Junk Food: Cravings Too Hard to Resist?
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For many people, junk food represents cravings that are too hard to resist. For your enlightenment and inspiration, we reproduce below – with permission from our friendly author herself, Caroline Shugart, RN, RD, MBA, Employee Wellness Coordinator of the Human Resources of the Utah State University – her article entitled: ‘Junk Food Cravings Too Hard to Resist?” This article was also published in “The BeeWell,” Health, Section “C” of the Herald Journal, Logan, Utah, Tuesday, March 17, 2009.
Junk Food Cravings Too Hard to Resist?
Within the last 15 years, we’ve gone from a lean society to an obese one, and the rate of childhood obesity has tripled. Our children have a 30 to 50 percent chance of getting Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime from excess body fat. This isn’t the result of some genetic disorder, it’s not a matter of being “big-boned,” and it’s not a hormone imbalance. As researcher Tim Gilbertson made clear in the recent Science Unwrapped event at USU [Utah State University] on “Why We Crave Junk Food,” we may very well share some of the same mechanisms that affect his research animals: they love fat, sugar, and high calorie foods. So do people, and that accounts for a lot of our obesity problem. Is fast food just too hard for us to resist? Early humans probably had a survival advantage if they could pack on extra fat tissue during times of plenty and metabolize those calories slowly during times of famine. Unfortunately, in today’s environment of food surplus and mega-portions, our genes work against us. Our children are overweight because they eat too many high-calories foods and many of those calories are stored as fat on their hips, on their belly, and around their heart and lungs. Huge portions and “eat more” messages are everywhere. It’s really hard to resist the super-sized offers. For only pennies more, these ads tell us, you can have twice the fries, or soda, or chips (of course, you also get twice the calories). Many fast food large combo meals (hamburger, fries, and soda) have between 1,600 to 2,000 calories, yet most women need only about 1,600 to 2,000 calories in an entire day, and most men about 1,800 to 2,500 calories. When you get this many calories in a single meal, it doesn’t leave you much wiggle room to fit in breakfast or dinner. Let’s do the math. Say your active body needs 2,000 calories to maintain a healthy weight and you eat 1,600 calories in one lunch. You now have 200 calories left for breakfast, and 200 calories for dinner. That’s one buttered toast for breakfast, and … one piece of buttered toast for dinner! Yum! Won’t that be satisfying! No? Well, anything in excess of this is stored as body fat. More on Junk Food Cravings Too Hard to Resist!
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