Junk food
America’s Contaminated
Diet!
The overall picture of America’s contaminated food intake is most discouraging: Coke –guzzling children, adults sizzling their breakfast in pans with cancer causing preservatives; potato chips loaded with oil, soda pop with additives; hotdogs, hamburgers and sweets eaten as “meals” on the run.
TV LURE
Television is still the direct line to a child’s imagination. The TV lures them relentlessly to partake of sugary sweet foods. The Broadcast Advertisers report says that the young person viewing TV is hit on an average of twenty times an hour with invitations to indulge in some form of sugary sweet food. This compare to seven to nine commercials an hour on prime-time adult programming.
HEALTH DESTROYING FOOD!
Health-destroying junk foods now predominate our culture. By junk food we mean foods that have been so altered and impaired in the process of manufacturing, bleaching, canning, cooking, preserving, pickling, etc., that they are no longer fitted to meet the needs of the body as God intended them to be when in their natural state.
Man has take the foods that were intended for him to eat in their natural state and has put these foods in vacuum cans, airtight jars, and sealed boxes—this, we are told, is to insure against spoilage. These foods are salted, sugared and have chemicals inserted that embalm them for a long shelf life. By extraction processes, man has taken the bran from rice and the germ from wheat. Fruits soaked in sugary syrup are no longer bursting with vitality. Vegetables cooked and canned, are void of their original God-given nutrition.
The net result: Man thinks he is nourishing his body with food, when he is really polluting his body with garbage! He is committing slow suicide! The junk food problem is not simply one of nutrition, but it is also related to the economic structure of this country and to the psychological and emotional makeup of millions of Americans.
A startling statistic is that more than half of all foods eaten by the typical American are junk foods. All junk foods are exceptionally high in either sugar, fat, salt, or all combined, and supply little or no nutrition. Junk food consists largely of empty calories and little else.
It is hard to believe, but one out of every two bites eaten is a mouthful of junk food! On the average, every man, woman and child in the country eats 700 pounds of junk food each year. This doesn’t even include other substandard and inappropriate foods, such as meat, white flour products, jams jellies, etc. These foods that have no nutritional value contribute to a very large degree to most of the illnesses in this country.
It’s a fact that the lowest-profit item in most grocery stores is the produce—the fresh fruits and vegetables—and that the highest markup comes from packaged, processed and junk foods. Natural and traditional foods, like fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, are rarely advertised because they cannot be given a brand or identify a manufacturer. After all, a potato is just a potato, and worth only a few cents a pound. But if you slice that potato, boil it in oil, add a large dose of salt and preservatives, and package it in a colorful bag with a catchy name, than you have potato chips that can be sold for ten to twenty times the cost of the original potato.
FOR EACH DOLLAR SPENT ON JUNK FOOD:
12 cents go for packaging
17 cents pays for the advertising and promotion;
55 cents goes for processing and profit-markup;
6 cents is for additives, preservatives and colorings;
10 cents is for the actual food in the product.
In contrast, for every dollar spent on produce and natural foods (like whole grains, nuts, seeds, dried fruit), about 65 cents goes for the actual food cost and remaining for transportation and retail markup.
Consider these facts: Eighty percent of all food items sold in the super market did not exit twenty years ago. In the past decade, over 9700 new items were introduced into grocery stores. The majority of these items are packaged junk food which are characterized by a remarkable lack of nutrients due to over-processing.
Junk-food manufacturers know that their products have no nutritional value and that their foods are open to attack by nutritionists. So to make their products to appear ok in the public’s eye, they have “fortified” the junk food. You can find fortified candy bars and cereals, but fortified junk foods still have the white sugar, the saturated fats, the high salt content, and the empty calories. Do not be fooled by two cents worth of added minerals and vitamins. Adding inorganic and useless vitamins and minerals to junk food is a cheap process. Even worse, the so-called “extra vitamins and minerals which were added to the junk food cannot be used anyway. They are inorganic chemicals, just like the other additives and preservatives already laced throughout the destructive foods.
Not only do junk foods and fast foods cost money to eat, but the after –effects of consuming such foods often results in additional money being spent. Indigestion, headaches, colds, hemorrhoids, colitis, and many other ailments may be traced to junk food consumption. The average person may spend another $5 to $10 per week just on “medicine cabinet “ remedies or over-the-counter drugs for these illnesses that result from such foods.
A year of junk food eating also typically results in about six new cavities and a tooth needing capping or pulling, according to figures from army dentists. This translates into an average $10 per week for dental care.
We still do not know the total costs of medical expenses that accumulate because of junk food eating, nor can we accurately figure in how many lost days of work result from such a diet. Even so, the known costs of eating junk food for a year are impressive.
Eliminating junk food not only results in better health and a clearer mind, but it means a real saving in the amount of money spent on these foods. It is painfully obvious that people who consume junk foods not only steal money from themselves and their families, but a foundation is being laid for expensive and painful suffering in the years to come. There is no question about it, junk food eating is only de meaning to God’s holy temple, our bodies.
A FEW OF THE WORST JUNK FOODS:
A White flour products. In milling white flour, the wheat, germ and outside layers of grain are removed. This means that nutrients are stripped away. Then chlorine dioxide is added to bleach the flour, and this substance is a potential poison whose safety has never been adequately proven.
B Sweet rolls and pastries. White flour products are bad enough, but with the addition of lots of white sugar and fats, they get even worse.
C Breakfast cereals. Most cold cereals are 25 to 50 per cent refined white sugar, which make them sweeter than chocolate candy.
D Chocolate bars and candy. When some candies have been analyzed for purity, reporting agencies have found all sorts of unpleasant things in them. Chocolate bars are fattening and loaded with sugar.
E Soft Drinks. All soft drinks are extremely unhealthy because of the amount of sugar they contain. But cola-flavored ones are worse still because they also contain caffeine in a far more potent form than the caffeine in coffee or tea.
F Salted snack foods. The heavy addition of salt to the diet increases water retention, leads to high blood pressure, and contributes to obesity. Salt also irritates and hardens the body’s delicate membranes, and can cause a type of stomach cancer called anaplastic adenocarcinoma.
G Hydrogenated fats such as margarine and shortenings. These products a re produced by hydrogenation of oil with artificial additives, emulsifiers, and chemicals which were never meant for human consumption.
H Imitation foods. All dairy substitutes, instant breakfasts, and imitation meat products are fragmented foods, and the ingredients usually read like a chemistry textbook.
AVOID EATING ICE
CREAM!
A It is loaded with saturated animal fat.
B It is loaded with cholesterol.
C It is loaded with refined sugar
D It is extremely high in calories.
E It is highly chemicalized with solvents, stabilizers, emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial flavors and colors.
F It is contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, drugs, and pesticides.
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31
Katy Chamberlin
freedomofhealth.org
