ARE FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS SAFE???

I have heard allot about this lately. I think that they should be checked more often so that this don't keep happening. I don't eat at Taco Bell, but I ate at Burger king one time and got really sick and went to the hospital and was told that I had food poisoning.

You can never know, you can't see the bacteria. You can't tell that some dufus didn't wash his or her hands after going to the bathroom or touching some raw meat. Holy cow, it is bad, first burgers, then spinach, now taco bell.

with proper care they are safe but we must be ever vigilant

Better drop the chalupa and head for the border! I'm in NJ so this is worrying. I don't eat at TB very often, but I figure this kind of thing can easily happen in any food establishment. NJ wants TB to throw out all their food; TB just wants to toss out the green onions. Umm, bacteria spreads real easily, I don't think just tossing the onions is gonna do the trick.

I hate to break it to you but...your own kitchen is most likely much more dangerous to your health than any outside eatery. Cut up a chicken, you have potential somenella all over the place. Wipe down your counters and then think back what else has that cloth touched? What has it spread over the counter you were cleaning? Do you cut your meats and vegetables on the same cutting board? Is it a wooden one? If you value your knives it is. Wood is porous, meaning everything can soak in. It has a grain, which holds microscopic bits of foods and dust. Not to mention the germs that float in the air. Possibly thrown up their by someone tossing an item or shaking something. How often do you wash your hands while preparing a meal? Between every food item you touch or only when you find grease or dirt on them? Do you wash all your vegetables before cooking? Lettuce? Cabbage? Vegetables today most often come from commercial farms. Pesticides are used, herbacides and yes various fertilizers some of which are hazardous to human health. Are you aware that e-coli is already present in your body? That is is neccesary for digestion? Suggestions for when eating out. Ask if the vegetables have been throughly washed. If the answer is "I don't know" ask that your order be washed. Ask for meat prepared well done. Heat kills most things that can harm you. If you are eating buffet style ask what the temperatures are on the hot and cold table. Foods need to be maintained at the correct temperature to avoid spoilage. We can chose to live life as though we are always at risk, or we can chose to simply live and take our chances. Or we can take sensible precautions without being obsessive about it. The choice is yours.

Putting a fast-food restaurant in a children's hospital gets patients' families to eat more fast food and to think it's relatively healthy, according to a new study that found at least 59 of the nation's 250 children's hospitals now have fast-food branches. That's troubling, particularly given rising obesity rates, said the study's lead author, Dr. Hannah Sahud, a pediatrician at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. 'We're giving two different messages by being in the health care profession and promoting health and saying obesity is a huge medical problem . . . and then implicitly encouraging it,'' said Sahud, who conducted the research while at Children's Memorial Hospital. Parents of kids who got outpatient treatment at Children's Memorial were much more likely to buy McDonald's on the day their kids were treated than parents of kids treated at other Chicago area hospitals, the study found. The study appears in December's issue of the medical journal Pediatrics.

It is tough to decide who was at fault here. I do commend them for their fast action in closing up & dumping everything & cleaning up. Isn't it odd that this happened almost right after the E. Coli problems started in raw spinach & raw lettuce? I can only speculate here, but there might just be some connection.

Fast food restaurants are only dangerious if you eat in them too often. I enjoy a Big Mac now and then, but I don't eat at McDonalds once a day or more than once a day, only on occasion when I'm passing through and need a quick meal.

It is only when a chain of events comes to light and further investigation needs to be carried out do we stop when we find the culprit. So we just keep doing what we do till something happens to someone.

i don't really like to eat at fast food places, but if you went into any restaurant kitchen, you'd probly never eat out again. i waitressed at a few places when i was younger, and oh the stories i coud tell. it doesn't matter how nice it is on the outside, the kitchen is never seen by its clients. ugh..

i don't really like to eat at fast food places, but if you went into any restaurant kitchen, you'd probly never eat out again. i waitressed at a few places when i was younger, and oh the stories i coud tell. it doesn't matter how nice it is on the outside, the kitchen is never seen by its clients. ugh..

Going restaurant once in a month for a change is fine,but over eating at restaurants is creating lot of problems like-gastroentritis,vommiting,diarrhoea,amboesis,gastritis,pepticulcer,hepatitis and so many infections.These are acute problems only.But the long term effects of eating junk food ehhances the problems like obesity,diabetes,hypertension,heart disease,mental irritation,malingnancy,colonic disorders and many others.

Sure I do. Taco Bell has been pretty honest with us on their little problems. The e coli think is sort of a non-issue for me. Most of the time things are fine. When the green onions went funky, they quit serving them up here in Alaska. All the spinach that came from out of state was pulled from the shelves and replaced with Alaska grown. Most things are grown in green houses here and much of it organically. Actually its riskier to eat organic if you are worried about bacteria because they use liquid fertilizers (liquified cow manure for instance) that even makes the pathogens air borne. You have to take the good with the bad. You have to be mindful of where your food comes from. You have to know how to cook it properly. I do not eat medium rare hamburger for instance but I will eat a medium rare steak..(wouldn't have it any other way!) But the reason I will not eat a medium rare hamburger is that the hamburger is "parts" of a cow versus a "cut" of a cow. There is a big difference when it comes to bacterial growth. Hamburger has all sorts of wonderful things in it sometimes. (Similar to hotdogs only not quite as many parts). However, I worry about carbohydrate content and protein content more than I worry about diseases with anything that I eat or my family eats since I have a diabetic son. I understand that there have been lots of stuff on the news about food recalls etc. The peanut butter one freaked me out a little. (I don't buy any of the brands on the list). The dog food one scared me silly. I started reading every dogfood label. Our dog works hard for us and he deserves to be fed a healthy meal. My thing is if this outbreak stuff is going to stop first Illegal immigration has to. Not that they are the cause of it all, but the fact is the fields that were contaminated with E Coli were harvested by illegal immigrants for the most part, as were the onions. The farm owners don't pay them enough to take time out for bathroom breaks so guess where they go????? They are not provided with proper sanitation so what can we expect them to do? People need to remember where their food comes from and remember that the reasons for some of these outbreaks are completely preventable if some simply hygiene practices are put into play. Those poor people out there baking in the sun to pick our Spinach hardly make anything for themselves. They get to take "seconds" that are more contaminated than the ones that actually go to the stores, then eat those and go back to work where there are no proper sanitation services in the fields and so they go on the ground. Washing your vegetables goes a long way toward removing any bacteria! You are responsible for what you put into you. If you choose not to wash vegetables even if they look like there is no dirt on them, then you are putting yourself at risk for things like E Coli. Things like meat are highly regulated. The outbreaks in meat have mostly been from the Mad Cow Disease. I grew up on a farm. We had to take extraordinary precautions if any animal got sick. We ate a lot of the meat and things that came from our farm. I drank unpasteurized milk from the bulk tank, 10 minutes after the cows had been milked. I never got sick. The fact is, management of individual franchises are responsible for what happened. It's not the fault of the Taco Bell owner company that opens the franchises. I feel perfectly safe eating at any of our Taco Bells because I constantly see people working there wiping tables, sanitizing this or that. And, here anyway, the kitchen is open for all to see. You can see what they are putting on your food, and there are sinks for handwashing etc, as well as all food preparers wearing gloves and hairnets most of the time. Because the managers here were responsible for their own stores and took measures, there were no reports of people getting sick in Alaska from eating Taco Bell food while those outbreaks were going on. Thanks be that no one got ill. Even with the most stringent precautions someone can get sick and it can spread to others. So the fact is, Taco Bell is probably doing everything they can, and if you don't think its enough then I am sure you would be willing to figure out how they can keep their food costs down and make the place completely germ free? I know I can't.

Thanks for all the research you put into this and for informing people of the various things you can catch from eating at fast food restaurants. I did hear about the NJ incident and people getting ecoli but I didn't know it was so widespread and that so many people were getting sick from these restaurants we trust.

lol I guess he got his, and his wife got everything else LOL

Not at all,specially in India

To be honest there is nothing like freshly cooked homemade cooking and the fact that we don't know how long a lot of the burgers and chicken pieces are sitting in there before they are sold is the most off putting element for me. I do get the odd bit of junk, very rarely, but usually go to some family owned junk franchises that we know the people and the meat is fairly good. Otherwise I like to cook myself. I don't know how people prepare the foods and if there are rats and cockroaches running around rampant in these places do I lol?

When my husband and I travel, we almost always choose fast food places on the road because you don't know about the cleanliness of restaurants in unfamiliar areas, and fast food is generally nuked pretty well and often too hot for the workers to handle after it is cooked. However, one of the other of us often notices that many of the younger workers don't even pretend to wash their hands after using the bathroom, and that really grosses us out. Come to think of it, Taco Bell is the only eatery where we mentioned this to a manager, and he just shrugged and didn't even give us an answer. He couldn't pretend he didn't know better, because this was in California, where the law requires a notice to be posted right over the bathroom sink informing workers that they must wash. At fancier restaurants, the workers use different restrooms than the customers, so one would never know, but it is at the allegedly better restaurants that we see waiters touching the rims of glasses or scooping ice cubes out of a bin with their bare hands, even after handling money, which is horribly dirty. The most amazing thing is that I've never seen a customer send the drinks back. I sure would!

Isn't it what David Letterman would always talk about on his shows? I think it is. I've never seen this Taco Bell in my life, I believe it doesn't exist in my country. If it does, it's nowhere close to me. Anyway, I think fast food is as dangerous as any othertype of food we get out of our houses. If we don't know how it's made and stocked, we don't know for sure what we're eating. I still prefer to take the risk, as I love fast food! :)