Fast food meal = 1 cigarette

• McDonald's Big Mac Meal $12.69 reduces your life by 10 min

• Each $1 spent on fast food costs 49 sec of life

• Smoking one cigarette reduces life by 11 min

• Spending $1 on 2.5 cigarettes reduces your life by 20 min

To get these numbers on fast food, let’s do a Fermi analysis: if Americans spend an average of $12 per day on food, and we replace one dollar of that with fast food (every day), that is a 8% increase in the proportion of fast food per day. Assuming the community-based finding that a 10% total increase in fast food has a corresponding 15-20 day reduction in lifespan [1], then our $1 (or 8%) daily increase in spending on fast food corresponds to a 12-16 day reduction in total lifespan. Given the above, now let’s see how much life you lose for each dollar spent on fast food, assuming an average lifespan of 77.5 years:

-> Total money spent: $1 / day * 365 day / year * 77.5 years / lifetime = $28287.5 spent total

-> Total life lost: 16 days * 24 hr / day * 60 min / hour * 60 sec / min = 1382400 sec lost total

-> Rate of life lost per dollar: [Total life lost] / [Total money spent] = 48.9 sec / dollar

So we have about 49 sec of life lost from a single dollar spent on fast food.

Note: Phillip Morris’ cost of life multiplier was reduced from 28 minutes to 20 to approximate that  some of its revenues are related to smoking adjacent. 

[1]

[2] Smoking one cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes