Living in a Junk Food World

One of the most revealing features of the last 20 years is the proliferation of junk:

- junk food - food containing a high proportion of fat, refined white flour and sugar, designed to be made and consumed in the shortest possible time and filling the stomach up as cheaply as possible

- junk drink containing large amounts of either sugar, aspartame, caffeine or alcohol (does anyone drink water these days?)

- junk mail and now junk email

- junk exercise - like ambling around for 10 minutes 3 times a day and expecting to have some miraculous improvement in your health

- junk sport, of which electronic poker machines are the most dreadful form.

- junk entertainment - particularly television soap

- junk religion - with people making supplications to gods that don’t exist

- junk medicine which masks the symptom of body system dysfunction and fails to stimulate the body's own recuperative powers.

But back to junk food.

The junk foods are foods high in fat and high density carbohydrate. The high density carbohydrates come in two main groups - the starches and sugar.

The hallmark of a good junk food meal is one in which you aim to get as much fat, starch and sugar into your body in one go as you possibly can. If you look at the junk food restaurants you'll see that this is the case - a piece of protein, dunked in or smeared with fat, eaten with a bread roll or a bucket of chips, washed down with a Coke or a thickshake and followed up with an icecream or a chocolate bar. The fact that a piece of protein gives an underlying character to the meal (in the form of a beef patty, a piece of fish or a chicken leg) is immaterial. The meal is a junk meal.

It doesn't matter whether it's fish and chips (and a Coke) or a hamburger with chips and a thickshake; or fried chicken with chips, a Coke and a chocolate, it's still junk; and it has a brand name that as soon as you see it stimulates hunger; a smell designed to get you drooling while you place your order; a taste and texture that lingers on in your memory and comes out next time you see the sign, and a feel of delight as it slides down your throat.

As a convenience meal it's designed so that the meal can be served and swallowed in the shortest possible time.

You don't have to waste any time chewing on it because there is nothing to chew on; you don't even have to put your false teeth in. It's designed so the mouth only has to act as a funnel, and the throat a chute to get the stuff into your stomach.

The fact that the meal contains precious little fibre doesn't matter to the manager and staff of the restaurant. They're only interested in getting junk into you, not out of you!

And you won't see any carrots, celery, broccoli or spinach in a junk food restaurant. Neither will you see any of the foods that primitive tribes valued for their nutritional content, like liver or kidneys, or, heaven forbid, brains or tripe!

The junk food restaurants have a hierarchy of their own. Some want you to buy junk to take away. That way you won't stick around the restaurant hogging the real estate.

Others of higher pretension want you to stay and spend up. They'll want you to sit down while they serve up a large pizza or a spaghetti carbonara, a bottle of wine, followed by a cassata and coffee. They have it worked out so that the longer you stay the more you're likely to spend up on beer, wine, cake, biscuits, ice-cream and coffee.

The junk food companies and their franchisees are not interested in nutrition. The franchisees of these establishments are business people out for a quick buck. Having a nutrition qualification is not a prerequisite for the job! They are not interested in designing or selling a nutritious product. They've bought into a system from which they cannot deviate.

All they want to do is fill you up as quickly as they can at the greatest profit for themselves, at the same time persuading you that you're getting a bargain. If they manage to increase their sales (often with freebies, discounts and sponsorships directed at children and their gullible parents) they can go to the next junk food convention with their chests puffed out, pat each other on the back, brown-nose a few of sports stars, pleased with their contribution to the national wellbeing.

Their staff have no qualifications in nutrition either. They're just hair-net wearing, pimply faced, wage-slaving, pocket-money earning counter jumpers. If you asked them to boil an egg at home they wouldn't have a clue how to do it. They're the drones of the food industry, barking at each other through surgically attached intercoms, regimented with Pavlovian precision by the sounds of the timers on their microwave ovens and patronising their customers with manufactured grins and inane invocations to enjoy the junk they have just sold them and have a nice day!

Their jobs are not safe.

In the future, the ultimate extension of the junk food industry will be the popularisation of a self-service method of food distribution where all one needs to do is pull into a bowser, stick one nozzle into your car and another into your mouth. In the time it takes to fill up you car you'll be able to fill up yourself, pouring a slurry of fat, protein, starch and sugar down your throat all in one go! One bowser, two different types of fuel. If the current promotion strategy of the junk food industry is any guide, given the right amount of saturation advertising it will be a real goer.

THE JUNK FOOD ICEBERG
The greatest of diet tragedies in an affluent society is that the junk food restaurants form only the tip of a huge junk food iceberg, with most of the junk being eaten in people's homes. You only have to look at what they unload out of their shopping trolleys when they get to the checkout to see the amount of junk that's going to be consumed when they get home.

You can be pretty certain that most of the food that comes in a plastic bag, cardboard box, cellophane wrap or bottle is junk food.
Look at the kilojoule content on the side of the packet. With the exception of meat, fish and chicken, if it's more than 500Kj per 100gms there's a good chance it's a junk food.

If you have junk food at home it comes dressed up in many forms;

- a breakfast of scab-shaped little biscuits made out of white flour, toast covered with margarine, peanut butter and honey, washed down with coffee and sugar

- lunch - two bits of white bread with a sliver of colour in between them

- dinner - sausages and mash potato with ice-cream, or fish and chips and ice-cream; followed by cream biscuits, lamingtons and a chocolate sultana supper.

But junk is junk whether it's eat out, take away or eat at home.

Junk is convenience food where-ever its eaten.

Junk is not designed to nourish the cells of your body. It's main purpose is to fill up your stomach, in the quickest possible time and have you think you've got yourself a bargain and done your body a favour.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and eat from the top of the Hourglass.

John Miller

http://www.hourglassdiet.com