Why is it called Junk Food?

When you eat junk food you feel junky. Junk food is non-nutritive. It probably shouldn’t even be called food. It doesn’t have the protein, healthy fat, vitamins and minerals to support your health.

Junk food is processed food. It comes in a package with a label that most likely has ingredients you don’t recognize. Juxtapose that against real one-ingredient foods. An apple for example. It is just an apple. It doesn’t have a food label mandated by the government, because it is just one ingredient. The same goes for any one-ingredient foods such as beef, beans, olive oil, avocado, etc. (Now I’m getting hungry for chili.) You get the picture…one-ingredient foods contain the building-blocks — the macro- and micro-nutrients — to maintain your health.

Junk foods and drinks, including sodas and other beverages like fruit juice, which is processed and has a food label, are highly refined and contain concentrations of sugar, carbohydrates, and ultra-processed seed oils or high-fructose corn syrup that are found no where in nature. They certainly are not providing your body, brain or gut, the nutrients they needs for well-balanced health.

Processed foods are the reason that most Americans are overweight or obese. According to recent CDC data, around 70% of American adults are considered overweight or obese, with approximately 40% classified as obese. Source: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data from the CDC.

Unfortunately, people are eating these hyper-palatable processed foods that do not fill them up, so they get hungry and need to eat again just a few hours later. This cycle repeats itself for days, weeks, months and years until a person is obese and probably suffering from malnutrition because they have been chronically under-eating the essential macronutrients of protein and fat (ideally from one-ingredient foods). And their body, cells, and brains have been deprived of micronutrients, vitamins and minerals needed to keep functioning properly.

This cycle of undernutrition in many cases leads to dis-ease in the body. A better plan? Just eat real food.

But, what if you are eating mostly real, one-ingredient foods and still experiencing symptoms and maybe even disease(s)? You’ll note that I did not mention carbohydrates above as an essential macronutrient. Essential means you will eventually die without it. Carbohydrates are not essential. And, if you’ve been over-consuming carbohydrates in favor of the two essential macronutrients of protein and fat, even if the carbs are whole one-ingredient foods, you still may experience ill effects of such an eating pattern. After all carbohydrates are eventually broken down into glucose in the body. Glucose is sometimes referred to as blood sugar. Eating foods that turn into sugar in your blood can cause inflammation. And, inflammation fanned by the flame of our stressful modern daily lives, is what drives imbalance and ultimately may lead to diagnosable diseases.

Just to be clear, I am not saying avoid carbohydrates. I'm trying to draw the distinction between the junky carbohydrates in processed, packaged food products that have passed for foods, and real one-ingredient foods.

A few good first steps on your journey of health:

• reduce your stressors or at least actively add in daily practices that calm the body-mind to counteract the stressors you experience day in and day out, and

• focus your food intake on quality proteins and healthy fats first.