by
Nick Nunes
It’s fantastic, it’s fast, it’s frighteningly addictive, and it’s everywhere. If you dream back to feudal times, no one, even the lower economic classes of the 21st century, could deny that we live with taken-for-granted luxuries that ancient emperors would blush to even imagine. Picture the awe that a simple Hot Pocket would inspire upon presentation to an Elizabethan royal.
Junk food has high fat, sugar, salt, and calories. Those highs are starkly mirrored by the lows of its nutritional value. What is considered junk food is woefully lacking in dietary fibre, protein, vitamins, minerals, and an arguable amount of other values.
Most closely associated with the term “junk food” is the world of “fast food”. However, the denigrating name “junk food” is truly a catch-all for highly processed food that is starved of equitable nutritional value.
The first appearance of the phrase “junk food” can be traced to an Ohio headline that proclaimed, “Junk Foods Cause Serious Malnutrition”. The phrase may have been derived from a four-year younger article from Utah, titled “Dr Brady’s Health Column: More Junk Than Food”. That, more than a half century old, health column claimed “white bread, crackers, cake, candy, ice cream soda, chocolate malted, sundaes, sweetened carbonated beverages” as junk foods.
Obviously, the author wasn’t blessed with the brilliance of deep fried dreams and pre-processed, packaged, and on-demand prepared dining delights.
Barbados may be slow to the variety of the junk food and fast food foray, but the health-related consequences of unchecked indulgence in junk food is plainly evident amongst such an antithetically slim population.
Getting the obvious out of the way, junk food is convenient— punishingly convenient to fast-paced and purpose-packed lives.
The trend of progressing years is towards convenience. Draining work lives, social obligations, social needs, personal pursuits, and everything else that clamours our time screeches happily to the quick convenience of fast and junky foods.
The second industrial revolution, or technological revolution, sparked a quick fire from the end of the 19th century to the beginning and early 20th century that bore with it electricity, standardisation, and, most importantly, mass production.
Mass producers of food started using cheaper ingredients to stretch their products at the cost of quality while increasing profit. Decades later, the damage is evident. A 2010 paper in the journal Nature purports, “Drug addicts’ brain reward circuits often exhibit dulled responses, leading the addicts to seek more of the addictive substance to get their fix. Work in rats indicates that fatty foods may trigger similar responses.”
The findings went on to assert, “Animals given prolonged access to the fatty foods needed more stimulation than normal rats to reach a certain reward threshold over time, and gained more weight.”
Junk food marketing is insidious. Use of psychological research on subconscious colour association is why so many purveyors of processed products utilise red and yellow in their advertising. Red is the most used colour in food advertising. It won’t take you long to come up with an exhausting list of fast food and junk food options that embrace the bright colour of passion. The colour red also triggers stimulation, appetite, hunger, and, most obviously, attracts attention. The colour yellow tends to incite happiness, peace, comfort, and general positivity. Red and yellow in food advertising is often referred to as the ketchup and mustard effect, and boy is it effective.
As with almost anything, the ingredients themselves are not necessarily addictive. The acclimatisation to the ingredients, their availability, and the mental reward of satisfaction builds tolerance, and therein lies the problem.
Some medical and food scientists believe that when an individual’s preference for salt, sweetness, or whatever personally preferred flavour is rewarded more than regularly or over-indulged, it can result in craving of the gratification and the resulting tolerance build-up that becomes a fiend for the beast of wanting more.
Especially when stressed, a favourite food is a soothing and simple solution. However, the instant abatement can have both short- and long-term effects. Food rich in saturated fats can increase bad cholesterol and develop plaque in a body’s arteries, leading to increased risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Too much sugar can lead to insulin resistance and potentially lead the way to diabetes. Balance and moderation for each individual is key. Every individual body doesn’t process every chemical the same way.
Stress, lack of sleep, anxiety, and habit are the leaders in overindulging, especially when it comes to junk foods that offer little more than short-term satisfaction. Knowing yourself with as much brutal honesty as you can and consulting a qualified specialist is the best way to cope with possibly addictive craving before you begin delving harmfully to corpulence and dependence.
We crave junk food because it’s easy, it’s immediately rewarding, and its intake literally provokes the desire to partake even more.
