Junk Food is Junk

Most people recognize egregious junk food. There is more of that than anything at the grocery store. When you are in a city driving down the road in America, that is what is selling at the fast food places, everywhere. Junk food isn’t really food. We can eat it but it takes away rather than adds to our body’s needs.

Junk food is processed, mostly to the extreme. It has been produced by company’s who want and need to make money to stay in the competition. These giant companies have the resources to experiment in making products that will sell cheap and will make us want more, even when we aren’t hungry. They takes a food from the ground like wheat and sugar and strip it of nutrients, add some fat, put in things like additives and preservatives to help with the shelf life and put it in pretty, irresistible packages for us to buy and eat and feed our young.

On average, we consume about 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day. That is 22 teaspoons of sugar we don’t need and hurts our body. We crave sugar and anything that has it in it, we will usually want. We evolved to want sugar because that let us know back in the day that it was food we wanted to eat: fruits, vegetables and grains taste good because of sugar. We use to need to find it to stay alive. This isn’t the case now and we are paying dearly. When we eat junk food, the fat in it ups our daily intake to be way too much and rarely is it a “good” fat. We evolved to want to eat some fat and to store some to help us through the famines we experienced back in the day. This isn’t usually true today. When we eat junk food, the grains usually have been stripped of nutrients and are extra calories that contribute to diseases. If we did this once in a while, it might be ok. We Americans on the SAD diet (standard American diet) are doing this each and every day.

America is one of the countries with the biggest obesity rates which lead to many diseases. Countries who don’t eat or have access to junk, aren’t usually obese. The access we have to junk food, the way we are advertised to and the convenience is killing us but slow enough that we don’t think about it and we keep doing it. We fool ourselves and we are paying the price.

We are a country who wants convenience and that is leading us to feed our children junk food who than will continue to do that with their children, as habits and culture tend to do. Why do we put so much effort to keep our kids safe and healthy and happy yet feed them food that is harmful daily? It’s not because we don’t know better about junk food. It’s one food group everybody agrees is bad but we do it any way.

Read the labels and you will be astounded at what we are eating daily. There are so many things in our food that we can’t even pronounce and we don’t really recognize. If a product has more than a few ingredients, it is hurting us. If a product has sugar, it is hurting us. If a product has grain that isn’t whole, it is hurting us.

Another thing to be aware of is “health promoting” junk food. Look around in your grocery store closer at those processed foods that have health claims. Usually whatever the claim is, there is something just as bad taking it’s place or we would pick the other brand which is doing that so we think it tasted better. Examples are a sugar free claim usually has diet sugar (just as bad as sugar) or extra fat to make up for the taste. If a product says gluten free, there are other things in there to make it palpable. If a product says organic, well organic sugar is still sugar. It’s crazy and we still literally “buy” it.

Preservatives are in most junk foods. We have many in our foods that other countries have banned because they are dangerous. Some of the worst are nitrates in meats to prevent bacteria growth and maintain color. We have BHA and BHT used to preserve fats and oils. We have propylene glycol used as a thickening agent to absorb water. We have propyl gallate used to keep oils in processed food fresh. There is dimethylpolysiloxane which is a type of silicone and can be found in Chick-fil-A chicken, McDonalds French fries and KFC mashed potatoes among many others. The only way to avoid eating these dangerous preservatives are to read labels and eat fresh.

Salt, Sugar and Fat Micheal Moss

The Food Babe Way, Vani Hari