Contents:
- Medical Video: 18 Harmful Foods We Keep Giving to Children
- High-fat foods make it difficult for the body to burn calories
- Junk food causes the body to experience insulin resistance
- Junk food triggers fake hunger
- High fat foods cause muscles to fail to burn glucose as energy
Medical Video: 18 Harmful Foods We Keep Giving to Children
There are many things that can affect your body's metabolism - from the drink you drink to the food you eat every day. Having a fast metabolism means that your body burns more calories. On the contrary, having a slow body metabolism means that your body burns fewer calories, making it harder for you to maintain or lose weight. One factor that can slow down the body's metabolism is high-fat food, aka junk food.
This article discusses how processed foods can slow down your metabolism.
High-fat foods make it difficult for the body to burn calories
Junk food refers to processed foods that generally contain high calories and processed carbohydrates. High-fat foods also include the junk food group. Junk food generally has very few essential nutrients needed by the body, such as protein and fiber.
Your body needs to expend energy to digest, absorb, and metabolize the food you eat. The energy released by the body to digest and process junk food becomes less body fuel than when digesting whole foods. Less energy released by the body to digest food means fewer calories burned throughout the day.
What's more, high-fat foods are not as easy to digest as some other food samples. As a result, your body's metabolism slows down and starts storing excess fat for future use. In the end, the body's slow metabolism makes the body more fat.
Junk food causes the body to experience insulin resistance
Consumption of junk food and other high-fat foods has been linked to an increased risk of insulin resistance. This is because most junk food is processed with vegetable oil and trans fat. Both are high in omega-6 which triggers inflammation. Excessive intake of omega-6 is associated with weight gain and insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance is a process in which our body converts too much carbohydrate consumed into body fat. This then causes blood sugar levels to rise sharply. Insulin resistance is a major risk factor for metabolic syndrome, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Junk food triggers fake hunger
Eating junk food is certainly incomplete if it is not accompanied by cold sweet drinks to refresh the throat. But this is precisely what adds to the danger to your body's metabolism.
Most packaged sweet drinks contain high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is a type of simple sugar that is metabolized by the liver. Fructose can trigger fake hunger signals even after eating if consumed in large quantities. As a result, you will eat again, again and again. In the end this then causes the liver to become overloaded so that it turns it into fat that builds up around the stomach.
High fat foods cause muscles to fail to burn glucose as energy
A normal diet generally contains around 30 percent fat in a day. But junk food and high-fat foods can provide you with about 55 percent of your daily fat requirements.
When you eat junk food, especially done routinely almost every day, the ability of muscles to burn glucose as energy can be disrupted. This is a side effect of junk food which is quite dangerous because muscles play an important role in rinsing excess blood sugar from the body after eating.
Under normal circumstances, your muscles will break down glucose or store it for later use. Your muscles make up about 30 percent of your body weight. So if you lose this key player in the function of glucose metabolism, this can open the way for blood sugar to continue to increase sharply after eating. This condition is called post-prandial hyperglycemia.
An abnormal increase in blood sugar can cause the body's metabolism to slow down, inflamed body tissue (similar to being attacked by an infection), narrowed blood vessels, dangerous buildup of free radicals in the body, soaring blood pressure, until insulin production drops sharply so it makes you fast starve again after eating. In the long run, an increase in blood sugar that exceeds the limit can increase the risk of metabolic syndrome, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart attacks.
