used the term “fast”, or “convenient to eat”. Their reasons are not very different from teenagers. Thus, the deciding factor of fast food is most likely to be taste.

Question 7: If a nutritionist were to tell you that fast food was unhealthy, what would you do?

Question 7 was to find out if today’s youngsters cared if they actually knew the “truth” about fast food. These children were very open-minded, and many of them chose to cut down on their intake. However, some others chose to ignore the would-be nutritionist.

Question 8: What type of fast food do you like most? (Please state only one type. E.g. Nuggets)

This question aims to find out what type of fast food most children liked best. 18 children chose fries while half of that number chose burgers to be their most hankered-after meal. Again, their choice is similar to teens of today. The presence of salt that is added in together with fries could be the main factor.

Question 9: Do you know what the risks of over consumption of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and salts are?

The question was aimed to find out whether young children knew exactly what was in their fast food (HFCS, trans fats or salt). Surprisingly, an even distribution of numbers was found out in the analysis. A majority of the surveyed thought they know what these three ingredients were. This is extremely similar to the teenagers’ replies. This is a surprising trend as we did not expect young children to know much about these risks. There are two possible reasons that contribute to this trend:
1a. Youngsters nowadays are more educated about the health risks of fast food
1b. Youngsters nowadays THINK they are more educated about the health risks of fast food.

Question 10: What do you think is the amount of: sugar, salt you need and fat you need a day?

The last question queries knowledge of the risks of over consumption of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and salts. An overwhelming majority of the young children did not know the answer to this question. This trend seems to be contradicting the trend in 1a. We therefore concluded that youngsters nowadays simply think that they know enough about the risks of fast food.

From this survey, we can conclude that young children do not know enough about the health risks of fast food. These young children will greatly benefit from educational websites on fast food, as educational sites such as ours contain in- depth information, and young children are also very open to change. (Refer to question 7). Many young children also stated that fries were their favorite food. Fat has one of the highest sodium and fat content amongst all fast foods. We aim to change the mindsets of these youngsters by educating them about the risks of fast food.

In our previous survey, we managed to spot quite a few unhealthy trends in young children. Those results were rather accurate representations of that age group, but could we say the same about teenagers? To answer this question, we conducted a second survey targeted at teenagers.

The aim of this survey is similar to the first; to find out whether teenagers of today had any knowledge of fast food and their health effects. Teens often like to eat fast food as it is convenient. As teenagers ourselves, we knew quite a few reasons that contributed to this trend, but we wanted to know what the general opinion of teenagers on fast food was. 30 youths were asked to take our online survey. We chose people from several different schools so that our results would be less biased.

Question 1: How many fast food meals do you consume per week?

Question 1 was to find out the average amount of fast food normal teenagers had per week. It gave us background knowledge of today’s teenagers’ exposure to fast food. Generally, youths in our survey consume fast food 1-2 times a week.
Apparently, youths are not heavily influenced by the fast food mania.

Question 2: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest
how concerned are you on the health effects of fast food?

Question 2 was to gauge the concern of youths about the connection between the fast food they ate and their overall healthiness. On the whole there are two averages for two groups of surveyed people. One of them is 2. The other average is 7. The average of 2 is because some youths hardly eat fast food every week. Therefore they need not worry too much about fast food. The average of 7 was because these people had prior knowledge of fast food and were well educated on the topic. From our results, girls tend to be more conscious about the health effects of fast food. Thus, they show to be more concerned about the effects of fast food.

Question 3: What is your weight classification?

Question 3 was on weight classification. It was to see if fast food contributed to general body mass. The idea was to compare the results of question 1 to the results of question 3. Most people that we had surveyed were of optimal weight. Only 2 people deemed themselves underweight and another 2 were overweight. Of the two overweight people, both of them consumed fast food more than 4 times per week. It is possible that fast food does not play a large part in the average teenager’s body weight as teenagers often live a rather active lifestyle which contributes to high metabolism. This burns away most of the calories they consume.

Question 4: Are you aware of the various health effects that fast food causes?
What do you think the health effects might be?

Question 4 had asked whether the people surveyed knew of the “various effects that fast food causes.” Evidently, most people knew the risk of overeating fast food. Most of their answers contained “clogging of arteries”, “high cholesterol”, “heart disease”, “existence of trans fat” and “obesity”. Some of these terms were considered general. However, we can infer that today’s youths are much more informed on fast food then in the past. This has been due to more and more research and scientific studies being done on fast food. However, the general teenage public still does not fully appreciate the extent of the damaging effects that fast food causes.

Question 5: What are your reasons for eating fast food?

Question 5 was to find out the main reason for eating fast food today. What exactly was the reason why fast food is so well-known?
Youths eat fast food for these reasons:
Fast food tastes good,
Convenient for people on the go
Easier to consume because food comes in packages and plastic bags
Cheap
Easily accessible

The main two reasons are that it is fast, and easily accessible. These are the selling factors behind fast food. The average teenager has a busy schedule and thus fast food appeals to them more.

Question 6: If a nutritionist were to tell you that fast food was unhealthy, what would you do?

Question 6 was to find out if teenagers cared if they actually had the truth about fast food. It is again, to gauge their concern on fast food’s health effects. Most teens agree that it is a trend for teenagers to eat fast food. However, most people agree to cut down but not stop consuming fast food altogether because it tastes nice, and is convenient. However, there were also a large number of people who chose to continue eating. Some of these people already knew it was unhealthy, so this would not affect how much they ate. However, there are a minority who would absolutely ignore the advice. Most of the people who knew about the health risks of fast food did not eat much fast food.

Question 7: What type of fast food do you like most? (Please state only one type.
e.g. fries, burger, nuggets)

Question 7 asks the surveyed youths what type of fast food they liked best.
Most people chose burgers and fries because of these two foods are the most convenient to eat “on the go”. This is because many teenagers have a busy schedule and they crave the convenience that fast food provides them. Finger foods are generally more convenient to consume than other types of food because finger foods allow the consumer to multitask while eating ( e.g. messaging)

Question 8. Do you know what the risks of over consumption of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and salt are?

Question 8 was asked to find out if teenagers understood the health risks of trans fats, salts and high fructose corn syrup. Many teenagers understood the risk so these ingredients, but did not know them in great detail. We aim to change that by including more details of these substances in our health risks section.

Question 9. What do you think is the amount of salt, sugar and fat you need per
day?

Question 9 was a test on the general knowledge of teenage consumers. The majority of them had no idea how much sugar, salt, and fat they needed a day, and only one of them got the ideal answer. This shows how little teenagers know about their diet, and it also reflects that teenagers do not check the labels of the food they consume. This leads to a diet that is uncontrolled; possibly causing many adverse health effects if too much or too little of a certain substance is consumed. A very important point to note is that since we consume food daily, such careless consumption can lead to a slow but steady deterioration of our body.

 

Conclusion

From this survey, we can infer that most teenagers are not extremely influenced by the ‘fast food trend.’ However, they seem to think a lot about fast food these days. Some teenagers are concerned about fast food, but some are indifferent to the issue of over-consumption, as they chose to completely ignore the “nutritionist” introduced in Question 6. Therefore, we can say that only a number of teenagers think about fast food seriously. Furthermore, other questions prove that most teenagers are concerned about the effects of over-eating fast food, and some are willing to cut down on consumption of fast food if it was necessary.

We also discovered the public’s general opinion about the selling point of fast food (Question 5). As of now, we have deducted as to how to create healthy yet appealing replacements for fast food; create nutrition-balanced and easily-handheld food that can be eaten quickly on the go. Throw in good taste and most people will like it. This is indeed a very important point in our research project.
We also realized that education plays a very major role in helping youths maintain a healthy diet (Question 6). We hope to bring about more awareness about the health risks of fast food through our website.

We compared this survey to the previous survey and found quite a few major differences and similarities. The main difference is that teenagers consume more fast food than young children, and this was due to the reason that teenagers thought that fast food was cheap. Young children did not have such spending capabilities, and this deterred them from fast food. Teenagers also tend to stay outside of home longer than young children, and thus fast food was the most convenient choice.