In America, almost every family eats fast food daily. It doesn’t require hours of preparation, you don’t need to wash the dishes later, and you can even eat it while you’re walking.
We agree that there are many things to make you cross over to the dark side of unhealthy nutrition, and later when you gain lots of weight you either continue eating in this way and stop caring, or undergo some extra restrictive diets and punish yourself.
However, gaining weight is not your biggest problem when it comes to junk food. There are so many negative consequences of basing your diet on this kind of eating. These foods are rich in unhealthy fats, sugars, carbohydrates, and very often packed with artificial ingredients that can be very bad for your health.
Here are 16 reasons why you should give up junk food and start caring more about your health.
1. Junk food decreases you mental abilities and increases the risk of mental illness.
Medical Daily reports on a research in which new discoveries about the link between junk food and memory were made. Namely, the researchers found that people who ate too much junk food, or ate such food daily in moderate amounts, had brain changes.
This is because fatty foods and sugars raise insulin levels, and the brain (as many other organs) becomes less sensitive to the hormone, which leads to a decreased ability to think and create new memories.
Dr. Suzanne de la Monte and her team of researchers from Brown University conducted a study on rats and they found that when insulin was blocked from their brains (which happens if too much fat and sugar are consumed) they became confused and unable to get out of a maze. They also developed patterns in their brains similar to those in the case of Alzheimer’s disease.
Besides raising insulin levels, regular consumption of junk food can decrease the amount of blood that comes to the brain, which makes you less attentive, and your brain activity decreases. Not to mention the memory loss and you must have noticed that when you overeat on candies your brain slows down and you become forgetful.