junk food causes obesity essay

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Eating And Health

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• For Foodies

Are Junk Food Habits Driving Obesity? A Tale Of Two Studies

Maria Godoy

What role do high-calorie, low-nutrition junk foods play in expanding waistlines? Two recent studies tackle that question. Morgan McCloy/NPR hide caption

What role do high-calorie, low-nutrition junk foods play in expanding waistlines? Two recent studies tackle that question.

More than 36 percent of American adults and 17 percent of youth under 19 are obese, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists still don't fully understand what got us here. And sometimes, the answers they've come up with turn out to be wrong. Consider the changing advice on fat , which has been amended of late from its days as a dietary demon.

By now, it would seem that the link between the obesity epidemic and the consumption of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods like sodas, cookies and fries is well-established. But as two recent studies show, researchers are still probing the mechanics of that connection.

Broadly speaking, both studies explore the connection between junk food and weight — though they do so using different data sets from two different populations (adults and kids).

Let's start with the finding that seems most counterintuitive: For most of us, junk foods may not be what's driving weight gain. That's what behavioral economist David Just and his colleagues at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab concluded in a paper in the journal Obesity Science & Practice.

The researchers looked at data collected in 2007-2008 from a nationally representative sample of roughly 5,000 U.S. adults as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) , including information on weight, height and eating habits. Junk food was defined as fast food, soda and sweets.

Some of that data set had been used in a 2013 CDC study that found that heavier Americans were indeed getting more of their daily calories from fast food. But the Cornell researchers wondered what would happen if they excluded the people on the extreme ends of the weight spectrum — those who are clinically underweight and the very morbidly obese.

And they found that once those groups were eliminated, there was no association between body mass index and how much fast food, sugary sodas and sweets people consume.

The finding, which applies to 95 percent of the population, "was really counterintuitive — not what we expected at all," Just tells The Salt.

But if fast food isn't driving the obesity epidemic, what is? "I suspect we're eating too many calories from all foods," Just says. He points to data from the USDA's Economic Research Service showing that Americans, on average, now eat 500 calories more daily than they did around 1970, before the obesity epidemic took off.

To be clear, Just isn't saying that you can eat all the junk food you want with no consequence. "You increase your consumption of these things, yeah, you're going to put on weight," he says. "But that's not to say that is the differentiator between those who are overweight and those who aren't." And if that's the case, Just says, instead of targeting junk foods in the war against obesity, maybe we should be preaching the gospel of moderation and portion control with all foods.

Sure, that's good advice in general — but it may not mean we can let junk foods off the hook.

Eric Finkelstein , an associate professor at the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University, notes that the data the Cornell researchers used is only a snapshot of what a cross-section of Americans were eating at a single moment in time. So it's possible, for example, that the overweight and obese people included in the study reported eating less junk foods because they were trying to lose weight.

"I'd lend a lot more credence to studies that follow change [in eating habits and weight] over time," Finkelstein tells The Salt.

And, over time, he says, the evidence suggests strongly that even modest increases in the consumption of certain foods will result in long-term weight gain. He points to a 2011 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at data gathered over decades on 120,000 U.S. adults. Over a four-year period, an extra daily serving of potato chips was associated with weight gain of 1.69 pounds, the study found. That may not sound like much, but for most adults, that's how the pounds add up — gradually, over time, at an average rate of about a pound a year .

And problem foods will pack on the pounds for kids, too. Last week, Finkelstein and his colleagues published a similarly detailed breakdown of the links between weight gain and certain foods in children. The researchers turned to data on more than 4,600 kids from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children , an ongoing study in the U.K. that has tracked the same set of children — with records on their height, weight and food intake — since their birth in the early 1990s.

Once again, potato chips raised red flags.

As the researchers reported in the journal Health Affairs , over a three-year period, every 25-gram serving of potato chips (a little under an ounce) that kids ate daily was linked to about a half-pound of excess weight gain. (Basically, that's defined as weight beyond what a child should weigh for his or her height and age.)

Again, half a pound doesn't sound alarming, "but if you're also getting an extra half a pound from burgers, and half a pound from french fries, these things add up. And some kids are eating more than a serving" daily, Finkelstein says.

Other foods the study linked to excessive weight gain included "kid food" staples — like breaded and coated fish and poultry (think fish sticks and chicken nuggets) and french fries — and processed meats, butter and margarine, desserts and sweets.

That's important, because some 31 percent of American and 38 percent of European kids are now overweight or obese — and the pounds we gain as kids often stay with us through adulthood.

• childhood obesity

Frontiers for Young Minds

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The Impacts of Junk Food on Health

Energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods, otherwise known as junk foods, have never been more accessible and available. Young people are bombarded with unhealthy junk-food choices daily, and this can lead to life-long dietary habits that are difficult to undo. In this article, we explore the scientific evidence behind both the short-term and long-term impacts of junk food consumption on our health.

Introduction

The world is currently facing an obesity epidemic, which puts people at risk for chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Junk food can contribute to obesity and yet it is becoming a part of our everyday lives because of our fast-paced lifestyles. Life can be jam-packed when you are juggling school, sport, and hanging with friends and family! Junk food companies make food convenient, tasty, and affordable, so it has largely replaced preparing and eating healthy homemade meals. Junk foods include foods like burgers, fried chicken, and pizza from fast-food restaurants, as well as packaged foods like chips, biscuits, and ice-cream, sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, fatty meats like bacon, sugary cereals, and frozen ready meals like lasagne. These are typically highly processed foods , meaning several steps were involved in making the food, with a focus on making them tasty and thus easy to overeat. Unfortunately, junk foods provide lots of calories and energy, but little of the vital nutrients our bodies need to grow and be healthy, like proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Australian teenagers aged 14–18 years get more than 40% of their daily energy from these types of foods, which is concerning [ 1 ]. Junk foods are also known as discretionary foods , which means they are “not needed to meet nutrient requirements and do not belong to the five food groups” [ 2 ]. According to the dietary guidelines of Australian and many other countries, these five food groups are grains and cereals, vegetables and legumes, fruits, dairy and dairy alternatives, and meat and meat alternatives.

Young people are often the targets of sneaky advertising tactics by junk food companies, which show our heroes and icons promoting junk foods. In Australia, cricket, one of our favorite sports, is sponsored by a big fast-food brand. Elite athletes like cricket players are not fuelling their bodies with fried chicken, burgers, and fries! A study showed that adolescents aged 12–17 years view over 14.4 million food advertisements in a single year on popular websites, with cakes, cookies, and ice cream being the most frequently advertised products [ 3 ]. Another study examining YouTube videos popular amongst children reported that 38% of all ads involved a food or beverage and 56% of those food ads were for junk foods [ 4 ].

What Happens to Our Bodies Shortly After We Eat Junk Foods?

Food is made up of three major nutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. There are also vitamins and minerals in food that support good health, growth, and development. Getting the proper nutrition is very important during our teenage years. However, when we eat junk foods, we are consuming high amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, which are quickly absorbed by the body.

Let us take the example of eating a hamburger. A burger typically contains carbohydrates from the bun, proteins and fats from the beef patty, and fats from the cheese and sauce. On average, a burger from a fast-food chain contains 36–40% of your daily energy needs and this does not account for any chips or drinks consumed with it ( Figure 1 ). This is a large amount of food for the body to digest—not good if you are about to hit the cricket pitch!

• Figure 1 - The nutritional composition of a popular burger from a famous fast-food restaurant, detailing the average quantity per serving and per 100 g.
• The carbohydrates of a burger are mainly from the bun, while the protein comes from the beef patty. Large amounts of fat come from the cheese and sauce. Based on the Australian dietary guidelines, just one burger can be 36% of the recommended daily energy intake for teenage boys aged 12–15 years and 40% of the recommendations for teenage girls 12–15 years.

A few hours to a few days after eating rich, heavy foods such as a burger, unpleasant symptoms like tiredness, poor sleep, and even hunger can result ( Figure 2 ). Rather than providing an energy boost, junk foods can lead to a lack of energy. For a short time, sugar (a type of carbohydrate) makes people feel energized, happy, and upbeat as it is used by the body for energy. However, refined sugar , which is the type of sugar commonly found in junk foods, leads to a quick drop in blood sugar levels because it is digested quickly by the body. This can lead tiredness and cravings [ 5 ].

• Figure 2 - The short- and long-term impacts of junk food consumption.
• In the short-term, junk foods can make you feel tired, bloated, and unable to concentrate. Long-term, junk foods can lead to tooth decay and poor bowel habits. Junk foods can also lead to obesity and associated diseases such as heart disease. When junk foods are regularly consumed over long periods of time, the damages and complications to health are increasingly costly.

Fiber is a good carbohydrate commonly found in vegetables, fruits, barley, legumes, nuts, and seeds—foods from the five food groups. Fiber not only keeps the digestive system healthy, but also slows the stomach’s emptying process, keeping us feeling full for longer. Junk foods tend to lack fiber, so when we eat them, we notice decreasing energy and increasing hunger sooner.

Foods such as walnuts, berries, tuna, and green veggies can boost concentration levels. This is particularly important for young minds who are doing lots of schoolwork. These foods are what most elite athletes are eating! On the other hand, eating junk foods can lead to poor concentration. Eating junk foods can lead to swelling in the part of the brain that has a major role in memory. A study performed in humans showed that eating an unhealthy breakfast high in fat and sugar for 4 days in a row caused disruptions to the learning and memory parts of the brain [ 6 ].

Long-Term Impacts of Junk Foods

If we eat mostly junk foods over many weeks, months, or years, there can be several long-term impacts on health ( Figure 2 ). For example, high saturated fat intake is strongly linked with high levels of bad cholesterol in the blood, which can be a sign of heart disease. Respected research studies found that young people who eat only small amounts of saturated fat have lower total cholesterol levels [ 7 ].

Frequent consumption of junk foods can also increase the risk of diseases such as hypertension and stroke. Hypertension is also known as high blood pressure and a stroke is damage to the brain from reduced blood supply, which prevents the brain from receiving the oxygen and nutrients it needs to survive. Hypertension and stroke can occur because of the high amounts of cholesterol and salt in junk foods.

Furthermore, junk foods can trigger the “happy hormone,” dopamine , to be released in the brain, making us feel good when we eat these foods. This can lead us to wanting more junk food to get that same happy feeling again [ 8 ]. Other long-term effects of eating too much junk food include tooth decay and constipation. Soft drinks, for instance, can cause tooth decay due to high amounts of sugar and acid that can wear down the protective tooth enamel. Junk foods are typically low in fiber too, which has negative consequences for gut health in the long term. Fiber forms the bulk of our poop and without it, it can be hard to poop!

Tips for Being Healthy

One way to figure out whether a food is a junk food is to think about how processed it is. When we think of foods in their whole and original forms, like a fresh tomato, a grain of rice, or milk squeezed from a cow, we can then start to imagine how many steps are involved to transform that whole food into something that is ready-to-eat, tasty, convenient, and has a long shelf life.

For teenagers 13–14 years old, the recommended daily energy intake is 8,200–9,900 kJ/day or 1,960 kcal-2,370 kcal/day for boys and 7,400–8,200 kJ/day or 1,770–1,960 kcal for girls, according to the Australian dietary guidelines. Of course, the more physically active you are, the higher your energy needs. Remember that junk foods are okay to eat occasionally, but they should not make up more than 10% of your daily energy intake. In a day, this may be a simple treat such as a small muffin or a few squares of chocolate. On a weekly basis, this might mean no more than two fast-food meals per week. The remaining 90% of food eaten should be from the five food groups.

In conclusion, we know that junk foods are tasty, affordable, and convenient. This makes it hard to limit the amount of junk food we eat. However, if junk foods become a staple of our diets, there can be negative impacts on our health. We should aim for high-fiber foods such as whole grains, vegetables, and fruits; meals that have moderate amounts of sugar and salt; and calcium-rich and iron-rich foods. Healthy foods help to build strong bodies and brains. Limiting junk food intake can happen on an individual level, based on our food choices, or through government policies and health-promotion strategies. We need governments to stop junk food companies from advertising to young people, and we need their help to replace junk food restaurants with more healthy options. Researchers can focus on education and health promotion around healthy food options and can work with young people to develop solutions. If we all work together, we can help young people across the world to make food choices that will improve their short and long-term health.

Obesity : ↑ A disorder where too much body fat increases the risk of health problems.

Processed Food : ↑ A raw agricultural food that has undergone processes to be washed, ground, cleaned and/or cooked further.

Discretionary Food : ↑ Foods and drinks not necessary to provide the nutrients the body needs but that may add variety to a person’s diet (according to the Australian dietary guidelines).

Refined Sugar : ↑ Sugar that has been processed from raw sources such as sugar cane, sugar beets or corn.

Saturated Fat : ↑ A type of fat commonly eaten from animal sources such as beef, chicken and pork, which typically promotes the production of “bad” cholesterol in the body.

Dopamine : ↑ A hormone that is released when the brain is expecting a reward and is associated with activities that generate pleasure, such as eating or shopping.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

[1] ↑ Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2013. 4324.0.55.002 - Microdata: Australian Health Survey: Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2011-12 . Australian Bureau of Statistics. Available online at: http://bit.ly/2jkRRZO (accessed December 13, 2019).

[2] ↑ National Health and Medical Research Council. 2013. Australian Dietary Guidelines Summary . Canberra, ACT: National Health and Medical Research Council.

[3] ↑ Potvin Kent, M., and Pauzé, E. 2018. The frequency and healthfulness of food and beverages advertised on adolescents’ preferred web sites in Canada. J. Adolesc. Health. 63:102–7. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.01.007

[4] ↑ Tan, L., Ng, S. H., Omar, A., and Karupaiah, T. 2018. What’s on YouTube? A case study on food and beverage advertising in videos targeted at children on social media. Child Obes. 14:280–90. doi: 10.1089/chi.2018.0037

[5] ↑ Gómez-Pinilla, F. 2008. Brain foods: the effects of nutrients on brain function. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9, 568–78. doi: 10.1038/nrn2421

[6] ↑ Attuquayefio, T., Stevenson, R. J., Oaten, M. J., and Francis, H. M. 2017. A four-day western-style dietary intervention causes reductions in hippocampal-dependent learning and memory and interoceptive sensitivity. PLoS ONE . 12:e0172645. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172645

[7] ↑ Te Morenga, L., and Montez, J. 2017. Health effects of saturated and trans-fatty acid intake in children and adolescents: systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS ONE. 12:e0186672. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186672

[8] ↑ Reichelt, A. C. 2016. Adolescent maturational transitions in the prefrontal cortex and dopamine signaling as a risk factor for the development of obesity and high fat/high sugar diet induced cognitive deficits. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 10. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00189

How Junk Food Can End Obesity

Demonizing processed food may be dooming many to obesity and disease. Could embracing the drive-thru make us all healthier?

Late last year, in a small health-food eatery called Cafe Sprouts in Oberlin, Ohio, I had what may well have been the most wholesome beverage of my life. The friendly server patiently guided me to an apple-blueberry-kale-carrot smoothie-juice combination, which she spent the next several minutes preparing, mostly by shepherding farm-fresh produce into machinery. The result was tasty, but at 300 calories (by my rough calculation) in a 16-ounce cup, it was more than my diet could regularly absorb without consequences, nor was I about to make a habit of $9 shakes, healthy or not.

Inspired by the experience nonetheless, I tried again two months later at L.A.’s Real Food Daily, a popular vegan restaurant near Hollywood. I was initially wary of a low-calorie juice made almost entirely from green vegetables, but the server assured me it was a popular treat. I like to brag that I can eat anything, and I scarf down all sorts of raw vegetables like candy, but I could stomach only about a third of this oddly foamy, bitter concoction. It smelled like lawn clippings and tasted like liquid celery. It goes for $7.95, and I waited 10 minutes for it.

I finally hit the sweet spot just a few weeks later, in Chicago, with a delicious blueberry-pomegranate smoothie that rang in at a relatively modest 220 calories. It cost $3 and took only seconds to make. Best of all, I’ll be able to get this concoction just about anywhere. Thanks, McDonald’s!

If only the McDonald’s smoothie weren’t, unlike the first two, so fattening and unhealthy. Or at least that’s what the most-prominent voices in our food culture today would have you believe.

An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight. In this narrative, the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis. The wares of these pimps and pushers, we are told, are to be universally shunned.

Consider The New York Times . Earlier this year, The Times Magazine gave its cover to a long piece based on Michael Moss’s about-to-be-best-selling book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us . Hitting bookshelves at about the same time was the former Times reporter Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal , which addresses more or less the same theme. Two years ago The Times Magazine featured the journalist Gary Taubes’s “Is Sugar Toxic?,” a cover story on the evils of refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. And most significant of all has been the considerable space the magazine has devoted over the years to Michael Pollan, a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and his broad indictment of food processing as a source of society’s health problems.

“The food they’re cooking is making people sick,” Pollan has said of big food companies. “It is one of the reasons that we have the obesity and diabetes epidemics that we do … If you’re going to let industries decide how much salt, sugar and fat is in your food, they’re going to put [in] as much as they possibly can … They will push those buttons until we scream or die.” The solution, in his view, is to replace Big Food’s engineered, edible evil—through public education and regulation—with fresh, unprocessed, local, seasonal, real food.

Pollan’s worldview saturates the public conversation on healthy eating. You hear much the same from many scientists, physicians, food activists, nutritionists, celebrity chefs, and pundits. Foodlike substances , the derisive term Pollan uses to describe processed foods, is now a solid part of the elite vernacular. Thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, most notably the Whole Foods chain, have thrived by answering the call to reject industrialized foods in favor of a return to natural, simple, nonindustrialized—let’s call them “wholesome”—foods. The two newest restaurants in my smallish Massachusetts town both prominently tout wholesome ingredients; one of them is called the Farmhouse, and it’s usually packed.

A new generation of business, social, and policy entrepreneurs is rising to further cater to these tastes, and to challenge Big Food. Silicon Valley, where tomorrow’s entrepreneurial and social trends are forged, has spawned a small ecosystem of wholesome-friendly venture-capital firms (Physic Ventures, for example), business accelerators (Local Food Lab), and Web sites (Edible Startups) to fund, nurture, and keep tabs on young companies such as blissmo (a wholesome-food-of-the-month club), Mile High Organics (online wholesome-food shopping), and Wholeshare (group wholesome-food purchasing), all designed to help reacquaint Americans with the simpler eating habits of yesteryear.

In virtually every realm of human existence, we turn to technology to help us solve our problems. But even in Silicon Valley, when it comes to food and obesity, technology—or at least food-processing technology—is widely treated as if it is the problem. The solution, from this viewpoint, necessarily involves turning our back on it.

If the most-influential voices in our food culture today get their way, we will achieve a genuine food revolution. Too bad it would be one tailored to the dubious health fantasies of a small, elite minority. And too bad it would largely exclude the obese masses, who would continue to sicken and die early. Despite the best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most of the obese population—even in the unlikely case that your typical junk-food eater would be willing and able to break lifelong habits to embrace kale and yellow beets. And many of the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement are, in any case, as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King.

Through its growing sway over health-conscious consumers and policy makers, the wholesome-food movement is impeding the progress of the one segment of the food world that is actually positioned to take effective, near-term steps to reverse the obesity trend: the processed-food industry. Popular food producers, fast-food chains among them, are already applying various tricks and technologies to create less caloric and more satiating versions of their junky fare that nonetheless retain much of the appeal of the originals, and could be induced to go much further. In fact, these roundly demonized companies could do far more for the public’s health in five years than the wholesome-food movement is likely to accomplish in the next 50. But will the wholesome-food advocates let them?

I. Michael Pollan Has No Clothes

Let’s go shopping. We can start at Whole Foods Market, a critical link in the wholesome-eating food chain. There are three Whole Foods stores within 15 minutes of my house—we’re big on real food in the suburbs west of Boston. Here at the largest of the three, I can choose from more than 21 types of tofu, 62 bins of organic grains and legumes, and 42 different salad greens.

Much of the food isn’t all that different from what I can get in any other supermarket, but sprinkled throughout are items that scream “wholesome.” One that catches my eye today, sitting prominently on an impulse-buy rack near the checkout counter, is Vegan Cheesy Salad Booster, from Living Intentions, whose package emphasizes the fact that the food is enhanced with spirulina, chlorella, and sea vegetables. The label also proudly lets me know that the contents are raw—no processing!—and that they don’t contain any genetically modified ingredients. What the stuff does contain, though, is more than three times the fat content per ounce as the beef patty in a Big Mac (more than two-thirds of the calories come from fat), and four times the sodium.

After my excursion to Whole Foods, I drive a few minutes to a Trader Joe’s, also known for an emphasis on wholesome foods. Here at the register I’m confronted with a large display of a snack food called “Inner Peas,” consisting of peas that are breaded in cornmeal and rice flour, fried in sunflower oil, and then sprinkled with salt. By weight, the snack has six times as much fat as it does protein, along with loads of carbohydrates. I can’t recall ever seeing anything at any fast-food restaurant that represents as big an obesogenic crime against the vegetable kingdom. (A spokesperson for Trader Joe’s said the company does not consider itself a “ ‘wholesome food’ grocery retailer.” Living Intentions did not respond to a request for comment.)

This phenomenon is by no means limited to packaged food at upscale supermarkets. Back in February, when I was at Real Food Daily in Los Angeles, I ordered the “Sea Cake” along with my green-vegetable smoothie. It was intensely delicious in a way that set off alarm bells. RFD wouldn’t provide precise information about the ingredients, but I found a recipe online for “Tofu ‘Fish’ Cakes,” which seem very close to what I ate. Essentially, they consist of some tofu mixed with a lot of refined carbs (the RFD version contains at least some unrefined carbs) along with oil and soy milk, all fried in oil and served with a soy-and-oil-based tartar sauce. (Tofu and other forms of soy are high in protein, but per 100 calories, tofu is as fatty as many cuts of beef.) L.A. being to the wholesome-food movement what Hawaii is to Spam, I ate at two other mega-popular wholesome-food restaurants while I was in the area. At Café Gratitude I enjoyed the kale chips and herb-cornmeal-crusted eggplant parmesan, and at Akasha I indulged in a spiced-lamb-sausage flatbread pizza. Both are pricey orgies of fat and carbs.

I’m not picking out rare, less healthy examples from these establishments. Check out their menus online: fat, sugar, and other refined carbs abound. (Café Gratitude says it uses only “healthy” fats and natural sweeteners; Akasha says its focus is not on “health food” but on “farm to fork” fare.) In fact, because the products and dishes offered by these types of establishments tend to emphasize the healthy-sounding foods they contain, I find it much harder to navigate through them to foods that go easy on the oil, butter, refined grains, rice, potatoes, and sugar than I do at far less wholesome restaurants. (These dishes also tend to contain plenty of sea salt, which Pollanites hold up as the wholesome alternative to the addictive salt engineered by the food industry, though your body can’t tell the difference.)

One occasional source of obesogenic travesties is The New York Times Magazine ’s lead food writer, Mark Bittman, who now rivals Pollan as a shepherd to the anti-processed-food flock. ( Salon , in an article titled “How to Live What Michael Pollan Preaches,” called Bittman’s 2009 book, Food Matters , “both a cookbook and a manifesto that shows us how to eat better—and save the planet.”) I happened to catch Bittman on the Today show last year demonstrating for millions of viewers four ways to prepare corn in summertime, including a lovely dish of corn sautéed in bacon fat and topped with bacon. Anyone who thinks that such a thing is much healthier than a Whopper just hasn’t been paying attention to obesity science for the past few decades.

That science is, in fact, fairly straightforward. Fat carries more than twice as many calories as carbohydrates and proteins do per gram, which means just a little fat can turn a serving of food into a calorie bomb. Sugar and other refined carbohydrates, like white flour and rice, and high-starch foods, like corn and potatoes, aren’t as calorie-dense. But all of these “problem carbs” charge into the bloodstream as glucose in minutes, providing an energy rush, commonly followed by an energy crash that can lead to a surge in appetite.

Because they are energy-intense foods, fat and sugar and other problem carbs trip the pleasure and reward meters placed in our brains by evolution over the millions of years during which starvation was an ever-present threat. We’re born enjoying the stimulating sensations these ingredients provide, and exposure strengthens the associations, ensuring that we come to crave them and, all too often, eat more of them than we should. Processed food is not an essential part of this story: recent examinations of ancient human remains in Egypt, Peru, and elsewhere have repeatedly revealed hardened arteries, suggesting that pre-industrial diets, at least of the affluent, may not have been the epitome of healthy eating that the Pollanites make them out to be. People who want to lose weight and keep it off are almost always advised by those who run successful long-term weight-loss programs to transition to a diet high in lean protein, complex carbs such as whole grains and legumes, and the sort of fiber vegetables are loaded with. Because these ingredients provide us with the calories we need without the big, fast bursts of energy, they can be satiating without pushing the primitive reward buttons that nudge us to eat too much.

(A few words on salt: Yes, it’s unhealthy in large amounts, raising blood pressure in many people; and yes, it makes food more appealing. But salt is not obesogenic—it has no calories, and doesn’t specifically increase the desire to consume high-calorie foods. It can just as easily be enlisted to add to the appeal of vegetables. Lumping it in with fat and sugar as an addictive junk-food ingredient is a confused proposition. But let’s agree we want to cut down on it.)

To be sure, many of Big Food’s most popular products are loaded with appalling amounts of fat and sugar and other problem carbs (as well as salt), and the plentitude of these ingredients, exacerbated by large portion sizes, has clearly helped foment the obesity crisis. It’s hard to find anyone anywhere who disagrees. Junk food is bad for you because it’s full of fat and problem carbs. But will switching to wholesome foods free us from this scourge? It could in theory, but in practice, it’s hard to see how. Even putting aside for a moment the serious questions about whether wholesome foods could be made accessible to the obese public, and whether the obese would be willing to eat them, we have a more immediate stumbling block: many of the foods served up and even glorified by the wholesome-food movement are themselves chock full of fat and problem carbs.

Some wholesome foodies openly celebrate fat and problem carbs, insisting that the lack of processing magically renders them healthy. In singing the praises of clotted cream and lard-loaded cookies, for instance, a recent Wall Street Journal article by Ron Rosenbaum explained that “eating basic, earthy, fatty foods isn’t just a supreme experience of the senses—it can actually be good for you,” and that it’s “too easy to conflate eating fatty food with eating industrial, oil-fried junk food.” That’s right, we wouldn’t want to make the same mistake that all the cells in our bodies make. Pollan himself makes it clear in his writing that he has little problem with fat—as long as it’s not in food “your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize.”

Television food shows routinely feature revered chefs tossing around references to healthy eating, “wellness,” and farm-fresh ingredients, all the while spooning lard, cream, and sugar over everything in sight. (A study published last year in the British Medical Journal found that the recipes in the books of top TV chefs call for “significantly more” fat per portion than what’s contained in ready-to-eat supermarket meals.) Corporate wellness programs, one of the most promising avenues for getting the population to adopt healthy behaviors, are falling prey to this way of thinking as well. Last November, I attended a stress-management seminar for employees of a giant consulting company, and listened to a high-powered professional wellness coach tell the crowded room that it’s okay to eat anything as long as its plant or animal origins aren’t obscured by processing. Thus, she explained, potato chips are perfectly healthy, because they plainly come from potatoes, but Cheetos will make you sick and fat, because what plant or animal is a Cheeto? (For the record, typical potato chips and Cheetos have about equally nightmarish amounts of fat calories per ounce; Cheetos have fewer carbs, though more salt.)

The Pollanites seem confused about exactly what benefits their way of eating provides. All the railing about the fat, sugar, and salt engineered into industrial junk food might lead one to infer that wholesome food, having not been engineered, contains substantially less of them. But clearly you can take in obscene quantities of fat and problem carbs while eating wholesomely, and to judge by what’s sold at wholesome stores and restaurants, many people do. Indeed, the more converts and customers the wholesome-food movement’s purveyors seek, the stronger their incentive to emphasize foods that light up precisely the same pleasure centers as a 3 Musketeers bar. That just makes wholesome food stealthily obesogenic.

Hold on, you may be thinking. Leaving fat, sugar, and salt aside, what about all the nasty things that wholesome foods do not, by definition, contain and processed foods do? A central claim of the wholesome-food movement is that wholesome is healthier because it doesn’t have the artificial flavors, preservatives, other additives, or genetically modified ingredients found in industrialized food; because it isn’t subjected to the physical transformations that processed foods go through; and because it doesn’t sit around for days, weeks, or months, as industrialized food sometimes does. (This is the complaint against the McDonald’s smoothie, which contains artificial flavors and texture additives, and which is pre-mixed.)

The health concerns raised about processing itself—rather than the amount of fat and problem carbs in any given dish—are not, by and large, related to weight gain or obesity. That’s important to keep in mind, because obesity is, by an enormous margin, the largest health problem created by what we eat. But even putting that aside, concerns about processed food have been magnified out of all proportion.

Some studies have shown that people who eat wholesomely tend to be healthier than people who live on fast food and other processed food (particularly meat), but the problem with such studies is obvious: substantial nondietary differences exist between these groups, such as propensity to exercise, smoking rates, air quality, access to health care, and much more. (Some researchers say they’ve tried to control for these factors, but that’s a claim most scientists don’t put much faith in.) What’s more, the people in these groups are sometimes eating entirely different foods, not the same sorts of foods subjected to different levels of processing. It’s comparing apples to Whoppers, instead of Whoppers to hand-ground, grass-fed-beef burgers with heirloom tomatoes, garlic aioli, and artisanal cheese. For all these reasons, such findings linking food type and health are considered highly unreliable, and constantly contradict one another, as is true of most epidemiological studies that try to tackle broad nutritional questions.

The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely unhealthy. The U.S. population does not suffer from a critical lack of any nutrient because we eat so much processed food. (Sure, health experts urge Americans to get more calcium, potassium, magnesium, fiber, and vitamins A, E, and C, and eating more produce and dairy is a great way to get them, but these ingredients are also available in processed foods, not to mention supplements.) Pollan’s “foodlike substances” are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (with some exceptions, which are regulated by other agencies), and their effects on health are further raked over by countless scientists who would get a nice career boost from turning up the hidden dangers in some common food-industry ingredient or technique, in part because any number of advocacy groups and journalists are ready to pounce on the slightest hint of risk.

The results of all the scrutiny of processed food are hardly scary, although some groups and writers try to make them appear that way. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Food Additives Project, for example, has bemoaned the fact that the FDA directly reviews only about 70 percent of the ingredients found in food, permitting the rest to pass as “generally recognized as safe” by panels of experts convened by manufacturers. But the only actual risk the project calls out on its Web site or in its publications is a quote from a Times article noting that bromine, which has been in U.S. foods for eight decades, is regarded as suspicious by many because flame retardants containing bromine have been linked to health risks. There is no conclusive evidence that bromine itself is a threat.

In Pandora’s Lunchbox, Melanie Warner assiduously catalogs every concern that could possibly be raised about the health threats of food processing, leveling accusations so vague, weakly supported, tired, or insignificant that only someone already convinced of the guilt of processed food could find them troubling. While ripping the covers off the breakfast-cereal conspiracy, for example, Warner reveals that much of the nutritional value claimed by these products comes not from natural ingredients but from added vitamins that are chemically synthesized, which must be bad for us because, well, they’re chemically synthesized . It’s the tautology at the heart of the movement: processed foods are unhealthy because they aren’t natural, full stop.

In many respects, the wholesome-food movement veers awfully close to religion. To repeat: there is no hard evidence to back any health-risk claims about processed food—evidence, say, of the caliber of several studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that have traced food poisoning to raw milk, a product championed by some circles of the wholesome-food movement. “Until I hear evidence to the contrary, I think it’s reasonable to include processed food in your diet,” says Robert Kushner, a physician and nutritionist and a professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, where he is the clinical director of the Comprehensive Center on Obesity.

There may be other reasons to prefer wholesome food to the industrialized version. Often stirred into the vague stew of benefits attributed to wholesome food is the “sustainability” of its production—that is, its long-term impact on the planet. Small farms that don’t rely much on chemicals and heavy industrial equipment may be better for the environment than giant industrial farms—although that argument quickly becomes complicated by a variety of factors. For the purposes of this article, let’s simply stipulate that wholesome foods are environmentally superior. But let’s also agree that when it comes to prioritizing among food-related public-policy goals, we are likely to save and improve many more lives by focusing on cutting obesity—through any available means—than by trying to convert all of industrial agriculture into a vast constellation of small organic farms.

The impact of obesity on the chances of our living long, productive, and enjoyable lives has been so well documented at this point that I hate to drag anyone through the grim statistics again. But let me just toss out one recent dispatch from the world of obesity-havoc science: a study published in February in the journal Obesity found that obese young adults and middle-agers in the U.S. are likely to lose almost a decade of life on average, as compared with their non-obese counterparts. Given our obesity rates, that means Americans who are alive today can collectively expect to sacrifice 1 billion years to obesity. The study adds to a river of evidence suggesting that for the first time in modern history—and in spite of many health-related improvements in our environment, our health care, and our nondietary habits—our health prospects are worsening, mostly because of excess weight.

By all means, let’s protect the environment. But let’s not rule out the possibility of technologically enabled improvements to our diet—indeed, let’s not rule out any food—merely because we are pleased by images of pastoral family farms. Let’s first pick the foods that can most plausibly make us healthier, all things considered, and then figure out how to make them environmentally friendly.

II. Let Them Eat Kale

I’m a fan of many of Mark Bittman’s recipes. I shop at Whole Foods all the time. And I eat like many wholesome foodies, except I try to stay away from those many wholesome ingredients and dishes that are high in fat and problem carbs. What’s left are vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, poultry, and fish (none of them fried, thank you), which are often emphasized by many wholesome-food fans. In general, I find that the more-natural versions of these ingredients taste at least a bit better, and occasionally much better, than the industrialized versions. And despite the wholesome-food movement’s frequent and inexcusable obliviousness to the obesogenicity of many of its own foods, it deserves credit for paying more attention to those healthier ingredients than does Big Food.

Where the Pollanites get into real trouble—where their philosophy becomes so glib and wrongheaded that it is actually immoral—is in the claim that their style of food shopping and eating is the answer to the country’s weight problem. Helping me to indulge my taste for genuinely healthy wholesome foods are the facts that I’m relatively affluent and well educated, and that I’m surrounded by people who tend to take care with what they eat. Not only am I within a few minutes’ drive of three Whole Foods and two Trader Joe’s, I’m within walking distance of two other supermarkets and more than a dozen restaurants that offer bountiful healthy-eating options.

I am, in short, not much like the average obese person in America, and neither are the Pollanites. That person is relatively poor, does not read The Times or cookbook manifestos, is surrounded by people who eat junk food and are themselves obese, and stands a good chance of living in a food desert—an area where produce tends to be hard to find, of poor quality, or expensive.

The wholesome foodies don’t argue that obesity and class are unrelated, but they frequently argue that the obesity gap between the classes has been created by the processed-food industry, which, in the past few decades, has preyed mostly on the less affluent masses. Yet Lenard Lesser, a physician and an obesity researcher at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute, says that can’t be so, because the obesity gap predates the fast-food industry and the dietary dominance of processed food. “The difference in obesity rates in low- and high-income groups was evident as far back as we have data, at least back through the 1960s,” he told me. One reason, some researchers have argued, is that after having had to worry, over countless generations, about getting enough food, poorer segments of society had little cultural bias against overindulging in food, or putting on excess pounds, as industrialization raised incomes and made rich food cheaply available.

The most obvious problem with the “let them eat kale” philosophy of affluent wholesome-food advocates involves the price and availability of wholesome food. Even if Whole Foods, Real Food Daily, or the Farmhouse weren’t three bus rides away for the working poor, and even if three ounces of Vegan Cheesy Salad Booster, a Sea Cake appetizer, and the vegetarian quiche weren’t laden with fat and problem carbs, few among them would be likely to shell out $5.99, $9.95, or $16, respectively, for those pricey treats.

A slew of start-ups are trying to find ways of producing fresh, local, unprocessed meals quickly and at lower cost. But could this food eventually be sold as cheaply, conveniently, and ubiquitously as today’s junky fast food? Not even according to Bittman, who explored the question in a recent New York Times Magazine article. Even if wholesome food caught on with the public at large, including the obese population, and even if poor and working-class people were willing to pay a premium for it, how long would it take to scale up from a handful of shops to the tens of thousands required to begin making a dent in the obesity crisis? How long would it take to create the thousands of local farms we’d need in order to provide these shops with fresh, unprocessed ingredients, even in cities?

Yet these hurdles can be waved away, if one only has the proper mind-set. Bittman argued two years ago in The Times that there’s no excuse for anyone, food-desert-bound or not, to eat fast food rather than wholesome food, because even if it’s not perfectly fresh and locally grown, lower-end wholesome food—when purchased judiciously at the supermarket and cooked at home—can be cheaper than fast food. Sure, there’s the matter of all the time, effort, schedule coordination, and ability it takes to shop, cook, serve, and clean up. But anyone who whines about that extra work, Bittman chided, just doesn’t want to give up their excessive TV watching. (An “important benefit of paying more for better-quality food is that you’re apt to eat less of it,” Pollan helpfully noted in his 2008 book, In Defense of Food .) It’s remarkable how easy it is to remake the disadvantaged in one’s own image.

L et’s assume for a moment that somehow America, food deserts and all, becomes absolutely lousy with highly affordable outlets for wholesome, locally sourced dishes that are high in vegetables, fruits, legumes, poultry, fish, and whole grains, and low in fat and problem carbs. What percentage of the junk-food-eating obese do we want to predict will be ready to drop their Big Macs, fries, and Cokes for grilled salmon on chard? We can all agree that many obese people find the former foods extremely enjoyable, and seem unable to control their consumption of them. Is greater availability of healthier food that pushes none of the same thrill buttons going to solve the problem?

Many Pollanites insist it will. “If the government came into these communities and installed Brita filters under their sinks, they’d drink water instead of Coke,” Lisa Powell, a professor of health policy and administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for Health Research and Policy, told me. But experts who actually work with the obese see a more difficult transition, especially when busy schedules are thrown into the equation. “They won’t eat broccoli instead of french fries,” says Kelli Drenner, an obesity researcher at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, which has about four fast-food restaurants per block along most of its main drag. “You try to make even a small change to school lunches, and parents and kids revolt.”

Hoping to gain some firsthand insight into the issue while in L.A., I drove away from the wholesome-food-happy, affluent, and mostly trim communities of the northwestern part of the city, and into East L.A. The largely Hispanic population there was nonaffluent and visibly plagued by obesity. On one street, I saw a parade of young children heading home from school. Perhaps a quarter of them were significantly overweight; several walked with a slow, waddling gait.

The area I found that’s most chockablock with commercial food options brackets the busy intersection of two main streets. However, like most areas I passed through nearby, this food scene was dominated not by fast-food restaurants but by bodegas (which, like most other types of convenience stores, are usually considered part of the low-income, food-desert landscape). I went into several of these mom-and-pop shops and saw pretty much the same thing in every one: A prominent display of extremely fatty-looking beef and pork, most of it fresh, though gigantic strips of fried pork skin often got pride of place. A lot of canned and boxed foods. Up front, shelves of candy and heavily processed snacks. A large set of display cases filled mostly with highly sugared beverages. And a small refrigerator case somewhere in the back sparsely populated with not-especially-fresh-looking fruits and vegetables. The bodega industry, too, seems to have plotted to addict communities to fat, sugar, and salt—unless, that is, they’re simply providing the foods that people like.

Various efforts have been made to redesign bodegas to emphasize healthier choices. I learned that one retooled bodega was nearby, and dropped in. It was cleaner and brighter than the others I’d seen, and a large produce case was near the entrance, brimming with an impressive selection of fresh-looking produce. The candy and other junky snack foods were relegated to a small set of shelves closer to the more dimly lit rear of the store. But I couldn’t help noticing that unlike most of the other bodegas I’d been to, this one was empty, except for me and a lone employee. I hung around, eventually buying a few items to assuage the employee’s growing suspicion. Finally, a young woman came in, made a beeline for the junk-food shelves, grabbed a pack of cupcakes, paid, and left.

It’s not exactly a scientific study, but we really shouldn’t need one to recognize that people aren’t going to change their ingrained, neurobiologically supercharged junk-eating habits just because someone dangles vegetables in front of them, farm-fresh or otherwise. Mark Bittman sees signs of victory in “the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s,” but it’s not hard to imagine which parents, which kids, and which neighborhoods those stories might involve. One study found that subsidizing the purchase of vegetables encouraged shoppers to buy more vegetables, but also more junk food with the money they saved; on balance, their diets did not improve. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that the aughts saw a significant drop in fruit intake, and no increase in vegetable consumption; Americans continue to fall far short of eating the recommended amounts of either. “Everyone’s mother and brother has been telling them to eat more fruit and vegetables forever, and the numbers are only getting worse,” says Steven Nickolas, who runs the Healthy Food Project in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We’re not going to solve this problem by telling people to eat unprocessed food.”

Trim, affluent Americans of course have a right to view dietary questions from their own perspective—that is, in terms of what they need to eat in order to add perhaps a few months onto the already healthy courses of their lives. The pernicious sleight of hand is in willfully confusing what might benefit them—small, elite minority that they are—with what would help most of society. The conversations they have among themselves in The Times , in best-selling books, and at Real Food Daily may not register with the working-class obese. But these conversations unquestionably distort the views of those who are in a position to influence what society does about the obesity problem.

III. The Food Revolution We Need

The one fast-food restaurant near that busy East L.A. intersection otherwise filled with bodegas was a Carl’s Jr. I went in and saw that the biggest and most prominent posters in the store were pushing a new grilled-cod sandwich. It actually looked pretty good, but it wasn’t quite lunchtime, and I just wanted a cup of coffee. I went to the counter to order it, but before I could say anything, the cashier greeted me and asked, “Would you like to try our new Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich today?” Oh, well, sure, why not? (I asked her to hold the tartar sauce, which is mostly fat, but found out later that the sandwich is normally served with about half as much tartar sauce as the notoriously fatty Filet-O-Fish sandwich at McDonald’s, where the fish is battered and fried.) The sandwich was delicious. It was less than half the cost of the Sea Cake appetizer at Real Food Daily. It took less than a minute to prepare. In some ways, it was the best meal I had in L.A., and it was probably the healthiest.

We know perfectly well who within our society has developed an extraordinary facility for nudging the masses to eat certain foods, and for making those foods widely available in cheap and convenient forms. The Pollanites have led us to conflate the industrial processing of food with the adding of fat and sugar in order to hook customers, even while pushing many faux-healthy foods of their own. But why couldn’t Big Food’s processing and marketing genius be put to use on genuinely healthier foods, like grilled fish? Putting aside the standard objection that the industry has no interest in doing so—we’ll see later that in fact the industry has plenty of motivation for taking on this challenge—wouldn’t that present a more plausible answer to America’s junk-food problem than ordering up 50,000 new farmers’ markets featuring locally grown organic squash blossoms?

According to Lenard Lesser, of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, the food industry has mastered the art of using in-store and near-store promotions to shape what people eat. As Lesser and I drove down storied Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and into far less affluent Oakland, leaving behind the Whole Foods Markets and sushi restaurants for gas-station markets and barbecued-rib stands, he pointed out the changes in the billboards. Whereas the last one we saw in Berkeley was for fruit juice, many in Oakland tout fast-food joints and their wares, including several featuring the Hot Mess Burger at Jack in the Box. Though Lesser noted that this forest of advertising may simply reflect Oakland residents’ preexisting preference for this type of food, he told me lab studies have indicated that the more signs you show people for a particular food product or dish, the more likely they are to choose it over others, all else being equal.

We went into a KFC and found ourselves traversing a maze of signage that put us face-to-face with garish images of various fried foods that presumably had some chicken somewhere deep inside them. “The more they want you to buy something, the bigger they make the image on the menu board,” Lesser explained. Here, what loomed largest was the $19.98 fried-chicken-and-corn family meal, which included biscuits and cake. A few days later, I noticed that McDonald’s places large placards showcasing desserts on the trash bins, apparently calculating that the best time to entice diners with sweets is when they think they’ve finished their meals.

Trying to get burger lovers to jump to grilled fish may already be a bit of a stretch—I didn’t see any of a dozen other customers buy the cod sandwich when I was at Carl’s Jr., though the cashier said it was selling reasonably well. Still, given the food industry’s power to tinker with and market food, we should not dismiss its ability to get unhealthy eaters—slowly, incrementally—to buy better food.

That brings us to the crucial question: Just how much healthier could fast-food joints and processed-food companies make their best-selling products without turning off customers? I put that question to a team of McDonald’s executives, scientists, and chefs who are involved in shaping the company’s future menus, during a February visit to McDonald’s surprisingly bucolic campus west of Chicago. By way of a partial answer, the team served me up a preview tasting of two major new menu items that had been under development in their test kitchens and high-tech sensory-testing labs for the past year, and which were rolled out to the public in April. The first was the Egg White Delight McMuffin ($2.65), a lower-calorie, less fatty version of the Egg McMuffin, with some of the refined flour in the original recipe replaced by whole-grain flour. The other was one of three new Premium McWraps ($3.99), crammed with grilled chicken and spring mix, and given a light coating of ranch dressing amped up with rice vinegar. Both items tasted pretty good (as do the versions in stores, I’ve since confirmed, though some outlets go too heavy on the dressing). And they were both lower in fat, sugar, and calories than not only many McDonald’s staples, but also much of the food served in wholesome restaurants or touted in wholesome cookbooks.

In fact, McDonald’s has quietly been making healthy changes for years, shrinking portion sizes, reducing some fats, trimming average salt content by more than 10 percent in the past couple of years alone, and adding fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and oatmeal to its menu. In May, the chain dropped its Angus third-pounders and announced a new line of quarter-pound burgers, to be served on buns containing whole grains. Outside the core fast-food customer base, Americans are becoming more health-conscious. Public backlash against fast food could lead to regulatory efforts, and in any case, the fast-food industry has every incentive to maintain broad appeal. “We think a lot about how we can bring nutritionally balanced meals that include enough protein, along with the tastes and satisfaction that have an appetite-tiding effect,” said Barbara Booth, the company’s director of sensory science.

Such steps are enormously promising, says Jamy Ard, an epidemiology and preventive-medicine researcher at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a co-director of the Weight Management Center there. “Processed food is a key part of our environment, and it needs to be part of the equation,” he explains. “If you can reduce fat and calories by only a small amount in a Big Mac, it still won’t be a health food, but it wouldn’t be as bad, and that could have a huge impact on us.” Ard, who has been working for more than a decade with the obese poor, has little patience with the wholesome-food movement’s call to eliminate fast food in favor of farm-fresh goods. “It’s really naive,” he says. “Fast food became popular because it’s tasty and convenient and cheap. It makes a lot more sense to look for small, beneficial changes in that food than it does to hold out for big changes in what people eat that have no realistic chance of happening.”

According to a recent study, Americans get 11 percent of their calories, on average, from fast food—a number that’s almost certainly much higher among the less affluent overweight. As a result, the fast-food industry may be uniquely positioned to improve our diets. Research suggests that calorie counts in a meal can be trimmed by as much as 30 percent without eaters noticing—by, for example, reducing portion sizes and swapping in ingredients that contain more fiber and water. Over time, that could be much more than enough to literally tip the scales for many obese people. “The difference between losing weight and not losing weight,” says Robert Kushner, the obesity scientist and clinical director at Northwestern, “is a few hundred calories a day.”

Which raises a question: If McDonald’s is taking these sorts of steps, albeit in a slow and limited way, why isn’t it more loudly saying so to deflect criticism? While the company has heavily plugged the debut of its new egg-white sandwich and chicken wraps, the ads have left out even a mention of health, the reduced calories and fat, or the inclusion of whole grains. McDonald’s has practically kept secret the fact that it has also begun substituting whole-grain flour for some of the less healthy refined flour in its best-selling Egg McMuffin.

The explanation can be summed up in two words that surely strike fear into the hearts of all fast-food executives who hope to make their companies’ fare healthier: McLean Deluxe.

Among those who gleefully rank such things, the McLean Deluxe reigns as McDonald’s worst product failure of all time, eclipsing McPasta, the McHotdog, and the McAfrica (don’t ask). When I brought up the McLean Deluxe to the innovation team at McDonald’s, I faced the first and only uncomfortable silence of the day. Finally, Greg Watson, a senior vice president, cleared his throat and told me that neither he nor anyone else in the room was at the company at the time, and he didn’t know that much about it. “It sounds to me like it was ahead of its time,” he added. “If we had something like that in the future, we would never launch it like that again.”

Introduced in 1991, the McLean Deluxe was perhaps the boldest single effort the food industry has ever undertaken to shift the masses to healthier eating. It was supposed to be a healthier version of the Quarter Pounder, made with extra-lean beef infused with seaweed extract. It reportedly did reasonably well in early taste tests—for what it’s worth, my wife and I were big fans—and McDonald’s pumped the reduced-fat angle to the public for all it was worth. The general reaction varied from lack of interest to mockery to revulsion. The company gamely flogged the sandwich for five years before quietly removing it from the menu.

The McLean Deluxe was a sharp lesson to the industry, even if in some ways it merely confirmed what generations of parents have well known: if you want to turn off otherwise eager eaters to a dish, tell them it’s good for them. Recent studies suggest that calorie counts placed on menus have a negligible effect on food choices, and that the less-health-conscious might even use the information to steer clear of low-calorie fare—perhaps assuming that it tastes worse and is less satisfying, and that it’s worse value for their money. The result is a sense in the food industry that if it is going to sell healthier versions of its foods to the general public—and not just to that minority already sold on healthier eating—it is going to have to do it in a relatively sneaky way, emphasizing the taste appeal and not the health benefits. “People expect something to taste worse if they believe it’s healthy,” says Charles Spence, an Oxford University neuroscientist who specializes in how the brain perceives food. “And that expectation affects how it tastes to them, so it actually does taste worse.”

Thus McDonald’s silence on the nutritional profiles of its new menu items. “We’re not making any health claims,” Watson said. “We’re just saying it’s new, it tastes great, come on in and enjoy it. Maybe once the product is well seated with customers, we’ll change that message.” If customers learn that they can eat healthier foods at McDonald’s without even realizing it, he added, they’ll be more likely to try healthier foods there than at other restaurants. The same reasoning presumably explains why the promotions and ads for the Carl’s Jr. grilled-cod sandwich offer not a word related to healthfulness, and why there wasn’t a whiff of health cheerleading surrounding the turkey burger brought out earlier this year by Burger King (which is not yet calling the sandwich a permanent addition).

If the food industry is to quietly sell healthier products to its mainstream, mostly non-health-conscious customers, it must find ways to deliver the eating experience that fat and problem carbs provide in foods that have fewer of those ingredients. There is no way to do that with farm-fresh produce and wholesome meat, other than reducing portion size. But processing technology gives the food industry a potent tool for trimming unwanted ingredients while preserving the sensations they deliver.

I visited Fona International, a flavor-engineering company also outside Chicago, and learned that there are a battery of tricks for fooling and appeasing taste buds, which are prone to notice a lack of fat or sugar, or the presence of any of the various bitter, metallic, or otherwise unpleasant flavors that vegetables, fiber, complex carbs, and fat or sugar substitutes can impart to a food intended to appeal to junk-food eaters. Some 5,000 FDA-approved chemical compounds—which represent the base components of all known flavors—line the shelves that run alongside Fona’s huge labs. Armed with these ingredients and an array of state-of-the-art chemical-analysis and testing tools, Fona’s scientists and engineers can precisely control flavor perception. “When you reduce the sugar, fat, and salt in foods, you change the personality of the product,” said Robert Sobel, a chemist, who heads up research at the company. “We can restore it.”

For example, fat “cushions” the release of various flavors on the tongue, unveiling them gradually and allowing them to linger. When fat is removed, flavors tend to immediately inundate the tongue and then quickly flee, which we register as a much less satisfying experience. Fona’s experts can reproduce the “temporal profile” of the flavors in fattier foods by adding edible compounds derived from plants that slow the release of flavor molecules; by replacing the flavors with similarly flavored compounds that come on and leave more slowly; or by enlisting “phantom aromas” that create the sensation of certain tastes even when those tastes are not present on the tongue. (For example, the smell of vanilla can essentially mask reductions in sugar of up to 25 percent.) One triumph of this sort of engineering is the modern protein drink, a staple of many successful weight-loss programs and a favorite of those trying to build muscle. “Seven years ago they were unpalatable,” Sobel said. “Today we can mask the astringent flavors and eggy aromas by adding natural ingredients.”

I also visited Tic Gums in White Marsh, Maryland, a company that engineers textures into food products. Texture hasn’t received the attention that flavor has, noted Greg Andon, Tic’s boyish and ebullient president, whose family has run the company for three generations. The result, he said, is that even people in the food industry don’t have an adequate vocabulary for it. “They know what flavor you’re referring to when you say ‘forest floor,’ but all they can say about texture is ‘Can you make it more creamy?’ ” So Tic is inventing a vocabulary, breaking textures down according to properties such as “mouth coating” and “mouth clearing.” Wielding an arsenal of some 20 different “gums”—edible ingredients mostly found in tree sap, seeds, and other plant matter—Tic’s researchers can make low-fat foods taste, well, creamier; give the same full body that sugared drinks offer to sugar-free beverages; counter chalkiness and gloopiness; and help orchestrate the timing of flavor bursts. (Such approaches have nothing in common with the ill-fated Olestra, a fat-like compound engineered to pass undigested through the body, and billed in the late 1990s as a fat substitute in snack foods. It was made notorious by widespread anecdotal complaints of cramps and loose bowels, though studies seemed to contradict those claims.)

Fona and Tic, like most companies in their industry, won’t identify customers or product names on the record. But both firms showed me an array of foods and beverages that were under construction, so to speak, in the name of reducing calories, fat, and sugar while maintaining mass appeal. I’ve long hated the taste of low-fat dressing—I gave up on it a few years ago and just use vinegar—but Tic served me an in-development version of a low-fat salad dressing that was better than any I’ve ever had. Dozens of companies are doing similar work, as are the big food-ingredient manufacturers, such as ConAgra, whose products are in 97 percent of American homes, and whose whole-wheat flour is what McDonald’s is relying on for its breakfast sandwiches. Domino Foods, the sugar manufacturer, now sells a low-calorie combination of sugar and the nonsugar sweetener stevia that has been engineered by a flavor company to mask the sort of nonsugary tastes driving many consumers away from diet beverages and the like. “Stevia has a licorice note we were able to have taken out,” explains Domino Foods CEO Brian O’Malley.

High-tech anti-obesity food engineering is just warming up. Oxford’s Charles Spence notes that in addition to flavors and textures, companies are investigating ways to exploit a stream of insights that have been coming out of scholarly research about the neuroscience of eating. He notes, for example, that candy companies may be able to slip healthier ingredients into candy bars without anyone noticing, simply by loading these ingredients into the middle of the bar and leaving most of the fat and sugar at the ends of the bar. “We tend to make up our minds about how something tastes from the first and last bites, and don’t care as much what happens in between,” he explains. Some other potentially useful gimmicks he points out: adding weight to food packaging such as yogurt containers, which convinces eaters that the contents are rich with calories, even when they’re not; using chewy textures that force consumers to spend more time between bites, giving the brain a chance to register satiety; and using colors, smells, sounds, and packaging information to create the belief that foods are fatty and sweet even when they are not. Spence found, for example, that wine is perceived as 50 percent sweeter when consumed under a red light.

Researchers are also tinkering with food ingredients to boost satiety. Cargill has developed a starch derived from tapioca that gives dishes a refined-carb taste and mouthfeel, but acts more like fiber in the body—a feature that could keep the appetite from spiking later. “People usually think that processing leads to foods that digest too quickly, but we’ve been able to use processing to slow the digestion rate,” says Bruce McGoogan, who heads R&D for Cargill’s North American food-ingredient business. The company has also developed ways to reduce fat in beef patties, and to make baked goods using half the usual sugar and oil, all without heavily compromising taste and texture.

Other companies and research labs are trying to turn out healthier, more appealing foods by enlisting ultra-high pressure, nanotechnology, vacuums, and edible coatings. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Center for Foods for Health and Wellness, Fergus Clydesdale, the director of the school’s Food Science Policy Alliance—as well as a spry 70-something who’s happy to tick off all the processed food in his diet—showed me labs where researchers are looking into possibilities that would not only attack obesity but also improve health in other significant ways, for example by isolating ingredients that might lower the risk of cancer and concentrating them in foods. “When you understand foods at the molecular level,” he says, “there’s a lot you can do with food and health that we’re not doing now.”

IV. The Implacable Enemies of Healthier Processed Food

What’s not to like about these developments? Plenty, if you’ve bought into the notion that processing itself is the source of the unhealthfulness of our foods. The wholesome-food movement is not only talking up dietary strategies that are unlikely to help most obese Americans; it is, in various ways, getting in the way of strategies that could work better.

The Pollanites didn’t invent resistance to healthier popular foods, as the fates of the McLean Deluxe and Olestra demonstrate, but they’ve greatly intensified it. Fast food and junk food have their core customer base, and the wholesome-food gurus have theirs. In between sit many millions of Americans—the more the idea that processed food should be shunned no matter what takes hold in this group, the less incentive fast-food joints will have to continue edging away from the fat- and problem-carb-laden fare beloved by their most loyal customers to try to broaden their appeal.

Pollan has popularized contempt for “nutritionism,” the idea behind packing healthier ingredients into processed foods. In his view, the quest to add healthier ingredients to food isn’t a potential solution, it’s part of the problem. Food is healthy not when it contains healthy ingredients, he argues, but when it can be traced simply and directly to (preferably local) farms. As he resonantly put it in The Times in 2007: “If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.”

In this way, wholesome-food advocates have managed to pre-damn the very steps we need the food industry to take, placing the industry in a no-win situation: If it maintains the status quo, then we need to stay away because its food is loaded with fat and sugar. But if it tries to moderate these ingredients, then it is deceiving us with nutritionism. Pollan explicitly counsels avoiding foods containing more than five ingredients, or any hard-to-pronounce or unfamiliar ingredients. This rule eliminates almost anything the industry could do to produce healthier foods that retain mass appeal—most of us wouldn’t get past xanthan gum—and that’s perfectly in keeping with his intention.

By placing wholesome eating directly at odds with healthier processed foods, the Pollanites threaten to derail the reformation of fast food just as it’s starting to gain traction. At McDonald’s, “Chef Dan”—that is, Dan Coudreaut, the executive chef and director of culinary innovation—told me of the dilemma the movement has caused him as he has tried to make the menu healthier. “Some want us to have healthier food, but others want us to have minimally processed ingredients, which can mean more fat,” he explained. “It’s becoming a balancing act for us.” That the chef with arguably the most influence in the world over the diet of the obese would even consider adding fat to his menu to placate wholesome foodies is a pretty good sign that something has gone terribly wrong with our approach to the obesity crisis.

Many people insist that the steps the food industry has already taken to offer less-obesogenic fare are no more than cynical ploys to fool customers into eating the same old crap under a healthy guise. In his 3,500-word New York Times Magazine article on the prospects for healthier fast food, Mark Bittman lauded a new niche of vegan chain restaurants while devoting just one line to the major “quick serve” restaurants’ contribution to better health: “I’m not talking about token gestures, like the McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are more than 50 percent sugar.” Never mind that 80 percent of a farm-fresh apple’s calories come from sugar; that almost any obesity expert would heartily approve of the yogurt parfait as a step in the right direction for most fast-food-dessert eaters; and that many of the desserts Bittman glorifies in his own writing make the parfait look like arugula, nutrition-wise. (His recipe for corn-and-blueberry crisp, for example, calls for adding two-thirds of a cup of brown sugar to a lot of other problem carbs, along with five tablespoons of butter.)

Bittman is hardly alone in his reflexive dismissals. No sooner had McDonald’s and Burger King rolled out their egg-white sandwich and turkey burger, respectively, than a spate of articles popped up hooting that the new dishes weren’t healthier because they trimmed a mere 50 and 100 calories from their standard counterparts, the Egg McMuffin and the Whopper. Apparently these writers didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, the fact that a reduction of 50 or 100 calories in a single dish places an eater exactly on track to eliminate a few hundred calories a day from his or her diet—the critical threshold needed for long-term weight loss. Any bigger reduction would risk leaving someone too hungry to stick to a diet program. It’s just the sort of small step in the right direction we should be aiming for, because the obese are much more likely to take it than they are to make a big leap to wholesome or very-low-calorie foods.

Many wholesome foodies insist that the food industry won’t make serious progress toward healthier fare unless forced to by regulation. I, for one, believe regulation aimed at speeding the replacement of obesogenic foods with appealing healthier foods would be a great idea. But what a lot of foodies really want is to ban the food industry from selling junk food altogether. And that is just a fantasy. The government never managed to keep the tobacco companies from selling cigarettes, and banning booze (the third-most-deadly consumable killer after cigarettes and food) didn’t turn out so well. The two most health-enlightened, regulation-friendly major cities in America, New York and San Francisco, tried to halt sales of two of the most horrific fast-food assaults on health—giant servings of sugared beverages and kids’ fast-food meals accompanied by toys, respectively—and neither had much luck. Michelle Obama is excoriated by conservatives for asking schools to throw more fruits and vegetables into the lunches they serve. Realistically, the most we can hope for is a tax on some obesogenic foods. The research of Lisa Powell, the University of Illinois professor, suggests that a 20 percent tax on sugary beverages would reduce consumption by about 25 percent. (As for fatty foods, no serious tax proposal has yet been made in the U.S., and if one comes along, the wholesome foodies might well join the food industry and most consumers in opposing it. Denmark did manage to enact a fatty-food tax, but it was deemed a failure when consumers went next door into Germany and Sweden to stock up on their beloved treats.)

Continuing to call out Big Food on its unhealthy offerings, and loudly, is one of the best levers we have for pushing it toward healthier products—but let’s call it out intelligently, not reflexively. Executives of giant food companies may be many things, but they are not stupid. Absent action, they risk a growing public-relations disaster, the loss of their more affluent and increasingly health-conscious customers, and the threat of regulation, which will be costly to fight, even if the new rules don’t stick. Those fears are surely what’s driving much of the push toward moderately healthier fare within the industry today. But if the Pollanites convince policy makers and the health-conscious public that these foods are dangerous by virtue of not being farm-fresh, that will push Big Food in a different direction (in part by limiting the profit potential it sees in lower-fat, lower-problem-carb foods), and cause it to spend its resources in other ways.

Significant regulation of junk food may not go far, but we have other tools at our disposal to prod Big Food to intensify and speed up its efforts to cut fat and problem carbs in its offerings, particularly if we’re smart about it. Lenard Lesser points out that government and advocacy groups could start singling out particular restaurants and food products for praise or shaming—a more official version of “eat this, not that”—rather than sticking to a steady drumbeat of “processed food must go away.” Academia could do a much better job of producing and highlighting solid research into less obesogenic, high-mass-appeal foods, and could curtail its evidence-light anti-food-processing bias, so that the next generation of social and policy entrepreneurs might work to narrow the gap between the poor obese and the well-resourced healthy instead of inadvertently widening it. We can keep pushing our health-care system to provide more incentives and support to the obese for losing weight by making small, painless, but helpful changes in their behavior, such as switching from Whoppers to turkey burgers, from Egg McMuffins to Egg White Delights, or from blueberry crisp to fruit-and-yogurt parfaits.

And we can ask the wholesome-food advocates, and those who give them voice, to make it clearer that the advice they sling is relevant mostly to the privileged healthy—and to start getting behind realistic solutions to the obesity crisis.

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Junk Food in Schools and Childhood Obesity

Affiliation.

• 1 RAND Corporation, 1776 Main Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407, USA, [email protected] , x7367.
• PMID: 23729952
• PMCID: PMC3667628
• DOI: 10.1002/pam.21602

Despite limited empirical evidence, there is growing concern that junk food availability in schools has contributed to the childhood obesity epidemic. In this paper, we estimate the effects of junk food availability on BMI, obesity, and related outcomes among a national sample of fifth-graders. Unlike previous studies, we address the endogeneity of the school food environment by controlling for children's BMI at school entry and estimating instrumental variables regressions that leverage variation in the school's grade span. Our main finding is that junk food availability does not significantly increase BMI or obesity among this fifth grade cohort despite the increased likelihood of in-school junk food purchases. The results are robust to alternate measures of junk food availability including school administrator reports of sales during school hours, school administrator reports of competitive food outlets, and children's reports of junk food availability. Moreover, the absence of any effects on overall food consumption and physical activity further support the null findings for BMI and obesity.

Keywords: Competitive foods; Junk food; Obesity.

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Harmful Effects of Junk Food Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on harmful effects of junk food.

Junk Food is very harmful that is slowly eating away the health of the present generation. The term itself denotes how dangerous it is for our bodies. Most importantly, it tastes so good that people consume it on a daily basis. However, not much awareness is spread about the harmful effects of junk food.

The problem is more serious than you think. Various studies show that junk food impacts our health negatively. They contain higher levels of calories, fats, and sugar. On the contrary, they have very low amounts of healthy nutrients and lack dietary fibers. Parents must discourage their children from consuming junk food because of the ill effects it has on one’s health.

Impact of Junk Food

Junk food is the easiest way to gain unhealthy weight. The amount of fats and sugar in the food makes you gain weight rapidly. However, this is not a healthy weight. It is more of fats and cholesterol which will have a harmful impact on your health. Junk food is also one of the main reasons for the increase in obesity nowadays.

This food only looks and tastes good, other than that, it has no positive points. The amount of calorie your body requires to stay fit is not fulfilled by this food. For instance, foods like French fries, burgers, candy, and cookies, all have high amounts of sugar and fats. Therefore, this can result in long-term illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure . This may also result in kidney failure .

Above all, you can get various nutritional deficiencies when you don’t consume the essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals and more. You become prone to cardiovascular diseases due to the consumption of bad cholesterol and fat plus sodium. In other words, all this interferes with the functioning of your heart.

Furthermore, junk food contains a higher level of carbohydrates. It will instantly spike your blood sugar levels. This will result in lethargy, inactiveness, and sleepiness. A person reflex becomes dull overtime and they lead an inactive life. To make things worse, junk food also clogs your arteries and increases the risk of a heart attack. Therefore, it must be avoided at the first instance to save your life from becoming ruined.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Ways to Avoid Junk Food

The main problem with junk food is that people don’t realize its ill effects now. When the time comes, it is too late. Most importantly, the issue is that it does not impact you instantly. It works on your overtime; you will face the consequences sooner or later. Thus, it is better to stop now.

You can avoid junk food by encouraging your children from an early age to eat green vegetables. Their taste buds must be developed as such that they find healthy food tasty. Moreover, try to mix things up. Do not serve the same green vegetable daily in the same style. Incorporate different types of healthy food in their diet following different recipes. This will help them to try foods at home rather than being attracted to junk food.

In short, do not deprive them completely of it as that will not help. Children will find one way or the other to have it. Make sure you give them junk food in limited quantities and at healthy periods of time.

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Watch CBS News

Is junk food to blame for the obesity epidemic?

By Ashley Welch

November 5, 2015 / 3:38 PM EST / CBS News

Fast food, soft drinks and candy are often painted as the driving forces behind America's obesity epidemic , but new research suggests there's more to it than that.

In fact, according to the study from the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, junk food does not appear to be a leading cause of obesity in the United States. Rather, the researchers suggest that the blame lies with Americans' overall eating habits -- particularly the amount of food consumed.

But the researchers emphasize that the findings do not give people a free pass to indulge in junk food.

"If you over-eat junk foods , they are going to make you fat," study author David Just, PhD, co-director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, told CBS News. "It's just that it doesn't look like that it's those foods that are making people fat generally. It's something else. It's their broader diet or it's their exercise regimen."

Just worked with lab co-director Brian Wansink, PhD, to review the 2007-2008 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Household and Nutrition Examination Survey -- a nationally representative sample of approximately 5,000 adults in the U.S.

The participants were asked to recall their food intake within the last 24-hour period on two separate occasions. Height and weight were also collected to calculate body mass index (BMI).

The Cornell team's analysis, published in the journal Obesity Science & Practice, showed something surprising: there was no significant difference in junk food intake between overweight and healthy individuals. In fact, consumption of soda, candy and fast food was not linked to BMI for 95 percent of the population. The exception came with those on the extreme ends of the BMI spectrum: the chronically underweight and the morbidly obese.

While the researchers emphasized that eating junk food is still certainly unhealthy, they concluded that the overwhelming majority of weight problems are not caused by consumption of soda, candy and fast food alone. Rather the problem is that many Americans are just eating too much and not exercising enough.

For example, the researchers note that the average daily calories consumed in the U.S. in the 1970's, before the obesity epidemic took off, was 2,039 -- compared to the average of 2,544 consumed circa 2010.

The results, the researchers say, have big implications for how we think about food and weight gain .

"If you're thinking about this as a dieter, more than likely if all you're doing is cutting out junk foods it's not going to have much of an impact," Just said. "More importantly, if you're thinking about this in terms of food policy and how to encourage people to have healthier diets and be a healthy weight, targeting narrowly these foods probably isn't going to do it. It's more complicated than that. It's our entire diet."

But experts caution that the study should not be interpreted to mean that eating junk food is not harmful to weight.

"I don't think we can say that fast food, candy and soda are completely unrelated to body weight," Alissa Rumsey, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told CBS News. "These items are generally very high in calories and very low in nutrients. They are also heavily processed, and contain a lot of added fat and sugar."

Rumsey also pointed out that junk food is low in protein and fiber, doing little to keep you full and making it easy to over-consume calories.

"I find that when people cut down on these foods, and add whole, real foods like fruits, vegetables, lean protein and healthy fat, they lower their calorie consumption naturally without feeling hungry or deprived," she said. "While it is OK to treat yourself once in awhile, these types of junk foods should not be part of your daily diet."

This week, the Food and Brand Lab also released another study looking at the connection between what's eaten for breakfast and a healthy weight. After surveying almost 150 healthy-weight people, the researchers found that the most common breakfast items they consumed were fruits, dairy, cold cereal/granola, bread, eggs, hot cereal and coffee.

Though egg consumption was higher than expected, the researchers said that much can be learned from the breakfast habits of healthy-weight people.

"One important take away from this study is that a very high rate of slim people actually eat breakfast instead of skipping, which is consistent with previous research on the importance of breakfast," lead author Anna-Leena Vuorinen said in a statement. "But what stands out is that they not only ate breakfast, but that they ate healthful foods like fruits and vegetables."

Ashley Welch covers health and wellness for CBSNews.com

More from CBS News

How the food industry created today’s obesity crisis, with Marion Nestle (Ep. 110)

Scholar and critic discusses how politics in food and processed foods is impacting our health

In today's grocery stores, you can find more sugary snacks, artificial ingredients, and ultra-processed packaged foods. At the same time, the United States has seen an increase in obesity, which is costing our healthcare system, too. Nutritionist Marion Nestle says the problem today isn't that Americans don't know how to eat healthy, rather the food environment that we live in has made it much harder to do so.

In this episode, she discusses what policy changes are needed—from the way food studies are funded, to offering nutrition education in schools, to regulating the food industry better. Nestle is a Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, & Public Health at New York University, Emerita, and the author of many books, including  Food Politics:  How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health , and  Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics .

Subscribe to Big Brains on  Apple Podcasts ,  Stitcher  and  Spotify .

(Episode published March 30, 2023)

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• Marion Nestle's Unexpected yet Impactful Life in Food Politics—Worth
• How Marion Nestle Changed the Way We Talk About Food—GQ
• “Slow Cooked”: How Marion Nestle Revitalized Food Studies—Forbes

Transcript:

Paul Rand: How can we improve communication at work? Are stock markets really efficient? Should we let algorithms make moral choices? How will climate migration affect our societies? The Chicago Booth Review Podcast addresses the big questions in business, policy, and markets, with insight from the world’s leading academic researchers. We bring you groundbreaking research in a clear and straightforward way. It could help you make better decisions, work smarter, and maybe even become happier. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. We all know that eating healthy is important, but in practice, well, that’s much harder to do.

Tape: They’re chocolatey with crisp baked wafers and crunchy peanut sprinkled on top.

Tape: Marshmallows and chocolate graham crackers, yum.

Paul Rand: Are you craving sweets yet?

Tape: Startling new insight into the addictive power of sugary, salty, and fatty foods? Would you believe doctors have found that cravings for junk food may be as strong as an addiction to heroin or cocaine?

Paul Rand: These days, more sugar, artificial dyes, and preservatives are sneaking into our foods.

Tape: So the question I have is, why are they so addictive? And some may ask. Tasty. It’s delicious.

Paul Rand: It’s no secret that these foods aren’t good for us, and the health implications are massive. Today, around 42% of adults in the US are obese, and alarmingly, obesity is rising among children too.

Tape: In the US right now, one in five kids are considered obese by doctors.

Paul Rand: But it’s not just here. It’s a global problem. Obesity has tripled since 1975. So how did we wind up here?

Marion Nestle: We live in an environment in which we are surrounded by messages to eat more.

Paul Rand: That’s Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University. She is famously, and infamously in some circles, known as one of the food industry’s biggest critics.

Marion Nestle: The whole purpose of a food company is to get people to eat more of its products.

Paul Rand: Public health experts are well aware of this fact, and yet, it seems like our food environment has only gotten worse.

Marion Nestle: The study has just come out saying that the cost of obesity in healthcare and lost productivity is going to amount to trillions of dollars. And it’s going to affect every country in the world, and it’s going to affect people’s personal lives, in not very nice ways. We don’t have a healthcare system in the United States, but how are people’s health problems going to be paid for? Not easily.

Paul Rand: Welcome to Big Brains. On our show, we translate the biggest ideas and complex discoveries into digestible brain food, big brains, little bites, from the University of Chicago Podcast Network. I’m your host, Paul Rand. On today’s episode, the science of nutrition and food politics. I wonder if I can start off by maybe just getting you to talk about your training, your background, your education, because I think that is quite fundamental to how you approach the field of nutrition.

Marion Nestle: Well, I’ve always been interested in food. I love it. I think food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, something that you get to have a pleasure several times a day. And I actually went to college wanting to study food. But the options were dietetics or agriculture. I was a bacteriology major in college and then, went to graduate school in molecular biology. I wanted to understand how science worked, and it was really fabulous training. Because you can’t see what you’re doing in molecular biology. You have to infer it from the kinds of experiments that you’re doing. Everything is at the molecular level. The whole game in graduate school was to try to figure out what was wrong with everybody’s experiments, not in a particularly hostile way, but really, in a very intellectually challenging way. I found it very intellectually challenging and liked it a lot.

And I didn’t really get back to food until my first teaching job. I was at Brandeis University in the biology department, teaching cell and molecular biology, and got handed a nutrition course to teach. And you had to teach whatever the department wanted or needed. And students were sitting in the chair’s office demanding human biology classes. And they offered me a... I could do physiology or nutrition. I picked nutrition, because I thought it would be fun. And was it ever. And so, that kind of critical thinking that I was trained to do, I was able to use when I started looking at nutrition research, which is so much easier to deal with than molecular biology. And I tell the story in my memoir about a nutrition class that I had just been handed to teach. And so, I went to the library and started reading these studies in nutrition, and I would tell the story about it. It was an incredible experience, because the studies were done on six people, who were incarcerated in one way or another. And the famous one was the vitamin C study.

Paul Rand: The scurvy study.

Marion Nestle: The scurvy study of vitamin C, and it was done in a prison, which you can’t do anymore, for ethical reasons. And during the study, two of the prisoners escaped, and I thought, “oh, this is not a well controlled clinical trial.”

Paul Rand: Well, one of the lines that I read and I was quite impressed with, you said, “I have been attacked lots of times for my opinions, but never on my science.”

Marion Nestle: Yeah, it’s true. The science is there.

Paul Rand: These days, it’s impossible to escape the bombardment of nutrition advice and “research.” There are tons of diets and fads out there from gluten free to vegan.

Marion Nestle: Keto and paleo and this nutrient and this food and this diet type of diet and fad and this kind of fad and that kind of fad.

Paul Rand: It’s hard to keep up with all of the new trends. But as a nutrition expert, who has read it all, Nestle says it really comes down to a few simple guidelines.

Marion Nestle: Dietary advice boils down to eat real food, which means not a lot of junk food. Maintain a reasonable body weight and eat lots of plants. That’s all there is to it.

Paul Rand: It’s changed a lot though, hasn’t it? If we look even back at the last 50 years or we look at the food pyramid back in the nineties, it really keeps evolving, and it seems to change constantly. Why is that?

Marion Nestle: Well, I actually don’t agree with that.

Paul Rand: You don’t?

Marion Nestle: No, I don’t think nutrition advice has changed at all. In the 1950s, Ancel Keys and his wife, Margaret, wrote the first set of dietary guidelines for chronic disease prevention.

Ancel Keys: The facts are simple. The chief killer of Americans is cardiovascular disease, disorders, and degeneration of the heart and blood vessels. Here are vital statistics. They show that this problem here in America is the worst in the world.

Marion Nestle: And they say, “eat less saturated fat, salts, and sugar. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Don’t drink too much alcohol. Get plenty of sleep.” Now, you tell me what’s changed in that.

Paul Rand: All right, so that’s a really interesting, and you’re right, that’s the exact same thing we hear today. What are we not learning with that straightforward, simple advice she gave? Why in the world is the world getting more obese?

Marion Nestle: What happened? I could tell you what happened. I’ve got an elaborate explanation for what happened, beginning with the election of Reagan as president, that changed everything in the United States.

Ronald Reagan: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

Marion Nestle: Up until then, the percentage of obesity in the population was quite low. After 1980, it went up very rapidly. Genetics did not change in 1980. What changed was the food environment. What happened in 1980 with Reagan’s election was that corporations were given a free hand, and that free market ideology became the ideology that everybody accepted.

Ronald Reagan: It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.

Marion Nestle: By that time, food was already beginning to be enormously overproduced. All of the effort was to produce as much food as possible. The number of calories in the food supply from 1980 to 2000 went from an average of 3,200 a person per capita, men, women, little tiny babies, to 4,000. So there was an enormous increase in the amount of calories available in the food supply. There was also an enormous increase in the number of calories that people were eating. So portions went up. Food became available in places that it had never been sold before. Libraries, bookstores. And then, people wonder why people were eating more. Well, people were eating plenty more calories. A number of calories in people’s diets went up, and people gained an average of 10 to 20 pounds.

Tape: It’s morning again in America.

Marion Nestle: I had a doctoral student, Lisa Young, who did her dissertation on the change in sizes of portions from 1980 to 2000, and demonstrated that muffins, which, in the early 1980s, were mini muffins, are now 600, 800 calories. They’re enormous. It’s not intuitively obvious to understand that larger portions have more calories. If you think about it, it makes sense, but in fact, humans don’t react to portions that way. And we could prove that by asking students in a class how many calories were in an eight ounce soft drink and how many calories were in a 64 ounce soft drink. And the students, that’s an eight times difference. Eight times a hundred is 800. The average calories was 300. And these students are not that mathematically challenged. So when she went back and asked students why, they just said “800 calories in a soft drink is impossible.” So there’s something about portion size that makes everybody think it’s smaller than it is.

Tape: Big Gulp, 7-Eleven’s big drink for a big thirst.

Paul Rand: From the 1980s through the 1990s, soda consumption skyrocketed. At its peak in 1998, Americans were drinking 53 gallons of soda per capita.

Marion Nestle: They go down really easily. You have no idea how much sugar there is in sugar sweetened beverages, because the flavors hide the sweetness. So you really don’t realize how much sugar you’re getting. And there’s tons and tons of evidence that sugars in liquid form are absorbed rapidly, raise blood sugar and insulin levels, and do all kinds of bad things.

Paul Rand: But how do you guide people on how much is the right amount?

Marion Nestle: Well, there are sort of general recommendations. And the general recommendation is 10% or less of total calorie intake. If you’re on a 2000 calorie diet, then that’s 200 calories from sugar divided by four. So it’s 50 grams a day. That’s 12 teaspoons. The reason that sugar is a problem is because everybody loves it. They want every food they eat to taste sweet, and they can’t stop eating it.

Paul Rand: Something else changed in our food environment from the 1980s through today. And it may be the worst offender when it comes to our public health crisis, processed foods.

Marion Nestle: We love ultra processed foods, because they’re designed to be irresistibly delicious. You can’t eat just one.

Tape: Ultra processed foods make up more than half of all the calories in the US diet. And I know that sounds scary, and I don’t even know why, but...

Tape: Very much so.

Marion Nestle: The classic example that’s used to explain what ultra processed foods are is that corn on the cob is unprocessed. Canned corn is processed or minimally processed, and Doritos are ultra processed.

Tape: It’s the big crunch with the big cheese taste.

Marion Nestle: They don’t look anything like corn. You would never know what was in them unless you read the ingredient list, and you can’t eat just one. Or maybe you can. I certainly can’t.

Paul Rand: Well, tell me what happens in our bodies, if you can, when we are eating these highly processed foods.

Marion Nestle: We don’t really know. The one clinically controlled study that has examined this question, I think one of the most important nutrition studies ever done was the one that was done in 2019 at NIH, where people were put in a controlled metabolic ward. They were given either ultra processed food diet or a diet that was processed but not ultra processed. The people who were eating the food couldn’t tell the difference. They were matched in nutrient composition. And to the investigators’ absolute surprise, when people were on the ultra processed diet, they ate 500 calories a day on average more than they ate when they were on the other diet. 500 calories is a lot. It’s a lot. It’s a pound a week. And they gained a pound a week while they were on that diet, without realizing that they were eating more. So he’s trying to figure out why.

And the most obvious thing was that they were eating more quickly, but he didn’t think that that accounted for it enough. And so, he’s done the first study to examine it, and he said it’s the hyper palatability, the fact that these people just love eating these foods and don’t even realize it. And the calorie density, meaning that these are highly caloric products, and we really like calories. And now he’s doing further studies to try to figure out what’s going on. But we don’t really know the answer to that. All we know is that, when people are given ultra processed foods, they eat a lot of them. Or as somebody explained to me, if you’ve got a bag of Oreo cookies in front of you, it’s really hard to stop. If you’re eating a salad, there’s a point at which you have enough salad. There’s never a point at which you have enough Oreo cookies, and you’re confronted with that all the time. You’re confronted with billions and billions of dollars spent on advertising, products that are not necessarily healthy.

Paul Rand: Did you see the recent multi-billion dollar lettuce campaign?

Marion Nestle: No, I did not.

Paul Rand: I didn’t either.

Marion Nestle: Exactly.

Paul Rand: This dynamic is what led Nestle to develop her own niche in the nutrition field. She realized the issue wasn’t just the food itself, but the food environment that we live in, and that environment is dominated by what she calls “food politics.” That’s after the break. Have you ever wanted to learn more about the life story of our guests or wondered what other world-changing research was happening this week? Well, now we’ve got you covered. Subscribe to the new Big Brains Insider from the University of Chicago. The Insider is a biweekly email newsletter with exclusive content featuring expanded guest interviews, groundbreaking research we are following, and other fun behind the scenes content.

If you love Big Brains, you’ll love the Insider. Visit our website to opt in now at bigbrainspodcast.com. Big Brains is once again participating in the UChicago Giving Day March 29th and 30th. Your contributions help us continue to highlight more pioneering researchers and the impact of the work that is reshaping our world. If you like the show, please consider supporting us. A link is on our website at bigbrainspodcast.com. In 2002, Nestle published the book that would define the future of her career, and it would change the way the world thought about the food industry. It was called Food Politics.

Marion Nestle: Well, food politics is something I’ve been writing about for more than 20 years now. Everything about food is political. Everybody eats. Everybody buys food. It’s an enormous industry composed of everything from agricultural production to transportation to retail sales to restaurants to everything that you can think of connected with food. There’s an enormous amount of money involved in it. And the purveyors of goods in that system want to make sure that their profits are maximized at all times. And food companies are not social service agencies, they’re not public health agencies, they’re not non-for-profit organizations. They’re businesses with stockholders, and they’re a for-profit business.

Their job is to give profits to stockholders, as their absolute primary priority. They’re not in the business of making people healthy. They’re in the business of selling products. And so, if you were following Michael Pollan’s basic dietary advice, eat food, not too much, mostly plants, nobody’s making much of a profit off of that. The profits are off of junk foods. Those are the most profitable foods, foods that we’re now calling “ultra processed,” which are industrially produced, can’t be made in home kitchens, and, we now know, encourage people to eat more.

Paul Rand: And at one point, you wrote, “it appears as if the government and the food industry are collaborating to support a food environment that encourages people to eat more food than they need.” And I wonder, if you think about what the government’s role is, what is it? And how are they actually making it worse for us?

Marion Nestle: Well, the government is involved in every aspect of food production and consumption that you can possibly think of, starting with agriculture and agricultural subsidies and where they go. And the fact that 90% of United States corn production has nothing to do with food for people. Half of that 90% goes to feed animals, and the other half goes to fuel automobiles. That’s our food system. That makes no sense whatsoever. We’re not producing food for people. We’re producing food for animals, and everything else is sort of minor in comparison. That’s agricultural policy. To me, it makes no sense whatsoever. The government is involved in nutrition education, through the dietary guidelines for Americans, which get longer and more complicated every year and confuse people enormously, because they’re focused on details, not on the bigger picture. The government is involved in food labeling, which nobody understands, and nobody understood from the get-go, because when the FDA tested models of food labels in focus groups and other kinds of testing, nobody understood any of the models they were using. And they picked the one that was least worst understood.

So there’s basically no useful nutrition education in this country. There’s no money going to nutrition education. The government does food safety. We could sure do a better job of that. The government regulates advertising. We could sure do a lot better job of putting some restrictions on marketing of junk foods to kids, for example. And the tax policies allow food corporations to deduct the cost of marketing as a business expense. I could go on and on and on. There’s so many ways. They’re not things that you usually think about, but the result of government policy is a food environment that is very good for business and not very good for public health. And I’d like to see that changed.

Paul Rand: It’s been a long time coming, but government regulations are getting better. The FDA recently introduced a new rule that would crack down on super sugary cereal brands.

Tape: Cereal may not be as healthy as you think. The FDA recently issued a proposed rule that updates criteria for claiming of food is healthy, and it takes aim at added sugars.

Paul Rand: Fruit Loops, Fruity Pebbles, and Lucky Charms.

Tape: Cereal seems a wise way to start the day, with claims of whole grains, fiber, protein, heart healthy. But look closer, and you may find a not so sweet secret.

Tape: And what we’ll find is a lot of America’s favorite cereals, even those that they think are healthy, will no longer cut or make that definition of healthy.

Paul Rand: And guess what? Those cereal brands aren’t too happy. They claim their cereals are indeed healthy.

Marion Nestle: I have a whole book on it. It’s called Unsavory Truth, How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat. And it has to do with corporate funding of nutrition and food research.

Paul Rand: And this is where Nestle’s work cuts close to home for our research focused podcast. Her work has shown that, in the game of food politics, scientists aren’t always the neutral parties that they’d like to think of themselves as.

Marion Nestle: The makers of any product that you can think of on the market are funding research, in order to demonstrate that their product has some benefit for health or is safe or is benign or is whatever. And I, on my blog, foodpolitics.com, every Monday, I post one of these studies. Each one is funnier than the next, because I can predict from the title of a study who funded it. Or if I know who the funder is, I know what the results are going to be, because they pay for what they get. And it’s not that the people who are doing this research are bought, in the most obvious sense. They’re influenced, but don’t recognize the influence. And there’s a great deal of research on industry funding, that shows that the recipients of industry funding really don’t realize the ways in which they’re being influenced. In drug industry funding demonstrates that drug companies that fund basic medical research get the results they want.

And I find that, in order to deal with food companies, because I deal with food companies all the time, I have to go to an enormous effort to think, in every dealing with a food company, “am I putting myself in a position where my integrity is going to be compromised or in which my thinking is going to be influenced?” And it’s hard. It’s not easy to do that, but it’s just, by the most remarkable coincidence, the studies that are industry funded almost always come out in favor of the funder’s interest.

And I get letters all the time from food corporations or from trade groups saying, “we’ve got this amount of money, and we’re looking for studies that demonstrate the benefits of our product.” Well, they’re not going to fund anything that’s not likely to show a benefit. That’s where the bias comes in. So you can design a study to demonstrate benefit, and you’re giving the funder exactly what the funder wants. And your study comes out exactly the way the funder wants it. I think this is very unfortunate. A lot of this has to do with the lack of government funding, but also, I think, because people just don’t realize that this is about marketing, not science.

Paul Rand: But even if we did manage to have better research into the food that we eat, how much would actually change? Most people know to eat more whole foods, mostly fruits and vegetables. The problem is what they eat in between. Changing the politics of our food environment, well, that’s complicated.

Marion Nestle: No, I think there are two things that would be very useful. One would be to repeal the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United, which allows corporations to put as much money as they want into election campaigns, without having to disclose the amounts that they’re doing. We need a publicly funded election system, so that people who care about public health can run for office without getting corrupted. Right now, we have a corporate controlled election system, because they’ve got the money. So that’s one. And then, the second one, I think, is we have to change Wall Street. The way that Wall Street evaluates corporations is by how much money they make for their stockholders.

There have been some attempts by business leaders to try to say social values need to be incorporated into corporate activities. And corporations need to be evaluated on what they’re doing for the environment and what they’re doing for public health. But until Wall Street changes the way it evaluates corporations, based on those kinds of values, they can’t budge. They can do lip service to it. And a lot of corporations are doing lip service to environmental protection, but it’s not real. So these are big system changes that need to be done. How do we do that? We need to change our government. When students ask me what can they do, I tell them, “run for office.” You either have to develop grassroots power or you have to develop top down power. I think we need both.

Paul Rand: The latest solution being put forward today doesn’t so much look at these systemic changes. Rather, it promises to fix everything with just a simple little drug.

Tape: Ozempic.

Tape: Ozempic, a popular medication typically prescribed for people with type two diabetes is reportedly being used off label for weight loss by social media users.

Tape: This question, I had to ask what this was earlier, but how does Wegovy help you lose weight? I guess we start with, what is Wegovy?

Tape: I love this.

Tape The weight loss drug, Wegovy, also made by Novo Nordisk, is FDA approved for weight loss.

Paul Rand: These drugs have become famous for their seemingly miraculous ability to help patients lose weight.

Tape: A new crop of anti-obesity drugs are proving remarkably effective, cutting body weight by an average 15 to 22%. These medicines, including Ozempic and Wegovy, could trigger a shift in how doctors treat this.

Paul Rand: There’s a lot of discussions these days about different drugs, i.e., Ozempic, which was developed to help people with diabetes, but is now actually not uncommonly surprised to help people lose weight. How do you feel about this approach? And if we can’t manage the obesity issue through the food we’re consuming and the changes in the companies, is handling it pharmacologically an option in your mind and a good option?

Marion Nestle: No. From a health promotion, public health standpoint, you want to prevent type two diabetes. If you want to prevent type two diabetes, what you want to prevent is weight gain. Because weight gain is so closely associated with type two diabetes. It’s not that everybody who is overweight gets type two diabetes, but if you look at people with type two diabetes, roughly 90% of them are overweight by the usual standards, because we live in an environment in which we’re supposed to eat more, not less. So that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, I don’t treat children and adults who have obesity. I’m not somebody who does that, but I hear from people who do treat, and they are happy to have a tool, at long last, that might actually do some good. I’m not going to argue that. From my standpoint, I think in public health terms. I’m a public health person.

I think we really need public policy. We need government action. We need everybody to try to figure out what to do about obesity. It should be a source of enormous concern, and the government should be funding all kinds of studies to try to figure out some effective way for making it easier for people to eat more healthfully. So that’s on the pessimistic side. I don’t see that happening. On the optimistic side, I teach students, and I get to deal with young people who are interested in food and who want to use food to change the world for the better. They’re interested in studying about food. We have food studies programs in my department at NYU, and the students who come into that, at the undergraduate, masters, or doctoral level, want to change the world, using food as a means to do that. And because food connects to absolutely every problem in society in one way or another, they have the opportunity to do that. And I want to encourage them in every way I can.

Paul Rand: Final question, if I can, I’m going to follow you into a supermarket. What am I going to find about how you’re shopping, what you’re putting in your cart?

Marion Nestle: I try to have a shopping list and shop with blinders on, so I don’t get hooked by the things that are being pushed at me. I read food labels, mainly because they’re so entertaining. I just love reading food labels. “What are they doing now?” And I look at them with a very skeptical molecular biology lens. I find supermarkets just more fun than anything. And healthy diets don’t necessarily have to be more expensive. They could be just as delicious. You don’t have to give up the pleasure of food deed healthfully. And it’s better for kids. It’s better for adults. It’s better for old people. It’s better for everybody.

Paul Rand: If you’re getting a lot out of the important research shared on Big Brains, there’s another University of Chicago Podcast Network show you should check out. It’s called Entitled, and it’s about human rights, co-hosted by lawyers and new Chicago law school professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg. Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights.

Matthew Hodapp: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand and produced by me, Matt Hodapp and Lea Ceasrine. Thanks for listening.

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• v.59(3); 2018 Sep

Fast food consumption and overweight/obesity prevalence in students and its association with general and abdominal obesity

A. mohammadbeigi.

1 Research Center of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran

A. ASGARIAN

2 Research Center for Air Pollutants, Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom/Iran

3 Department of Anesthesiology, Faculty of Medicine, Arak University of Medical Sciences, Arak, Iran

S. AFRASHTEH

4 Department of Public Health, Vice chancellor of Health, MSc of Epidemiology, Bushehr University of Medical Sciences, Bushehr, Iran

5 Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, Hamadan, Iran

6 Health Promotion Research Center, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Zahedan, Iran

Nowadays, the prevalence of both fast food consumption and overweight/obesity has been increased. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of fast food consumption and to assess its association with abdominal and general obesity. In an analytical cross-sectional study, 300 students were selected randomly from two largest universities in Qom, center of Iran, studying in medical and basic sciences fields in 2015. Data collection was conducted by a modified version of NELSON’s fast food questionnaire and anthropometric measures including Waist-Hip Ratio (WHR) and Body Mass Index (BMI). Chi-square, independent t-test, and multivariate logistic regression were used for statistical analysis. According to our results, 72.4% (67.4% in females vs 80.7% in males) had at least one type of fast food consumption in the recent month including sandwich 44.4%, pizza 39.7%, and fried chicken 13.8%, The obesity prevalence based on BMI and WHR was 21.3% (95% CI: 19.4, 23.2%) and 33.2% (95% CI: 0.7, 35.7), respectively. Fast food consumption was related to abdominal obesity as WHR (OR: 1.46, 95% CI: 1.11, 2.26), but was not related to general obesity as BMI (OR: 0.97, 95% CI: 0.63, 1.52). The prevalence of fast food consumption and obesity/overweight in Iranian student is high. Fast food consumption was associated with abdominal obesity based WHR, but did not related to general obesity based on BMI.

In adolescent students, 72.4% and 34% have used at least one type of fast foods in recent month and in recent week.

The obesity prevalence based on BMI and WHR was 21.3 % (18.2% in females vs 26.3% in males) and 33.2% (40.1% in females vs 21.9% in males), respectively.

Fast food consumption was associated with WHR, while was not related to BMI.

Sandwich consumption was associated with obesity/overweight based on BMI to 35%, fried chicken to 40%, and pizza more than 80%.

Introduction

The percentage of caloric intake from fast foods has increased fivefold over the past three decades among adolescents [ 1 , 2 ]. In addition, obesity prevalence increased dramatically worldwide as one of the most serious public health problem especially in childhood and adolescents in current century [ 3 ]. Fast food consumption has increasing’ trend due to convenience, costs, menu choices, flavor and taste [ 4 ]. About 30% of children to more than 50% in college students use fast food daily[ 2 , 5 ]. Moreover, more than 33% of adults and 17% of children and teenagers are obese in united states [ 6 ]. Increased food consumption and substantial changes in the food habits are the most important factors of obesity epidemic [ 7 ] besides the poor diet among young people at recent years [ 8 ].

Wide ranges of causes are associated with obesity and overweight that varied from genetic to environmental factors [ 3 , 7 ]. However, our surround environment is one of the key factors that effective in the rapid development of the obesity epidemic in the world [ 7 ]. Fast food consumption is strongly associated with weight gain and obesity. Fast food consumption could increase the risk of obesity and obesity-related diseases as a major public health issue [ 9 , 10 ]. Obesity and overweight are the most important factors of non-communicable diseases related to years of life lost in cardiovascular diseases [ 11 , 12 ].

Fast food is defined by a convenience food purchased in self-service or carry out eating venues without wait service [ 9 ]. Todays, the number of women in the workforce is increased due to changes in the family structure and urbanization in all countries over the past years. Moreover, the working of people for longer hours expands and the food and mealtimes have changed seriously. A rapid growth is observed in fast food industries and restaurants [ 13 ]. Consequently, some worse consequences such as overweight and obesity have increasing trend [ 9 ]. Previous research has identified a strong positive association between the availability of fast food and its consumption as well as fast food consumption and obesity outcomes [ 5 , 8 , 10 , 14 , 15 ]. However, some studies assessed the fast food consumption on the general obesity based on Body Mass Index (BMI) [ 5 , 8 , 10 , 16 ]. Nevertheless, the association between fast food consumption and obesity type (abdominal/general) is unclear [ 3 , 10 ]. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of fast food consumption and obesity/overweight in two different governmental and nongovernmental universities, and to assess the association of fast food consumption with abdominal/general obesity.

This cross-sectional study was conducted on 300 students of two large Universities in Qom, center of Iran, that randomly selected and studying in medical and basic sciences fields at spring 2015. Sample size was calculated based on the fast food prevalence in recent studies with considering the power equal to 90% and first type error equal 5% as well as based on the minimal significant difference expected regarding fast food consumption between the two university and students who used and not used fast food. The study subjects were selected based on the multistage sampling method. In the first phase, according to the stratified random sampling method, 150 students selected from the Qom Medical University, and 150 students selected from a nongovernmental University (Qom branch of Islamic Azad University). Then in each stratum, simple random sampling was used for selecting some classes and recruitment of students. In the third phase, in each selected class, all the eligible students were called to participate in the study. After describing the objectives and the method of data gathering, the informed consent is taken from all the volunteer subjects. Moreover, the ethic committee of Qom University of Medical Sciences approve the study protocol.

Data collection was conducted by a modified version of standard NELSON’ fast food questionnaire [ 17 ]. The reliability and validity of this questionnaire is assessed by them and reported as a reliable measure with fair validity. Moreover, the content validity of modified version of questionnaire changed based on cultural and nutritional differences in Iranian people, was assessed by experts in epidemiology, nutrition and health education majors. Moreover, the reliability of questionnaire was assessed by Cronbakh Alpha and estimated as 0.861.

The main outcomes in our questionnaire were fast food consumption, type of fast food and the frequency of consumption. The variables that evaluated in fast food consumption were selected based on more frequent items that used in Iran based on cultural and religious condition such as different types of sandwich, fried chicken, fried potato, hotdog and pizza.

Obesity indexes data of such as waist and circumference for calculating Waist-Hip Ratio (WHR), height and weight for computing BMI were collected. Waist, hip circumference, and height of subjects were measured by anthropometric tape measure. Moreover, the weight of students was measured by a valid scale (SECA 830). BMI and WHR were calculated by standard formulae [ 18 , 19 ].

The WHR index was used for measuring the abdominal obesity and BMI for general obesity. Frequency, mean, and standard deviation were used for description of data. Chi-square test was used to assess the relationship between fast food consumption and quantitative demographic variables with obesity in studied subjects. Independent t-test were used for comparing the mean of age, BMI and WHR and their components in studied subjects between used and un-used fast food consumption. Finally, multivariate logistic regression was used to control the potential confounders including job, educational level, field of study and type of university. The statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS software (Chicago, IL, USA) and the type one error considered in 0.05 level.

Overall, 72.4% (67.4% in females vs 80.7% in males) have fast food consumption. These students used at least one type of the fast foods in the recent month. However, the most common type of fast food consumption was sandwich 44.4%, pizza 39.7%, fried chicken 13.8%, respectively. Figure 1 showed the distribution of different type of fast foods in recent month after survey.

The prevalence of different the types of fast food consumption in studied students.

Table I shows the comparison of fast food consumption in students by chi square test between who were consumed fast food in recent month and who not consumed. This table showed that there was significant difference between subjects who used and did not use fast food in recent month regarding to the gender, marital status, education level, university, and major of study. The married and male students as well as who studied in basic sciences and nongovernmental university were used more fast food. Nevertheless, there was no significant relationship between job and residency place at night with fast food consumption.

Table II shows that there was a significant difference between studied subjects who used and not used fast food in past month regarding to waist and WHR (p < 0.05). Nevertheless, the difference in age, weight, height, hip, and BMI was not significant between two groups.

Comparing the mean of age, BMI and WHR and their components in studied subjects between used and un-used fast food consumption.

The overweight/obesity prevalence based on BMI classification (higher 25 kg/m 2 ) was 21.3% (95% CI: 19.4, 23.2%) calculated 18.2% (95% CI: 16.1, 20.3) in females vs 26.3% (95% CI: 22.7, 29.8) in males. Moreover, the obesity prevalence based on WHR was 33.2% (95% CI: 30.7, 35.7) calculated 40.1% (95% CI: 36.6, 43.5) in females vs 21.9% (95% CI: 18.8, 25.0) in males, respectively. Therefore, we considered a subject as obese if he/she had BMI more than 25 or WHR more than 0.9 in males and more than 0.8 in females. According to this definition, 37.2% (41.2% in females vs 30.7% in males) were affected to overweight and obesity. Therefore, the consumption of fast food was related to obesity. Moreover, a significant relationship was observed between obesity and consumption of sandwich (OR: 1.35, 95% CI: 1.4, 2.41), fried chicken (OR: 1.4, 95% CI: 1.22,1.73), and pizza (OR: 1.8, 95% CI: 1.1, 2.9). In addition, the fast food consumption was related to WHR as abdominal obesity (OR: 1.46, 95 CI: 1.11, 2.26), but was not related to BMI as general obesity (OR: 0.97, 95% CI: 0.63, 1.52) ( Tab. III ). Based on multivariate regression model ( Tab. IV ) only marital status, type of university and gender were the most related factors of fast food consumption. Therefore, studying in nongovernmental university (OR: 3.16, 95% CI: 1.8, 5.6), single status (OR: 3.08, 95% CI: 1.26, 5.01) and being females (OR: 2.96, 95% CI: 1.61,4.53) are the most important related factors of fast food consumption, respectively in Qom, Iran.

The relationship between fast food consumption and obesity in studied subjects.

Multivariate analysis of predictive factors of fast food consumption in under studied subjects.

The adjusted variables in this model were job, educational level, field of study and type of university.

According to our results, 72.4% and 34% have used at least one type of the fast foods in recent month and recent week, respectively. It seems that the consumption of fast food in Qom students is high due to lack of recreational facilities and entertainment in this religious city. However, the fast food consumption in our study was lower than other studies [ 4 , 20 ]. Results of studies in students of King Faisal University reported that more than 90% of people used fast foods monthly that was higher our estimate. In addition, a same study in female students aged 18 to 25 years showed that 47.1% had fast food consumption for two or more time per week [ 5 ].

The obesity prevalence in our study was estimated 21.3% and 33.2%, based on BMI and WHR, respectively. In a previous study, the obesity/overweight prevalence was 29.7% 5 and nearly half of them used fast foods. Moreover, in Shah et al. study, more than 34% of Chinese medical students were pre-obese and obese [ 4 ].

According to our results WHR was significantly different between subjects who used and not used fast food while, the difference in BMI was not significant. Therefore, fast food consumption was related to WHR, but did not related to BMI. In addition, consumption of sandwich, fried chicken and pizza were associated with obesity/overweight based BMI. Same direct association were demonstrated the association between fast food consumption and overweight/obesity in different studies [ 10 , 14 , 15 , 21 , 22 ]. Fast foods are poor in micronutrients, low in fiber, high energy density, high in glycemic load9 and large portion size with sugar [ 4 ] and could be more energetic than the daily energy requirements [ 6 , 9 ]. In addition, the average energy density of an entire menu in fast food restaurant is approximately more than twice the energy density of a healthy menu [ 22 ]. According to some studies [ 3 , 22 , 23 ] obesity is the core of some important non-communicable diseases such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes [ 12 , 22 , 23 ]. Increase in energy density of diet by fat or sugar, together with concomitant eating behaviors like snacking, binge eating and eating out; promote unhealthy weight gain through passive overconsumption of energy [ 4 , 6 ].

Fast food consumption is positively related to overweight and obesity due to extremely high energy density of these foods [ 6 , 22 ]. Moreover, a study a significant association was observed between BMI and fast food consumption [ 4 ]. Two commonly eaten fast foods including fried foods and hotdogs have been associated with risk of obesity and weight gain [ 22 ]. Moreover, fast food consumption was related to general obesity in female adolescents. Moreover, obesity/overweight was significantly associated with frequency of fast food consumption [ 5 ].

This study found the prevalence of obesity was higher in females, while the prevalence of fast food consumption was higher in males. However, male students who are married are more interesting to eating fast food and it might be due to the religious culture of Qom as the most religious city of Iran. In the other hand, the single female students are not free to go in fast food restaurants than married ones. Moreover, three variables including marital status, type of university and gender are the most associated factors of fast food consumption. Based on our results in multivariate model, both studying in nongovernmental University and being single increase the odds of fast food consumption more than three fold. Moreover, female students used fast food 2.9 folds more than male students. The main reasons of students for fast food consumption are taste and comfort to access to these foods and lack of cooking skills [ 5 ]. The higher fast foods consumption in females and single students might related to lower wasting time in android social networks than male students [ 25 , 26 ]. Moreover, since in nongovernmental university the price of kitchen food is high, the students are more interesting to have eating in fast food restaurants. However, the fast food prevalence is high in students and teenagers probably due to low cost [ 4 , 16 ]. Nevertheless, because comfort accesses to fast food the corresponding expenditures are rising among people [ 15 ]. Moreover, the price of health outcomes of consequences of fast food consumption are more expensive and need to more investigations [ 9 , 15 ].

We could not measure the morphometric characters and adipocity measures of students as other body compositions indexes. Moreover, lack of cooperation of students for anthropometric measurements was another limitation of the current study.

Conclusions

The prevalence of fast food consumption and obesity/overweight in Iranian student is high. Studying in nongovernmental University, being single and females were associated with fast food consumption to three fold. Fast food consumption could have associated to abdominal obesity based WHR to 46%, but was not related to general obesity based on BMI. However, this study showed the different effect of fast foods on abdominal and general obesity as a hypothesis. Future studies need to determine the pure effect of fast food consumption on different dimensions of obesity.

The relationship between demographic variables and fast food consumption.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the research Vice-Chancellor of Qom University of Medical Sciences for financial supporting of this work. They are also grateful students who participated in this study.

Funding source: Qom University of Medical Sciences.

Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Authors' contributions

AM: contributions to the conception, design of the work; analysis, and interpretation of data and Final approval of article.AA: contributions the acquisition and analysis of data for the work and Drafting the article. EM: contributions to the conception or design of the work; interpretation of data for the work; and Final approval of the article. SA: contributions to the conception or design of the work; interpretation of data for the work; and Final approval of the article. SK: contributions to the conception or design of the work analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and Final approval of the article.HA: contributions to the conception, design of the work; analysis, and interpretation of data and Final approval of article.

Essay on Junk Food

Essay generator.

In the contemporary world, one cannot escape the prevalence of junk food. From ubiquitous fast-food chains to convenience store shelves stocked with sugary snacks and processed treats, junk food has become an integral part of modern diets. It’s quick, tasty, and often affordable, making it a popular choice for people of all ages. However, it is imperative that we delve deeper into the subject of junk food, exploring its definition, its effects on our health, and the measures we can take to promote a healthier lifestyle.

Before we delve into the complex implications of junk food, it is essential to define what it actually is. Junk food refers to a category of food that is typically high in calories, sugar, unhealthy fats, and salt while being low in essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals, and fiber. These foods are often processed and manufactured with additives and preservatives to enhance their taste and shelf life. Common examples include fast food items like burgers, fries, and pizza, as well as sugary beverages, candies, and chips.

The Temptation of Junk Food

Junk food’s allure lies in its taste and convenience. The combination of fats, sugars, and salt in these foods can trigger a pleasurable response in the brain, similar to what occurs with addictive substances. This pleasure reinforces the desire to consume these foods repeatedly. Additionally, the fast-paced nature of modern life has led to an increased reliance on convenience foods, many of which fall into the category of junk food.

The Health Consequences of Junk Food

While junk food may offer immediate satisfaction for our taste buds and fill our stomachs, it also carries severe health consequences that extend beyond the momentary pleasure of consumption.

• Weight Gain and Obesity: Junk food is often calorie-dense, and excessive consumption can lead to weight gain and obesity. Obesity is associated with numerous health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, and certain types of cancer.
• Nutrient Deficiency: Junk food is notoriously low in essential nutrients like vitamins and minerals. Overreliance on these foods can lead to nutrient deficiencies, weakening the immune system and impairing overall health.
• Blood Sugar Imbalance: Sugary junk foods can cause rapid spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels, leading to increased hunger, irritability, and cravings for more unhealthy snacks.
• Heart Health: The high levels of unhealthy fats and salt in junk food can raise blood pressure and increase the risk of heart disease.
• Dental Problems: Sugary snacks and beverages are a leading cause of dental cavities and gum disease.
• Mental Health: There is evidence linking the consumption of junk food to poor mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety.
• Addictive Behavior: The combination of sugars, fats, and salt in junk food can trigger addictive behavior, making it difficult for individuals to resist and moderate their consumption.

The Impact on Children

Children are particularly vulnerable to the allure of junk food. Advertisements targeting them are omnipresent, and the easy availability of sugary and processed snacks only adds to the problem. Poor eating habits developed during childhood can have lasting consequences on health. Childhood obesity, for example, can lead to a lifetime of health issues.

The Need for Education and Awareness

In the battle against junk food and its detrimental effects on health, education and awareness play a vital role. It is crucial to inform students and the general public about the risks associated with excessive consumption of junk food. This education should encompass the nutritional value of foods, the importance of a balanced diet, and the long-term consequences of unhealthy eating habits.

Schools and educational institutions have a significant role to play in this regard. They should incorporate nutrition education into their curricula, teaching students about making informed food choices and understanding food labels. Encouraging healthy eating habits at a young age can have a profound impact on students’ future well-being.

Promoting Healthier Alternatives

While it’s important to acknowledge the challenges posed by junk food, it’s equally essential to explore solutions and promote healthier alternatives. Here are some strategies to encourage better eating habits:

• Access to Nutritious Food: Efforts should be made to ensure that nutritious food options are readily available and affordable. This includes providing healthier meal choices in schools and workplaces and promoting the consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins.
• Nutrition Labeling: Clear and easy-to-understand nutrition labels on packaged foods can empower consumers to make informed choices. Understanding serving sizes, calorie content, and nutrient values can guide individuals toward healthier options.
• Cooking Skills: Teaching students and adults how to prepare balanced meals from fresh ingredients can instill a lifelong appreciation for home-cooked food. Cooking classes and workshops can be valuable in this regard.
• Reducing Marketing to Children: Regulations should be in place to limit the marketing of junk food to children. This includes restrictions on advertising in schools, on children’s programming, and through digital media channels.
• Role of Parents and Caregivers: Parents and caregivers play a pivotal role in shaping children’s eating habits. Setting a positive example through their own food choices and providing a variety of nutritious foods at home can establish a strong foundation for healthy eating.
• Physical Activity: Encouraging regular physical activity is essential for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Schools and communities should provide opportunities for physical exercise and play.
• Government Policies: Governments can implement policies such as sugar taxes, restrictions on unhealthy food advertising, and regulations on school lunch programs to promote healthier eating habits.

In conclusion, junk food is a prevalent and tempting part of modern diets, but it comes with significant health consequences. It is essential to educate students and the general public about the risks associated with excessive junk food consumption and promote healthier alternatives. By emphasizing nutrition education, access to nutritious food, cooking skills, and responsible marketing practices, we can work towards a healthier future where individuals make informed food choices, leading to improved overall well-being and a reduced burden of diet-related diseases. It is a collective effort that involves individuals, families, communities, educational institutions, and policymakers. Together, we can navigate the path to a healthier future and help students make choices that support their long-term health and vitality.

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Essay on Junk Food: Samples in 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 5, 2023

Food is the main source of energy. It is important to consume healthy food. Any food product that contains a high percentage of saturated fats or trans fats is referred to as Junk food. The term junk itself indicates that it is harmful to our health. To lead a healthy lifestyle it is important to avoid the overconsumption of junk food. However, junk food has gained popularity because we consume it on a regular basis. Here we have provided an essay on junk food for children and school-going students. It will provide a general overview of how to draft an essay on junk food. Continue reading!

Also Read: Essay on Health

Also Read: Importance of Education

Essay on Junk Food in 150 Words

Junk food has become a prevalent component of the modern diet. It is not only attracting the young generation but is also getting induced in their daily diet. Habitual consumption of junk food causes serious health issues because it is high in calorie content. Processed food with high content of saturated and trans fats, or high sugar content comes under this category.

Street food places and the majority of food chains and restaurants are serving food in high quantities, thereby reducing the consumption of healthier options. People are now prioritizing taste and neglecting the culinary diversity of traditional food.

Another aspect of the over-consumption of junk food is ordering food on a daily basis due to a busy schedule. Besides that, munching on snacks to satisfy hunger is another bad habit that leads to health issues. Such food products lack nutritional components such as dietary fibres, protein, vitamins, iron, etc. 

To conclude, health is an important part of life so, it is important to take care of healthy food habits and avoid the excess consumption of unhealthy or junk food.

Also Read: Tips for cooking while studying abroad

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Essay on Junk Food in 250 Words

Junk food refers to the unhealthy food. Consumption of junk food such as pizzas, burgers, fried items, pastries, etc. has alarming consequences. Its effect is witnessed as the global obesity epidemic because the masses are more inclined towards eating junk food.

Impact of Consuming Junk Food

Food high in salt, sugar, and unhealthy fats contributes to weight gain. It will ultimately cause obesity. Obesity is the key source of other diseases that are difficult to cure. Some of the chronic diseases that occur due to the consumption of junk food are high risk of heart failure, GIT disorders, hypertension, diabetes, etc. So, it is crucial to eliminate or reduce the consumption of unhealthy food and replace it with nutritional food. 

Affordability

Another factor that contributes a lot in favour of a high intake of junk food is its affordability. Junk food is more accessible as it is available on the streets at a cheaper price. The price factor affects people who cannot afford healthier options. Thus, people tend to consume junk food that is comparatively more affordable and accessible.

Taste over Nutritional Value

Nowadays, people are more inclined towards enjoying the taste of food. It’s obvious that crispy and spicy food will attract you more as compared to salads and pulses i.e. much healthier options with high nutritional values. Consuming junk food on a regular basis has become common for many, and this has led to homogeneity in their diets. So, it’s important to choose the healthy option over a tastier option to minimize the negative health impact due to junk food.

In conclusion, having junk food occasionally is acceptable when you visit any party or celebrate any occasion. However, its regular consumption will disturb your dietary habits and also hamper your health for the long term.

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Junk food is processed and refined food products high in calories due to the high percentage of saturated and trans fats. Most restaurants generally serve junk food as they know that such food is popular among the young generation. However, it is not nutritious and also causes serious health issues such as obesity, diabetes, etc.

Following are 10 lines on junk food: Junk food does not possess nutritional value; It causes serious health illness; Junk food is mainly fried food products or packaged foods that have high-calorie content; It lacks dietary fibres; Heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, all such health issues are caused by junk food; Talking in terms of accessibility and affordability, then, such food items are cheaper as compared to healthier options; Excess availability of junk food in the market at cheaper rates is leading to a loss of culinary diversity; Over-consumption of junk food leads to anxiety, depression, and upset stomach; Junk food products are also high in sugar content causing harmful health effects, and Fast food chains and junk food brands are prevalent worldwide, homogenizing diets.

The 10 harmful effects of junk food are listed below; Cardiovascular disease; Obesity; Fatty liver; Hypertension; Diabetes; High cholesterol; Kidney damage; Weight gain; Addictive eating patterns, and Dental problems.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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The impact of food advertising on childhood obesity

• Marketing and Advertising

The childhood obesity epidemic is a serious public health problem that increases morbidity, mortality, and has substantial long term economic and social costs. The rates of obesity in America’s children and youth have almost tripled in the last quarter century. Approximately 20% of our youth are now overweight with obesity rates in preschool age children increasing at alarming speed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled among children ages 2 to 5 (5.0% to 12.4%) and ages 6 to 11 (6.5% to 17.0%). In teens ages 12 to 19, prevalence rates have tripled (5.0% to 17.6%). Obesity in childhood places children and youth at risk for becoming obese as adults and associated poor health such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some forms of cancer. Prevention efforts must focus on reducing excess weight gain as children grow up.

Today’s children, ages 8 to 18, consume multiple types of media (often simultaneously) and spend more time (44.5 hours per week) in front of computer, television, and game screens than any other activity in their lives except sleeping. Research has found strong associations between increases in advertising for non-nutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity. Most children under age 6 cannot distinguish between programming and advertising and children under age 8 do not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. Advertising directed at children this young is by its very nature exploitative. Children have a remarkable ability to recall content from the ads to which they have been exposed. Product preference has been shown to occur with as little as a single commercial exposure and to strengthen with repeated exposures. Product preferences affect children's product purchase requests and these requests influence parents' purchasing decisions.

• Food industry advertising that targets children  and youth has been linked to the increase of childhood obesity.
• Advertising by other industries often objectifies girls and women, contributing to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.
• Many adolescents, particularly teenage girls, have body image concerns and engage in unhealthy weight control behaviors.
• Unhealthy weight control behaviors (e.g., fasting, skipping meals, eating very little food, vomiting and using diet pills, laxatives or diuretics) have been found to co-occur with obesity.
• Weight bias may marginalize children and youth considered obese by their peers and teachers and place them at risk for teasing and bullying.
• Body dissatisfaction and weight-related concerns extend across all ethnic groups and weight-related stigma has been found to co-occur with depression, low self esteem and suicidal thought.
• Obesity in children increases the more hours they watch television.
• Children’s exposure to TV ads for unhealthy food products (i.e., high-calorie, low-nutrient snacks, fast foods and sweetened drinks) are a significant risk factor for obesity.
• In very young children, research has found that for every one-hour increase in TV viewing per day, there are higher intakes of sugar-sweetened beverages, fast food, red and processed meat, and overall calories (48.7 kcal/day). Excess weight can be gained by the addition of only 150 calories a day.
• Other research has found that children who watch more than three hours of television a day are 50 per cent more likely to be obese than children who watch fewer than two hours.
• Food and beverage advertising targeted at children influences their product preferences, requests and diet.
• The food and beverage industry has resolved to self-regulate their marketing to children, but this has not resulted in significant improvement in the marketing of healthier food (i.e., fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat or non-fat milk or dairy products, lean meats, poultry, fish and beans) to children. Almost three out of every four foods advertised to children falls into the unhealthy categories that contribute to the obesity epidemic.
• Food ads on television make up 50 percent of all the ad time on children’s shows. These ads are almost completely dominated by unhealthy food products (34 percent for candy and snacks, 28 percent for cereal, 10 percent for fast food, 4 percent for dairy products, 1 percent for fruit juices, and 0 percent for fruits or vegetables). Children are rarely exposed to public service announcements or advertising for healthier foods.

• Clearly, children between ages 8-12 are receiving the highest rates of ad exposure. They are entering a critical stage of development where they are establishing food habits, making more of their own food choices and have their own money to spend on the types of food they enjoy.
• Marketing of food to children on the internet is even more complex since the boundaries between content and pure advertising is often less clear than on television. Only a minority of advertisers include reminders distinguishing content from pure advertising.
• One study has shown that children find it harder to recognize advertisements on websites than they do on television; 6 year olds only recognized a quarter of the ads, 8 year olds recognized half of the ads, and 10 and 12 year olds recognized about three quarters of the ads.
• The majority of food brands advertised to children on TV is also promoted on the internet and often includes online games which are heavily branded, i.e. “advergames”.
• Advergames can provide a more highly involving and entertaining brand experience than what is possible with conventional media.
• Websites also contain other brand-related content such as television commercials, media tie-ins, promotions, viral marketing and website membership opportunities.
• Viral marketing is used to encourage children to talk to one another about a brand’s website by emailing friends in the form of an e-greeting or invitation and inviting them to visit the site.
• Marketers also often provide brand-related items that can be downloaded or printed and saved (e.g., brand-related screensavers and wallpaper).
• The continual branding through these sites reinforces and amplifies the product message to children, who have a remarkable ability to recall content from ads to which they are exposed.
• There is also a creeping commercialism of America’s schools.
• Children spend a considerable amount of their time in school settings, where compulsory attendance makes it difficult to avoid exposure to commercial content.
• Commercial content delivered in schools may be assumed to have the tacit endorsement of respected teachers and school officials, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the advertising.
• Advertising and marketing in schools takes several forms:      * Direct advertising in school classrooms (via advertiser-sponsored video or audio programming)      * Indirect advertising (via corporate-sponsored educational materials)      * Product sales contracts (with soda and snack food companies)      * School-based corporate-sponsored marketing research.
• Ads are now appearing on school buses, in gymnasiums, on book covers and even in bathroom stalls.
• School advertising also appears under the guise of educational TV. For instance, Channel One, which is available in 12,000 schools, provides programming consisting of 10 minutes of current-events and 2 minutes of commercials. Advertisers pay $200,000 for advertising time and the opportunity to target 40% of the nation’s teenagers for 30 seconds.
• Active healthy lifestyles for children and adolescents include moderate television viewing, regular family mealtimes, and regular exercise .
• Limit excessive time spent watching TV, video, gaming, or surfing the web.
• Monitor the media that your children consume, particularly if they are under age 8.
• Encourage healthy eating habits (i.e., greater consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat or non-fat milk or dairy products, lean meats, poultry, fish, and beans) and promote physical activity.
• Eat with your kids and take pleasure in your mealtimes together.
• Lead by example by eating healthy foods and engaging in physical activity yourself. Remember you can have the greatest influence on your children’s health. 

Children, Youth and Families Resources

Children, Youth and Families Office

Report of the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children

Promoting Healthy Behaviors to Prevent Obesity and Unhealthy Weight Control in Our Youth

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