“Processed food is gross, Mom,” said my 7th grade daughter the other day. She was prompted to make this statement by a book for kids called Chew on This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson. (Yes, she checked this book out of the library completely on her own without any maternal pressure!) Schlosser, who also wrote the book Fast Food Nation for adults, does a good job in making the scary side of fast food and processed food accessible to kids. This is a huge service given the current epidemic of childhood obesity and the proven role of excess fast food consumption in our kids’ expanding waistlines.

When I asked my daughter which of the book’s points particularly stood out to her, she gave me the following list (in italics; the explanations are my own):

• McDonald’s puts beef flavor in its French fries. McDonald’s used to fry the fries in beef fat, but when that practice was criticized because of all the artery-clogging saturated fat it added, they simply started adding beef flavor to the potatoes and fryer oil instead (it’s listed as “natural flavor” on the ingredients). My mostly vegetarian daughter thought this was “disgusting” and vowed to never eat McDonald’s fries again unless she was “starving.”

• The red color in many candies, fruit yogurts, and frozen fruit pops comes from a dye made from the dead bodies of South American bugs. “Carmine” (or carminic acid) is made from the bodies of little cactus-eating bugs from Peru and the Canary Islands. It takes 70,000 bugs to make a pound of carmine dye, which is used in many processed foods to provide a red, pink, or purple color. “Yuck!”

• Food companies do stuff on purpose that they know is bad for people. Whether it is hijacking school lunch menus to encourage fast food consumption, using essentially slave labor in Asia to make millions of fast food toys (did you know that McDonald’s is now the single largest toy manufacturer in the world?), or luring children to consume not-so-healthy food through bright colors, added flavorings, or other means, it’s hard to look at what food companies are doing and really believe they aren’t aware of the effects.

So, if you are looking for ways to get your teens to kick the fast-food habit (or are looking for some motivation yourself!), I suggest picking up a copy of Eric Schlosser’s book. You may just find that there are a lot of reasons why “processed food is gross.”