Junk food

No food, not even the most highly processed nutritional nightmare is actively poisonous or devoid of nutritional value. It only becomes a problem if you eat so much of it that you displace other things from your diet and skew the balance. These foods tend to be energy dense and low in nutrients – thus the well known term ‘junk’ food.

Junk foods include chocolates, lollies, biscuits, cakes, ice creams, potato crisps and take-away. It is the excessive consumption of these somewhat tasty convenience foods that is still partially responsible for ongoing heart disease and cancer. The animal industry sells trimmed fat as cheap oil to be used in take-away food shops and by the food industry.

Burger King and McDonalds use a mix of beef tallow and hydrogenated cottonseed oil (high in saturated fat and trans fats) and Hungry Jacks, KFC and Red Rooster use palm oil. These fats are cheap and stable for deep-frying.

Market research that has led to the development of ‘healthier’ fast foods like skinless chicken, showed that people who enjoyed fast foods were also demanding it to be healthier. This is also an indication that there is a growing reliance in Australia on take-away and convenience foods. These type of meals represented 30% of total household budget, with the number of take-away meals consumed in Australia leaping 57% from 1996 to 1997. Many take-away outlets now served McCain's oven-baked chips, which had only 3% fat compared with 20% found in regular fried chips. The National Heart Foundation is trying to convince all take-away shops and fast food chains to offer at least one healthy meal on their menu and that meals with <10% fat would be considered healthy.

Serves are getting bigger at fast food outlets - standard serves used on food labels and by dietitians are much smaller than what we see at fast food outlets: a standard serve of pizza is 1 slice which contains 249 kcal NOT one whole pizza worth 1000 kcal; a standard glass of cola is 250ml worth 103 kcal NOT one can 375ml worth 154 kcal or large coke from McDonalds 500ml worth 205 kcal; standard serve of chips is 1 cup (95g) containing 16g fat NOT the large chips from KFC 290g with 50g fat.

Fast foods are not devoid of nutrients, but it is not the best way to obtain these nutrients because of the large amounts of fat and sodium that come with it.

  Best ‘Take Away’ Food choices:
   1. Vegetarian or seafood pizza,
   2.Red Rooster skin free chicken sub meal   
   3. McDonalds Grilled chicken burger without chips   
   4. Souvlaki
   5.Hamburgers/Fish burgers without chips.

Resisting the chips, especially french fries, in fast food outlets is a good way to improve the nutritional quality of the meal. French fries (medium size) from fast food outlets have 20g fat, of which 10g is saturated. These chips will also be high in trans fats if fried in hydrogenated cottonseed oil.

Oven-baked chips (McCain's 3% fat) or large-cut chips fried in extra virgin olive oil are a better choice than french fries from fast food outlets. Foods which are deep fried absorb less oil than foods which are shallow fried, and there is some evidence that less oil is absorbed if the oil used is extra virgin olive oil. For more information, http://www.burkesbackyard.com.au/facts/1998/recipes/oilsaintoils_21.htm

McDonalds took 2 British activists to court for distributing pamphlets for accusing McDonalds of exploiting children. The British judge concluded that "customers who eat McDonalds foods several times a week will take the very real risk of heart disease if they continue to do so throughout their lives".

The take home message is that you can eat what you like 10% of the time if you eat the good stuff 90% of the time. Many Australians do the reverse.

 

Last Updated: March 28, 2001