KATHMANDU: Is your plate healthy? Next time when you sit for any meal just look at the food that you give to your body. You will be surprised! What if your meal is filled with junk food?
We all are familiar with the term ‘Junk Food’. Junk food is any food that is rich in calories, sugar, salt, and trans fat.
Usually, junk food does not contain enough nutrients like micro minerals, for example, Fiber, Iron, Calcium, Zinc, Omega fatty acids and other basic nutrients required by our body for growth and development.
Such foods can be also said as convenient food as it saves the consumers time to prepare them. Opting for junk food just to avoid the preparation time for healthy food can turn out to waste your time, money and health in the long run.
Choosing healthy over junk can be difficult at the beginning but once you get healthy eating habits it can bring the best to the body and mind. Undoubtedly, all age groups eat junk food.
Why I am writing this stressing issue about the overconsumption of junk food among teenagers is because I was once trapped by the temptation of junk food.
Serve them healthy dishes in attractive cutlery so they feel happy while eating. Put more healthy tit-bit options at home so that they can opt for those while watching movies or playing games.
There are various reasons why I or any adolescent would easily fall for this tempting nature of junk food.
Firstly, It is easily available. Second, It is cheap and most importantly it is luxuriously filled with a proper blend of fat, salt, and sugar which is generally liked by our taste buds.
Third, our self-control system is still limited and they get tempted by the advertisements. The advertisements are made in such a way that attracts us psychologically, emotionally, and visually and it ends up interfering with our brains.
The pictures of food that they show in a way seduce us by actually reducing our capacity to think practically.
The part of the brain called the hippocampus and the dorsal part of the Prefrontal Cortex which are responsible for decision making get partially deactivated with the visual representation of food.
For example: imagine it’s raining and you see luscious momos with mouth-watering jhol in Snapchat.
You will be tempted immediately. The reasons are: your prefrontal lobe gets partially inactive and the second reason is your friend has posted the photo. In short, you not only get attracted by visual representation but also get influenced by what people eat.
Further talking about adolescents, as they go through a lot at school, when they come back home hungry they always look for something that would give them pleasure.
Therefore, if there is no guidance they indulge themselves in the consumption of junk food. If you are a parent and reading this, try to check your kitchen shelves and identify all the junk available. You will be amazed!
The savory taste of junk food doesn’t always come from the mass media, it comes from the home itself.
Here’s the science behind it. Adolescents opt for junk food also because their brain has not yet been developed properly even at the age of 20.
The prefrontal cortex which is part of the brain responsible for self-control and the decision-making process is on its way to being developed by the age of 25. The other science behind it is the chemical dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is referred to as pleasure or the happy hormone in fancy terms. When they eat junk food they feel good as the brain releases the pleasure hormones.
Various diseases might be caused due to consumption of junk food. They are type 2 diabetes, depression, problems in memory and concentration, brain abnormalities, eating disorders, cancers, irregularities in the menstrual cycle, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver, hypertension, obesity, interference in the growth and development of the overall body.
Let us look at how heart attacks occur. First, junk food increases the sodium level in the blood, which in turn increases your blood pressure.
Second, high fat intake increases bad cholesterol levels in the blood and later this cholesterol starts to get deposited in the artery walls which will decrease your blood supply to the heart and thus cause heart attacks.
Teenagers might not consider these at this small age because of the chemicals rushing into their bodies.
But it is the duty of parents, teachers, health workers and other adults to explain to them that eating junk food can lead to these diseases later in life.
In addition to this, even moderate consumption can make teenagers addicted, overweight, less productive, and lazy and drain them mentally, and physically. This further leads to low academic performance.
This low academic performance results in stress like anxiety, self-doubts, low confidence and sometimes depression.
In Nepal, of all students, 90.1% of students preferred junk food for its taste, while only 54.2% of students were aware of the harmful effects of eating junk food regularly.
Do you know people die from excessive eating of unhealthy items? Here are the stats from Nepal.
About six among 10 deaths are found to be caused by non-communicable diseases in Nepal; among them, nearly a quarter of these have been caused by cardiovascular diseases.
The major reason behind it is an unhealthy diet. Nepal is still in a better position as we compare it with other countries like the US, China, Japan, and European Nations like France, the UK, and Belgium.
Today, Nepali teenagers or their entire population can still have control over unhealthy eating habits with the intervention by Food and agriculture organization, and the World health organization to enlighten the public about its harmful effects.
What is the way out of this mess then? It is always best to do or eat only in a limited manner. The problem with junk food is that it has nothing else but a high amount of fat, sugar, calories, and salt in it.
Next, the most important thing is to educate and aware teenagers of the health impacts of junk food rather than saying NO without explaining.
Teenagers’ brains don’t want to hear no. Their brain is still equipped to do what’s not allowed. Always try to add healthy foods and tell them the reason behind eating the particular.
It was not a one-day process, it takes time to convince the brain to eat healthily. But once you start to develop healthy eating habits there’s no going back to junk.
Tell them how eating junk food can hinder their learning capabilities and mental health. Allow them to eat junk food once or twice a month so they don’t end up craving it.
Allow them the liberty to ask for junk food anytime they want, I’m doing so it’ll reduce their cravings.
Serve them healthy dishes in attractive cutlery so they feel happy while eating. Put more healthy tit-bit options at home so that they can opt for those while watching movies or playing games.
Always try to eat simple and nutritious food items with them so they copy you.
Summing up, as a teenager I accept the fact that unhealthy food attracts us the most. But how do I avoid this?
It’s all about the way you educate your brain and the way you think. As a teenager, whenever I go to groceries I convince myself that junk food will only negatively affect my health negatively.
It was not a one-day process, it takes time to convince the brain to eat healthily. But once you start to develop healthy eating habits there’s no going back to junk.
To leave a healthy life, one should focus on the food they feed to their brain.
(Shreya Jain is a student of Bachelors of Science in Nutrition and Health)
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