A fast food restaurant, sometimes known as a quick service restaurant or QSR, is a specific type of restaurant characterized both by its fast food cuisine and by minimal table service. Food served in fast food restaurants typically caters to a Western-style diet; is cooked in bulk in advance and kept hot to order; and is usually available ready to take away, though seating is provided. Fast food restaurants are usually part of a restaurant chain or franchise operation, which ships standardized foodstuffs to each restaurant from central locations.The first fast food restaurants originated in the United States of America during the 1950s. Today, American-founded fast food chains such as McDonald's and Pizza Hut are multinational corporations with outlets across the globe.Variations on the fast food restaurant concept include fast casual restaurants and catering trucks. Fast casual restaurants have higher sit-in ratios, and customers can sit and have their orders brought to them. Catering trucks often park just outside worksites and are popular with factory workers.

Fast food restaurants could be banned from opening near schools as part of a more interventionist approach by the Government to tackling childhood obesity.

The CEO of McDonald’s in the UK, Steve Easterbrook, does admit that fast food restaurants play a role in childhood obesity; however, he says that the main reason is due to video games.

"We found there was actually a fairly strong relationship, a strong correlation between the two, that those cities that had higher obesity and overweight rates tended to have a higher density of at least the larger fast-food restaurant chains, so there were more restaurants per person in those cities," Cash said.

"We have a serious problem in my district with fast-food restaurants and the increasing level of obesity and diabetes," Councilwoman Jan Perry told the panel.

Councilwoman Jan Perry pushed for the ban in her district, saying: "We have a serious problem in my district with fast-food restaurants and the increasing level of obesity and diabetes."