Healthy fast food sounds ideal: It’s quick and easy and still healthy. Unfortunately, the latter rarely applies – instead, fast food usually contains many calories and few nutrients. But there are exceptions.

“Fast food” – that means first of all “fast food”. This rather vague term has a wide variety of associations:

Fast food is food that can be prepared quickly and easily – partly because it is produced in large companies using standardized processes.
Accordingly, as a customer in the snack bar, you never have to wait long for your fries or currywurst – and you don’t have to pay a lot either.
Fast food is also “fast” because it is usually eaten quickly.
A wide variety of meals fit into this broad field. French fries, burgers, doner kebabs and currywurst are typical fast food, but you can also call sandwiches or cakes from the bakery and ready-made meals from the supermarket fast food.

With many fast food dishes it is quite obvious that they are unhealthy. But what about supposedly healthy fast food such as packaged salads? We take a closer look at the different cases.

This is why typical fast food is not healthy

Few believe that fast food classics are healthy. Dishes such as burgers and fries are characterized above all by the fact that they have a high energy density. This means that there are few nutrients for many calories. Instead, typical fast food dishes primarily contain:

simple carbohydrates that get into the blood quickly and can cause cravings.
a lot of fat, including many saturated fatty acids and various trans fats, which are said to increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, among other things.
a lot of salt and sugar – both of which are also considered unhealthy in large quantities.
Additives, thanks to which the product has a longer shelf life, tastes better and is easier to manufacture.
In addition, residues of harmful substances are often found in processed food. For example, Öko-Test tested various chicken nuggets and found multi-resistant germs and mineral oil residues in many products.

Because fast food is so diverse, it’s hard to say exactly how healthy or unhealthy it is. Hardly anyone eats fast food in such quantities as Morgan Spurlock in the shocking film “Supersize Me” and suffers obvious health damage as a result. As a review explains, studies nevertheless come to the overall conclusion that the above-mentioned unfavorable nutrient composition increases the risk of numerous lifestyle diseases.

Incidentally, this is also due to the substances of which fast food contains too little: vitamins, minerals, trace elements and other important micronutrients. On the one hand, the basic ingredients already contain small amounts, on the other hand, many of these nutrients are lost in the processing.

According to a study, eating too much fast food can cause nutritional deficiencies that are detrimental to the body and mind. Another study suggests that frequent consumption of fast food increases the risk of depression, as fast food tends to be high in pro-inflammatory compounds.

Fast food: How to make the healthier choice

As I said, not all fast food is equally unhealthy. Here are a few general tips on how to choose healthy fast food:

Organic ready meals contain ingredients of organic quality – and therefore less chemical pesticide residues.
The sandwich from the baker is more filling if it is made from wholemeal flour.
Look out for Asian snack bars that work without the flavor enhancer glutamate.
In the meantime, there are also many shops that offer high-quality variants of classic fast food such as burgers or fries. However, it is then no longer necessarily fast food – many burger restaurants have discovered the Slow Food movement for themselves.

Tip: Many fast food dishes contain cheap meat from factory farming. For the sake of the animals, choose a vegan burger or a kebab with falafel or fried vegetables and lots of salad instead of a burger with a meat patty.