Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
Gawd, can't seem to junk it!
|
What's with us? We know our eating habits aren't doing us any good but we can't seem to help it, confesses foodie BHUMIKA K.
|
SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE How does one resist temptation? PHOTO: AFP
Atantalising, scrumptious chocolate pastry takes a life of its own and beckons you seductively from the well-lit transparent cabin it's sitting in. Fried rice is being tossed at another end of the food court, and the overwhelming aroma of sizzling shawarma permeates the air. From somewhere behind you, another smell teases your olfactory senses and you involuntarily salivate as you think: "Yummy! French fries!"
Ah! The things such food can do to us. You crave for it, though you know what exactly it is — junk. It makes your taste buds triumph over your brains. It makes a junkie out of you — someone who must have something they want, immediately.
Especially food that folks always say is not good for health. Who can say no to potato chips? Or resist making yourself some quick instant noodles when you're not feeling up to a virtuous but boring breakfast?
We're overwhelmed
It's all around us — pizzas spilling over with cheese, combined with can loads of colas just a dial away; stocks of semi-processed maida foods made with hydrogenated oils in the kitchen cupboard; deep fried pakodas and bajjis at the street corner; chocolate-coated doughnuts, fresh-cream topped pastries and cellophane-wrapped ready-to-eat juicy burgers at the supermart you shop in.
Doctors, nutritionists and health gurus would have told you by now what is good food, how junk food is toxic, what you must eat and mustn't. But how in tarnation do you resist temptation? Or do you go the whole hog and then work it out at the gym? Is there something like a balance we'll ever be able to strike, given our current lifestyle?
Harineeshree T. is 30, and a manager of corporate communications at WeP. She's always been a health freak and makes sure the food made at home entails minimum oil and there's plenty of salad at dinner every day. "But over the weekend, we tend to pamper each other and overeat. I can't resist outside food. So we end up eating kababs, a lot of non-veg and pizzas," she confesses.
Despite her good resolutions, Harineeshree is overwhelmed by a force she cannot control, viz., her 11-year-old daughter Roshini who is initiating her into an entirely different food lifestyle. "I was never brought up on pasta. But my daughter always wants what is in her friend's lunch box." Working hard between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. every day, she wants to give herself the best of the "should haves". Roshini on her part makes it very clear she loves biscuits, chocolates and chips; and daal and chapathi "sometimes". "I hate soppu and all sabjis. If they scold me at home, I eat them. I force myself to eat lunch at school," she grumbles. A staple in her classmates' lunch box at school is macaroni and noodles, way different from the pulav, upma and curd rice her mother packs for her. "I like pizzas because they are so yum! I enjoy chocolates and biscuits... I don't know why," she offers. And her mother's counter: "Can anyone say `no' to a child?"
Aruna Raman, a 26-year-old technical writer with a software consultancy, works up to 10 hours a day, clubbed with over three hours of travel to and from the workplace. She walks around 10 minutes at the workplace and eats three full meals, apart from the "munching" in between and on the ride back home. She confesses to those manic cravings for chocolate mousse or cake. "I feel guilty afterwards. Then I walk an extra flight of stairs at work. I know it's a small consolation." She takes a lunch box to work — either chapathi-sabji or rice. Haldiram's namkeens accompany dinner twice a week. Weekends are the time to enjoy with pizzas, burgers, and chaklis.
So why does she eat junk after all? "It just tastes great on the tongue compared to healthy food. It's also the appeal... the way a chocolate fantasy cake looks... "
Nutritionist Sheela Krishnaswamy is founder partner of Niche, a nutrition consulting firm that offers its `Corporate Health' services to various IT firms and call centres in the city. Nutritional science hasn't formally defined "junk" but any food with a high fat/sugar/sodium content and low in nutritional value falls in this category. Dr. Krishnaswamy lists some of the long-term impacts of consistently eating junk food — heart diseases, colon cancer, increase in BP, "central obesity" or the stretching waistline, osteoporosis and anaemia (from lack of nutrition). Temporary effects could be constipation and restlessness, to begin with.
"I guess people are often brainwashed by advertisements and peer pressure into junk food. A lot of youngsters in call centres presume they can eat whatever they want and get away with it because they are young." Call centres, she believes, offer more unhealthy food than IT companies because there are no "full-fledged meals" at cafeterias where employees predominantly work through the night. "My guesstimate is that about 40 to 50 per cent of the food a call centre employee eats in a day is junk and for an IT company employee it is about 20 to 25 per cent," she says.
Our lifestyles definitely have changed dramatically. People opt for takeaways and dial for food because they work long hours and there's no one to cook for them. Most often the food opted for is something that gives a false notion of an instant high — fast foods that are a sure source of killer contents such as highly saturated fat, high salt and sugar levels besides aspartame, trans fat, hydrogenated oils, saccharin.
The number of juvenile diabetics is on the rise. Even in small cities like Kanpur kids are being dragged to the gym because they have settled into a sedentary life, and don't play any outdoor games. In Varanasi recently, kids attended summer camps where they celebrated Watermelon Day to be slowly weaned off soft drinks.
PLENTY ON THE PLATTER
In the U.K., a campaigning group has been set up to defend people's right to eat whatever they like — even if it is unhealthy — rather than have the state or other agencies interfering with their lives.
Some American companies are monitoring their employees' lunch, and if they eat too much of the wrong type of food they get a call in the afternoon from the company doctor, a lecture, and maybe even threats of dismissal. — Alternet reports
Healthy-eating school pupils in Glasgow are being rewarded with iPods, cinema tickets, book tokens, game consoles. The City Council decided to provide incentives to about 30,000 children in 29 secondary schools. — BBC report
American students are junk food addicts, but the schools are increasingly dependent on the revenue that soda and candy machines bring in each year. Through contracts with soft drink companies and other vendors, some schools are raising as much as $100,000 a year, money that pays for such things as computer rewiring, teacher training, says a Washington Post report.
JUNK AT HOME
In India, where deep frying is a pet cooking mode, 12 out of 100 people living in cities and seven out of 100 in villages have heart disease. India is home to over 30 million heart patients, and in the past three decades, cases of coronary artery disease have risen three-fold. The Delhi Medical Association has written to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi asking the civic body to ban restaurants from serving food containing trans fat used in processed and junk food to increase shelf life. Trans fat is in vanaspati and other hydrogenated oils that are commonly used in cooking deep fried food. _ A recent Malayala Manorama report.
Supported by research findings of AIIMS that suggest obesity and diabetes start from eating unhealthy food in school canteens, the Delhi Government in 2004 had introduced an ambitious health alternative for youngsters. But the scheme has had very few takers. _ healthlibrary.com
Nationwide, 31 per cent of urban Indians are either overweight or obese. The Indian Medical Association reports that one in three residents of Delhi is obese. Delhiites consume 20 per cent more fat and 40 per cent more sugar than they did 50 years ago. - AP report
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
