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“EATING JUNK FOOD”
Junk food is a pejorative term for food containing
high levels of calories from sugar or fat with
little protein, vitamins or minerals. Use of the term implies that a particular food has
little "nutritional value" and
contains excessive fat, sugar, salt, and calories. Junk food can also refer to high protein food
containing large amounts of meat prepared with, for example, too much
unhealthy saturated fat many
hamburger outlets, fried chicken outlets and the like supply food considered
junk food.
Despite being labeled as "junk," such foods
usually do not pose any immediate health concerns and are generally safe when
integrated into a well balanced diet. However, concerns about the negative
health effects resulting from the consumption of a "junk food"-heavy
diet have resulted in public health awareness campaigns, and restrictions on advertising and sale in several countries.
What 5 Days of Junk Food Can Do to Your Metabolism
By Dr.
Mercola
If you
overdo it on pizza, macaroni and cheese, chips, and ice cream, you might
worry about what it's going to do to your thighs or mid-section. But binging on
junk food isn't only a matter of weight gain. It might have
far more serious repercussions than that.
People who
ate a diet focused on macaroni and cheese, processed lunchmeat, sausage
biscuits, mayonnaise, and microwavable meals with unhealthy fats, for example,
showed serious negative changes to their metabolism after just five days.
After eating the junk-food diet, the
study participants (12 healthy college-aged men) muscles' lost the
ability to oxidize glucose after a meal, which could lead to insulin resistance
down the road.1
What Happens to Your Metabolism
After Five Days of Junk Food
Even though
their caloric intake remained unchanged, when men ate a junk-food diet their
muscles' ability to oxidize glucose was disrupted in just five days' time. This
is a significant change, because muscle plays an important role in clearing
glucose from your body after a meal.
Under normal circumstances, your
muscles will either break down the glucose or store it for later use. Your
muscles make up about 30 percent of your body weight, so if you lose this key
player in glucose metabolism it could pave the way for diabetes and
other health problems.2 As reported by TIME:3
"'The normal response to a meal
was essentially either blunted or just not there after five days of
high-fat feeding,' [Matthew] Hulver, [PhD, department head of Human
Nutrition, Food, and Exercise at Virginia Tech Hulver] says.
Before going on a work-week's worth
of a fatty diet, when the men ate a normal meal they saw big increases in
oxidative targets four hours after eating.
That response was obliterated after
the five-day fat infusion. And under normal eating conditions, the biopsied
muscle used glucose as an energysource by oxidizing glucose. 'That was
essentially wiped out after,' he says. 'We were surprised how robust the effects
were just with five days.'"
Just One Bad Meal Can Mess with Your
Health
Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super
Size Me was one of the first to vividly demonstrate the consequences
of trying to sustain yourself on a diet of fast food. After just four weeks, Spurlock's
health had deteriorated to the point that his physician warned him he was
putting his life in serious jeopardy if he continued the experiment.
But as the featured study showed, it
doesn't take a virtual month to experience the health effects of a poor diet.
In fact, the changes happen after just one meal, according
to research published in the Journal of the American College
ofCardiology.4
When you eat
a meal high in unhealthy fats and sugar, the sugar causes a large spike in your
blood-sugar levels called "post-prandial hyperglycemia." In the long
term this can lead to an increased risk of heart attack, but there are
short-term effects as well, such as:
·
Your tissue
becomes inflamed (as occurs when it is infected)
·
Your blood
vessels constrict
·
Damaging
free radicals are generated
·
Your blood
pressure may rise higher than normal
·
A surge and
drop in insulin may leave you feeling hungry soon after your meal
The good news is that eating a
healthy meal helps your body return to its normal, optimal state, even after
just one. Study author James O'Keefe of the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas
City, Missouri told TIME:5
"Your health and vigor, at a
very basic level, are as good as your last meal."
See Inside Your Stomach After a Meal
of Instant Meals…
Dr. Braden Kuo of Massachusetts
General Hospital used a pill-sized camera to see what happens inside your
stomach and digestive tract after you eat ramen noodles, one common type
of instant noodles. The results were astonishing…
In the video
above, you can see ramen noodles inside a stomach. Even after two hours, they
are remarkably intact, much more so than the homemade ramen noodles, which were
used as a comparison. This is concerning for a number of reasons.
For
starters, it could be putting a strain on your digestive system, which is
forced to work for hours to break down this highly processed food (ironically, most
processed food is so devoid of fiber that it gets broken down very quickly,
interfering with your blood sugar levels and insulin release).
When food
remains in your digestive tract for such a long time, it will also impact
nutrient absorption, but, in the case of processed ramen noodles, there isn't
much nutrition to be had. Instead, there is a long list of additives, including
the toxic preservative tertiary-butyl hydroquinone (TBHQ).
This
additive will likely remain in your stomach along with the seemingly invincible
noodles, and no one knows what this extended exposure time may do to your
health. Common sense suggests it's not going to be good…
Eating Processed Foods Linked to
Chronic Disease
Research published in the Journal
of Nutrition found that women who consumed more instant noodles had a
significantly greater risk of metabolic syndrome than those who ate less,
regardless of their overall diet or exercise habits.6
Past
research also analyzed overall nutrient intake between instant-noodle consumers
and non-consumers, and found, as you might suspect, that eating instant noodles
contributes little value to a healthy diet.
The instant-noodle consumers had a
significantly lower intake of important nutrients like protein, calcium,
phosphorus, iron, potassium, vitamin A, niacin, and vitamin C compared with non-consumers.7 Those who ate instant
noodles also had an excessive intake of energy, unhealthy fats, and sodium
(just one package may contain 2,700 milligrams of sodium).8
Not to
mention, refined carbohydrates like breakfast cereals, bagels, waffles,
pretzels, and most other processed foods quickly break down to sugar in your
body. This increases your insulin and leptin levels, and contributes to insulin
resistance, which is the primary underlying factor of nearly every chronic
disease and condition known to man, including weight gain.
Not only that, but remember… when
you eat junk food you are not just feeding yourself… you’re feeding your microbiome, too, and in so doing altering its construction for
better or worse. Your body’s diverse army of microbes is responsible for many
crucial biological processes, from immunity to memory to mental health, so
feeding it wisely, with fresh unprocessed and naturally fermented foods, is
crucial to your overall health and well-being.
Is Junk Food as Dangerous as
Cigarettes?
In the US, about one-quarter to
one-third of adults fall into the obese category. A staggering two-thirds of
Americans are overweight, and poor diet is in large part to blame. Last year,
UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, said that
"obesity is a bigger global health threat than tobacco use," and that
this fact isn't taken as seriously as it should be. His statements were
delivered at the opening of the 2014 World Health Organization's annual summit.
De Schutter ultimately wants nations to join forces to place stricter
regulations on unhealthy foods:9
"Just as the world came
together to regulate the risks of tobacco, a bold framework convention on
adequate diets must now be agreed," he said. 'The Special
Rapporteur has previously agitated for greater governmental action on junk
foods, including taxing unhealthy products, regulating fats and sugars,
cracking down on advertising for junk food, and rethinking agricultural
subsidies that make unhealthy food cheaper,' Time Magazine noted. 'Governments
have been focusing on increasing calorie availability,' he said, 'but they have
often been indifferent to what kind of calories are offered, at what price, to
whom they are made available, and how they are marketed.'"
The idea that being overweight can
be more harmful than smoking is likely to make many balk, considering how
"normal" it has become to carry around extra pounds, but in terms of
overall health effects and subsequent health care costs, it's likely true. For
example, data collected from over 60,000 Canadians show that obesity leads to
more doctor visits than smoking.10
Further, according to a report by
The McKinsey Global Institute, the global cost of obesity is now $2 trillion
annually, which is nearly as much as the global cost of smoking ($2.1 trillion)
and armed violence (including war and terrorism, which also has a global cost
of $2.1 trillion).11 For comparison,
alcoholism costs are $1.4 trillion annually, road accidents cost $700 billion,
and unsafe sex costs $300 billion. What's more, if current trends continue, the
McKinsey report estimates that nearly half of the world's adult population will
be overweight or obese by 2030.
Junk Food Is Incredibly Addictive
Your body is
designed to naturally regulate how much you eat and the energy you burn. But
food manufacturers have figured out how to over-ride these intrinsic
regulators, designing processed foods that are engineered to be
"hyper-rewarding." According to the "food reward hypothesis of
obesity," processed foods stimulate such a strong reward response in our
brains that it becomes very easy to overeat. One of the guiding principles for
the processed food industry is known as "sensory-specific satiety."
Investigative reporter Michael Moss
describes this as "the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm
your brain."12 The greatest
successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their "craveability" to
complex formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming
them, thereby overriding your brain's inclination to say "enough." In
all, potato chips are among the most addictive junk foods on the market,
containing all three "bliss-inducing" ingredients: sugar (from the
potato), salt, and fat. Further, as reported by TIME:13
"Studies suggest that fatty,
sugary foods promote excretion of the stress hormone cortisol, which seems to
further stimulate appetite for calorie-dense foods. And the big post-meal
spikes in blood sugar are more likely in people who don't exercise or those who
carry weight around their abdomen. All of it makes it tough for people to stop
eating junk food once they're in the habit. 'The more you eat it the more you
crave it. It becomes a vicious cycle,' says O'Keefe."
And while food companies abhor the
word "addiction" in reference to their products, scientists have
discovered that sugar, in particular, is just that. In fact, sugar is more addictive
than cocaine. Research published in 2007 showed that 94 percent of rats that
were allowed to choose mutually-exclusively between sugar water and cocaine,
majority chose sugar.14 Even rats that were
addicted to cocaine quickly switched their preference to sugar, once it was
offered as a choice. The rats were also more willing to work for sugar than for
cocaine.
The
researchers speculate that the sweet receptors (two protein receptors located
on the tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in
sugar, have not adapted to modern times' high-sugar consumption. Therefore, the
abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets generates
excessive reward signals in your brain, which have the potential to override
normal self-control mechanisms and thus lead to addiction.
Does Junk Food Have a Hold on You?
How to Break Free
Replacing processed foods with
homemade meals made from scratch using whole ingredients is an ideal and
important way to ensure optimal nutrition. This will automatically cut out the
vast majority of refined sugars, processed fructose, preservatives, dyes, other nasty chemicals, and many
addictive ingredients from your diet. This will allow your body to depend less
on sugar and more on fat as its primary fuel—provided you eat enough healthy
fat, that is.
As a result, you will no longer
crave sugar to keep you going. The key elements for a healthy diet that can
help kick your junk food cravings to the curb are the following. For a
comprehensive guide, please see my free optimized nutrition plan:
·
Avoiding
refined sugar, processed fructose, grains, and processed foods
·
Eating a
healthy diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replacing the carbs you
eliminate with:
o As much high-quality healthy fat as
you want (saturated and monounsaturated). Many would benefit from getting as much
as 50-85 percent of their daily calories from healthy fats. While this may
sound like a lot, consider that, in terms of volume, the
largest portion of your plate would be vegetables, since they
contain so few calories.
Fat, on the
other hand, tends to be very high in calories. For example, just one tablespoon
of coconut oil is about 130 calories—all of it from healthy fat. Good sources
include:
|
|
|
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk
|
|
Organic raw nuts, especially macadamia nuts, which
are low in protein and omega-6 fat
|
Organic pastured egg yolks and pastured meats
|
|
o
Large
amounts of high-quality organic, locally grown vegetables, fermented
vegetables, and ideally sprouts grown at your home
o
Low-to-moderate
amount of high-quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals, or
eggs)
Planning Your Meals Is Key
Ditching processed foods requires
that you plan your meals in advance, but if you take it step-by-step as
described in mynutrition plan, it's quite possible, and manageable, to painlessly
remove processed foods from your diet. You can try scouting out your local
farmer's markets for in-season produce that is priced to sell, and planning
your meals accordingly, but you can also use this same premise with supermarket
sales. You can generally plan a week of meals at a time, making sure you have
all ingredients necessary on hand, and then do any prep work you can ahead of time
so that dinner is easy to prepare if you're short on time (and you can use
leftovers for lunches the next day).
Finally, if you're an emotional
eater, I highly recommend using the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT is
simple and effective, and can rapidly help you eliminate your food cravings
naturally.
What Happens to Your Brain When You Eat Junk Food (And
Why We Crave It)
Most of us
know that junk food is unhealthy. We know that poor nutrition is
related to heart problems, high blood pressure, and a host of other health
ailments. You might even know that studies show that eating junk food has been
linked to increases in depression.
But if it’s so bad for us, why do we keep doing it?
There is an
answer. And the science behind it will surprise you.
Why We Crave
Junk Food
Steven
Witherly is a food scientist who has spent the last 20 years studying what
makes certain foods more addictive (and tasty) than others. Much of
the science that follows is from his excellent report, Why Humans Like
Junk Food.
According to Witherly, when you eat tasty food, there
are two factors that make the experience pleasurable.
First, there is the sensation of eating the food. This
includes what it tastes like (salty, sweet, umami, etc.), what it smells like,
and how it feels in your mouth. This last quality — known as “orosensation” —
can be particularly important. Food companies will spend millions of dollars
to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip.
Their scientists will test for the perfect amount of fizzle in a soda. These
factors all combine to create the sensation that your brain associates with a
particular food or drink.
The second factor is the actual
macronutrient makeup of the food — the blend of proteins, fats, and
carbohydrates that it contains. In the case of junk food, food manufacturers
are looking for a perfect combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your
brain and gets you coming back for more.
Here’s how they do it…
How Science
Creates Cravings
There are a range of factors that scientists and food
manufacturers use to make food more addictive.
Dynamic
contrast. Dynamic contrast refers to a combination of different sensations in
the same food. In the words of Witherly, foods with dynamic contrast have “an
edible shell that goes crunch followed by something soft or creamy and full of
taste-active compounds. This rule applies to a variety of our favorite food structures
— the caramelized top of a creme brulee, a slice of pizza, or an Oreo
cookie — the brain finds crunching through something like this very novel and
thrilling.”
Salivary
response. Salivation is part of the experience of eating food and the more that
a food causes you to salivate, the more it will swim throughout your
mouth and cover your taste buds. For example, emulsified foods like
butter, chocolate, salad dressing, ice cream, and mayonnaise promote a
salivary response that helps to lather your taste buds with goodness. This is
one reason why many people enjoy foods that have sauces or glazes on them. The
result is that foods that promote salivation do a happy little tap dance on
your brain and taste better than ones that don’t.
Rapid food
meltdown and vanishing caloric density. Foods that rapidly vanish or
“melt in your mouth” signal to your brain that you’re not eating as much as you
actually are. In other words, these foods literally tell your brain that you’re
not full, even though you’re eating a lot of calories.
The result: you tend to overeat.
In his
best-selling book, Salt Sugar Fat, author Michael Moss describes a
conversation with Witherly that explains vanishing caloric density perfectly…
I brought him two shopping bags filled
with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,”
Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet,
in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos
that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s
uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,”
Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s
no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
Sensory
specific response. Your brain likes variety. When it comes to food,
if you experience the same taste over and over again, then you start to get
less pleasure from it. In other words, the sensitivity of that specific sensor
will decrease over time. This can happen in just minutes.
Junk foods, however, are designed to avoid this
sensory specific response. They provide enough taste to be interesting (your
brain doesn’t get tired of eating them), but it’s not so stimulating that your
sensory response is dulled. This is why you can swallow an entire bag of potato
chips and still be ready to eat another. To your brain, the crunch and
sensation of eating Doritos is novel and interesting every time.
Calorie
density. Junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting
nutrition, but to not fill you up. Receptors in your mouth
and stomach tell your brain about the mixture of proteins, fats,
carbohydrates in a particular food, and how filling that food is for your body.
Junk food provides just enough calories that your brain says, “Yes, this will
give you some energy” but not so many calories that you think “That’s
enough, I’m full.” The result is that you crave the food to begin with, but it
takes quite some time to feel full from it.
Memories of
past eating experiences. This is where the psychobiology of junk food
really works against you. When you eat something tasty (say, a bag of potato
chips), your brain registers that feeling. The next time you see that food,
smell that food, or even read about that food, your brain starts to trigger the
memories and responses that came when you ate it. These memories can actually
cause physical responses like salivation and create the “mouth-watering”
craving that you get when thinking about your favorite foods.
All of this brings us to the most important question
of all.
Food companies are spending millions of dollars to
design foods with addictive sensations. What can you and I do about it? Is
there any way to counteract the money, the science, and the advertising behind
the junk food industry?
How to Kick
the Junk Food Habit and Eat Healthy
The good news is that the research shows that the less
junk food you eat, the less you crave it. My own experiences have mirrored
this. As I’ve slowly begun to eat healthier, I’ve noticed myself wanting pizza
and candy and ice cream less and less. Some people refer to this transition
period as “gene reprogramming.”
Whatever you want to call it, the lesson is the same:
if you can find ways to gradually eat healthier, you’ll start to experience the
cravings of junk food less and less. I’ve never claimed to have all the answers
(or any, really), but here are three strategies that might help.
1. Use the
“outer ring” strategy and the “5 ingredient rule” to buy healthier food.
The best course of action is to avoid buying processed
and packaged foods. If you don’t own it, you can’t eat it. Furthermore, if you
don’t think about it, you can’t be lured by it.
We’ve talked about the power of junk food to pull you
in and how memories of tasty food in the past can cause you to crave more of it
in the future. Obviously, you can’t prevent yourself from ever thinking about
junk food, but there are ways to reduce your cravings.
First, you
can use my “outer ring” strategy to
avoid processed and packaged foods at the grocery store. If you limit yourself
to purchasing foods that are on the outer ring of the store, then you will
generally buy whole foods (fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, etc.). Not everything
on the outer ring is healthy, but you will avoid a lot of unhealthy foods.
You can also follow the “5 ingredient rule” when
buying foods at the store. If something has more than 5 ingredients in it,
don’t buy it. Odds are, it has been designed to fool you into eating more of
it. Avoid those products and stick with the more natural options.
2. Eat a
variety of foods.
As we covered earlier, the brain craves novelty.
While you may not be able to replicate the
crunchy/creamy contrast of an Oreo, you can vary your diet enough to keep
things interesting. For example, you could dip a carrot (crunchy) in some
hummus (creamy) and get a novel sensation. Similarly, finding ways to add new
spices and flavors to your dishes can make eating healthy foods a more
desirable experience.
Moral of the
story: eating healthy doesn’t have to be bland. Mix up your foods to get
different sensations and you may find it easier than eating the same foods over
and over again. (At some point, however, you may have to fall in love with boredom.)
3. Find a
better way to deal with your stress.
There’s a reason why many people eat as a way to cope
with stress. Stress causes certain regions of the brain to release chemicals
(specifically, opiates and neuropeptide Y). These chemicals can trigger
mechanisms that are similar to the cravings you get from fat and sugar. In
other words, when you get stressed, your brain feels the addictive call of fat
and sugar and you’re pulled back to junk food.
With that
said, if you’re looking for a better written and more detailed analysis of the
science of junk food, I recommend reading the #1 New York Times
best-seller, Salt Sugar Fat.
Where to Go
From Here
One of my goals with this article is to reveal just
how complex poor eating habits can be. Junk food is designed to keep you coming
back for more. Telling people that they “need more willpower” or should “just
stop eating crap” is short-sighted at best.
Understanding
the science behind junk food is an important first step, but I don’t want you
to stop there. I wrote a free 46-page guide called Transform Your Habits, which
explains strategies for winning the battle against junk food and improving your
eating habits.
REFERENSI :
http://jamesclear.com/junk-food-science
