JUNK FOOD MAKES YOU DEPRESSED

By Vegan Victoria, Certified Nutrition Consultant

You’d think that indulging in a little tasty snack would make you feel better. But I recently came across a Public Health Nutrition (a Cambridge Journal- March 2012) study that shows people who ate junk food were 51 percent more likely to show signs of depression. And the more junk food they ate, the more likely they were to be depressed. That seems to explain why emotional eating becomes such a vicious cycle for some people.

We also learned from a January 2012 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study that when women experience work “burn out,” they are likely to engage in emotionally-charged and uncontrolled eating. So it seems that if those women are eating junk food for comfort, they may just be making a bad situation worse.

Junk food might make you feel better for the moment, but it could be hurting you in the long run, causing you to be even more depressed and left seeking comfort from food yet again. This cycle doesn’t stop until you put down the potato chips (or any other unhealthy food).

Fortunately, you can avoid the ill-effects of junk food and the cycle of emotional eating that may come as a result of indulgence. Rather than draining your happiness with junk food, try healthier alternatives. Instead of potato chips, try baking thinly sliced sweet potatoes. Instead of ice cream, make a healthy version by blending sliced frozen bananas, almond milk, cocoa powder and chia seeds. Instead of alcohol, try to have a juice spritzer with seltzer water and a splash of cranberry juice or a squeeze of lime. These are just a few ideas; don’t give up. Keep trying and eventually your body, mind and taste buds will start to crave the healthy food, not the junk.

Along those lines, it’s important to realize the food companies are intentionally trying to keep you hooked on their products to make money by stuffing them with addictive additives. The excellent book “Salt Sugar and Fat” by Michael Moss is an objective study on this topic. He explores how the food industry scientifically engineers foods that induce cravings to overeat. These 3 ingredients also mask bitter flavors, allow food to be stored for months, and they are very inexpensive. Moss is an investigative reporter with the New York Times; he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for his investigation of the dangers of contaminated meat.