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Hi.
I used to work in the fast food industry, so I know a lot about what goes in
the food.  It is food aimed at the lowest common denominator of taste and
nutrition, but there are special food technology methods that make it seem
otherwise.  It is highly engineered food--not made like the food in your
kitchen, or even like much of the food made in a "slow food" restaurant.  It
often contains ingredients that you couldn't get on your own, even if you
tried to bribe somebody.  You can't look at a fast food item and know
anything from appearance about what's in it.  These techniques and
ingredients don't necessarily lead to immediate or acute illness in
everybody, but they aren't great for your health either.  They tend to
aggravate chronic illnesses.  For those reasons, I would not recommend that
*anyone* eat fast food on a regular basis (more often than once a week).  And
I people with chronic illnesses may need to evaluate whether or not they
*ever* want to eat it.  Of course, those recommendations set me at odds with
a great deal of what has become accepted by the general public as
conventional wisdom.
 
So be it.  I've learned that there are more important things in life besides
fitting in.
 
It's hard to live with a disease like celiac.  It's also hard to have one's
celiac disease under control, while having to deal with atherosclerosis,
diabetes, saddlebag thighs/pot bellies, food allergies, gorilla-sized
cravings, and other problems that some fast foods tend to aggravate.  The
goal would be to get and remain healthy, not trade off one highly miserable
syndrome for another (allegedly) less miserable one.   Remember--nobody ate
fast foods 30-40 years ago.  Few people ate them even twenty years ago.
 Single parents worked, sometimes at two jobs, and managed to feed their kids
without giving them fast foods.  Many busy people today raise their children
without ever feeding them fast foods.  Lots of teenagers live happily without
eating fast foods--I know one who even started a trend in his crowd, of
avoiding it.  One cannot live without food.  But one can live, and live well,
without fast foods.
 
What Ted said (and Don appended) about what makes fast food successful I
agree with.  Fast food companies are expert marketers, and know exactly how
to push your buttons to make you drive across town for, well...****.  (The
fast food company I worked for preferred getting its marketing people
directly from RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris Companies, the kingpins of the
tobacco industry.  RJR and PM have a reputation for training--ethics
aside--some of the best marketing professionals in the country.)
 
One of the ways that fast food companies achieve that consistency while
simulaneously inducing excitement is by using jazzed up but cheap
ingredients.  These ingredients are available abundantly, which is why
they're cheap.  Those abundant ingredients--like wheat and milk--are among
the most common food allergens, and are the chief causes of our misery.
 
The ingredients have to be able to withstand long-term storage in a multitude
of warehouses, and endure trans-continental shipping before being mixed and
cooked in fast food restaurants.  That means lots of preservatives, lots of
msg and lots of sodium added, to trick the taste buds into thinking they're
getting an exciting "hit."  For certain of the largest fast food
corporations, it also means adding proprietary flavorings (flavorings
developed exclusively for that company, and hence, flavorings that you have
no access to--now you know why no matter how hard you try, you'll never
duplicate the flavor of a Big Mac or a Pan Pizza in your home kitchen...:-).
  There are even proprietary strains of basic foodstuffs, and others are
under development, like the potatoes used in one company's french fries.
 Foods are selected, and trade recipes are based on, storage, shipping and
fast cooking.  Nutritional considerations are secondary.  the food is
 tweeked at the end with flavorings to give it the right taste, and
preservatives.  (Not all fast food companies do this, by the way.  Wendy's
does it the least of the others--which may account for the multitude of GF
items on their menu.)  These things are treated like trade secrets.  The
companies may tell you some things over the phone, but not be willing or able
to tell you all you need to know about what's in the product, or from what a
specific ingredient (like flavoring) is derived, because that could give
their competitors access to their market advantages.  Also, because of their
need to get the cheapest ingredients, they want the flexibility to be able to
put whatever bland starch and protein they want as filler in the product, at
any time, based on market prices of raw foodstuffs or processed ingredients.
 Today's batch of chips may be GF.  Next week's might be tweeked with
gluten-containing ingredients because the potato crop was off color or had
too much moisture to meet the taste or cooking time specs.  You don't know.
 They may not know.  In an emergency they could track it down (like they did
in the Jack-in-the-Box/e.coli episode), but your standing in line or calling
on the phone and asking is not an emergency.  Or at least, not to them...
 
Also, many fast food restaurants are owned and controlled by franchisees, and
not by the company whose name is on the marquee.  While the fast food
companies struggle to ensure that everyone falls into line on food prep and
cooking techniques, occasionally a franchisee goes on to do some of his/her
own thing.  Sometimes this happens because of maverick tendencies or poorly
trained workers, but sometimes it happens because of local conditions.
 Certain oils might be scarce in some regions, or expensive, or somebody just
forgot to order enough.  That day's oil might therefore wind up being reused
or one batch used to cook a variety of things, even though the rules say
doing that's a no-no.
 
Because of all the "proprietariness" of it all, and that the products are
sometimes composed of some of the most low nutrition ingredients, some (not
all) fast food companies are resistant to releasing for the general public
the full truth about what the ingredients are in their products.  Some years
ago, several watchdog groups, like the Center for Science in the Public
Interest, worked with members of Congress to write a bill that would have
required restaurants to publish the ingredients in all foods in their menus.
 
The restaurant lobby defeated it (for a number of reasons), in particular by
the "voluntary" compromise tactic.  Back then, one of the larger ones started
requiring each restaurant to have a stack of brochures available to give to
any customer who asked about ingredients.  The stack of brochures then got
whittled down to one card in each restaurant which contained the ingredients
in their foods.  Now you have to call headquarters and ask.   That's kind of
hard to do if it's midnight, your flight to an unfamiliar town has landed
three hours late, you're tired, you're hungry, the only other open restaurant
is on the other side of town, and you saw an ad for their product on
television while you were unpacking your luggage.  It's hard to do while
you're tired and are in the store with three kids crying and pulling at your
arms begging you for a Happy-Go-Lucky Meal.
 
Some years ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article on its front
page that showed the extent of fast food addiction in one community, a
community that could least afford it.  Some of the people profiled in this
community were spending as much as $40 to $50 per day (that's for one person)
from their chosen fast food restaurant; when they ran out of money, they
simply stole the food.  (The movie, "Paris is Burning," showed one way that
this is done...)  Others would travel long distances--out of the city and
across two or three suburbs, by bus--to get their food fix.  This type of
food addiction manifested itself because these were poor people with incomes
of less than $500 per month.  If you're living in middle class America, it's
easy to miss fast food addiction, because indulging in it is accepted
behavior, and withdrawal symptoms can be attributed to ordinary childhood
tantrums (or to PMS or to ETS...).
 
Life is stressful.  No one chooses celiac, or any other disease.  But when
you get it, you have to learn to deal with it, and learn to deal with all the
temptations that advertising and targeted marketing inflict on your psyche.
 And you may also have to deal with problems of addiction/dependence on
wheat,  and addiction/dependence on proprietary flavorings in wheat-based
products.  And it can anger you, especially if you find it hard to move back
to a slower pace, or live a life that is different from the life of the
crowd.
 
Since I've gone gluten free, I used to think that I decreased the number of
different foods I eat.  But lately, I've realized that I've *increased* the
number of different foods I eat, not decreased them.  Many others have too.
  How many of us eat foods made with tapioca flour?  Bean flour?  I'd never
heard of those foods until going GF.  I didn't know that you could have pasta
made of rice and corn as well as wheat.  And how many others have
experimented with non-wheat-based cuisines from around the world?
 
Lifestyle changes--not just dietary changes--are often called for to restore
and maintain your health.  Change is often painful, and hence resisted, but
the outcomes are rewarding in the end.
 
Sue  (North Carolina, USA)