Fast food isn't hard to come by. It's an easy, low-cost option when cooking is out of the question. But how many adults are consuming it daily?
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently did some digging to find out. By using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the analysts gathered diet information from about 10,000 adults aged 20 and older between 2013 and 2016.
After analyzing the results, they found that 36.6 percent of adults dine on fast food on a given day, the report revealed.
“Fast food is a part of the American diet and has been associated with high caloric intake, and poor diet quality. Time, financial resources, price, and availability influence fast food consumption,” the authors wrote. “A previous report estimated that adults consumed 11.3 percent of their total daily calories from fast food.”
They also learned the percentage of adults who ate fast food decreased with age. About 45 percent of adults aged 20 to 39 and about 38 percent of adults aged 40 to 59 munched on fast food, while just 24 percent of those over 60 consumed it.
Furthermore, their results showed men were more likely than women to have fast food at lunch, and women were more likely than men to eat it as a snack. And non-Hispanic black adults gobbled up fast food more than other races.
A family's household earnings also played a factor. According to their findings, people with higher incomes were more likely to consume fast food than those with lower incomes.
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