Fast food fast exit

Fast food logos turn your judgment inside out

If you're jonesing for junk food, you don't have a craving -- you've been conditioned, plain and simple.

Ronald McDonald, world's most careful and calculated clown, has turned you into one of Pavlov's dogs. He's already taught you how to beg... and if you keep eating his junk, you'll be playing dead, too -- and that's no trick.

A new study shows how the very sight of a fast food logo can send you itching and twitching into an irrational frenzy that can only be cured by some reformed chicken chunks and processed meat patties.

And all it takes is a quick, subliminal flash to change your behavior.

Researchers showed a series of images to students for less than a tenth of second
-- between 12 and 80 milliseconds. Some of the students saw logos for death cafes such as McDonald's, KFC, Subway and Taco Hell, err, Bell.

Then, the students were asked to read some text and choose between two skincare products.

The researchers found that the students who were exposed to -- or infected by, in my book -- the fast food logos were more likely to plow through the text as quickly as possible, and then choose the product that saved the most time.

I'm surprised some of these kids didn't just toss the reading assignment and run right out of the room in search of some processed meat patties or reformed chicken chunks.

The researchers say their study shows how fast food "can have the unexpected consequence of inducing haste and impatience."

I hate to break the news, but the biggest problem with fast food isn't the fact that it causes haste and impatience. It's the fact that it causes heart disease, diabetes and early death.

As far as I'm concerned, the best fast food logo is a rotting corpse.

Speeding away from fast food,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

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