AJ stands for Andrew Jackson, our 7th president. His reputation for toughness earned him the nickname "Old Hickory." A hero of the War of 1812, Jackson has appeared on the $20 bill since 1928.

Your money is the target!Do you have a short lunch break at school and run out in search of a quick sandwich?

In your free time do you look for quick snacks between activities?

Fast food marketers know teenagers spend more money on fast food than anything else—more than on games, clothes, movies or sports.

You can bet they're targeting your pocket money. They want to persuade you to buy the foods they sell, whether that's in your best interest or not.

Value pricing

One way restaurants compete to get your dollar is to offer you larger portions that make you feel like you are getting a deal. You've probably noticed how fast food chains offer items in super-sizes.

Food companies call this "value-marketing." It means encouraging a customer to spend a little extra money to purchase a larger portion. In dollars and cents it's true, you get more when you buy the super-size portion.

But you might be surprised to learn the total cost of eating that extra food!

Value marketing means extra profit

Super sizing is one value-marketing technique that businesses use to increase profits.

Super sizing: Here's how it works.Super sizing: Here's How it Works

As cheap as fast food seems, only a small amount of the price you pay actually goes for the food you eat. Let's say you buy a $1.25 bag of french fries from my franchise, O'Besity's.

It costs me about a dollar to produce that bag of fries. The potatoes, oil, and salt used to make those fries costs me 20 cents. The other 80 cents go toward my other costs of getting you those french fries, like packaging, wages, and advertising.

If I add another half-portion of fries to your bag, and raise the price to $1.50, the extra potatoes, oil and salt I put in only costs me another 10 cents.

But my other costs don't go up at all. You still get more, but I make 15 cents in pure profit. That means my profit margin increases from 20% (0.25 ÷ 1.25) to 23.3% (0.35 ÷ 1.50).

Big deal, you say? Well on $1 million in sales, an extra 3.3% profit equals $33,000, thank you.

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Food marketers have a job to do—get customers to spend as much as possible on their products. They use other means besides super-sizing.

A technique called "bundling" gets you to purchase larger sizes and more side orders, even when you're not terribly hungry.

When you see the menu items grouped into meals with names like value meal or combo, that's bundling. Restaurants encourage customers to upgrade their orders by purchasing a bundle containing larger portions and side dishes.

These bundles are more profitable to the company. Fast food value pricing techniques like super-sizing and bundling tempt people into buying and eating too much.

OK, so you feel like you got a good deal. Maybe you did—if eating all those fries would be actually good for you.

You want to join your friends at a fast food place, but you're not very hungry. What do you do?What Do You Do?

You enter a fast food restaurant. You see friends you want to join, but you’re not very hungry. What do you do?

• Pick up fries and a soda and approach their table.
• Join them at their table and, as you’re talking, you nibble some bites from your friends’ meals.
• Stop by the table before you order and ask if anyone would like to share a serving.

The second choice is better than the first, but the last choice is better still.

If you pick up fries and a soda, you're likely to eat more calories than you need, plus spend some of your pocket money on impulse.

If you nibble their food, you might not realize how many calories you’ve eaten, and might go over your food budget as the day goes on.

If you split a meal, you can choose to eat just what you want and be a generous friend too.

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Who chooses what you eat?

Studies show that portions in the U.S. are about twice as big as they were 20 years ago, and that when people are served more food, most of them eat more food.

Americans are getting fatter, and large portion sizes are partly to blame. When those large portions are made up of foods like hamburgers, fries, and soda pop, they deliver too many fats and calories.

The super-size extra-value meal at a leading fast food restaurant gets you a quarter pound burger with cheese, super-size fries, and a super-size soda for a whopping 1,550 calories! That's about three-quarters of the food you need for a whole day. If you overeat by just 150 calories a day, that can turn into 15 pounds of body fat in one year.

It's not the food marketers' job to choose healthy food for you to eat, or to tell you when to stop eating. That's up to you.

The food choices you make affect how you feel for the next few hours and how you live for years to come...

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