Here’s something that’s going to blow your mind.
The definition of junk food is a food that is “high in calories and low in minerals and vitamins”. By this definition junk food can't exist because no food contains calories.
A calorie is a unit of energy, but food is matter and according to the rules of physics and chemistry. Energy can become matter, but matter cannot become energy.
What this means is the entire first row on the nutrition label is a lie as no foods contain energy. Neither can foods be converted into energy because food is matter and matter cannot become energy.
The Bomb Calorimeter is false and the Atwater System even more so as it relies on numbers from a Bomb Calorimeter - did you know he cooked turds to get his numbers?
That means all that exists is food that is high in vitamins and minerals - meat being the highest per gram - and food that isn't high in vitamins and minerals.
These low mineral foods aren't necessarily bad for us, just not entirely good for us either.
We need to stop criminalising foods. By criminalising foods, we are stopping our bodies from getting any form of nutrition. What's more important? Getting any vitamins and minerals into us or lessening our sugar intake? I would argue that it's more important to get vitamins, minerals, and proteins into us and let our bodies do what they are good at. This means letting our bodies absorb what they need and get rid of what they don't. Our bodies are super-efficient at doing this but to do so we need to get that food into us.
And the thing we need to take into account is this... ALL foods that are considered junk foods are plant based.
Take for example the number 1 selling junk food of all time - McDonald's fries. They are potatoes cooked in vegetable oil. 100% plant based.
Take a hamburger, and yes I would include a McDonald's burger in this despite the pink sludge crap. The only part of that burger that isn't plant based is the meat patty. In a cruel irony, that patty is still pound for pound more nutritionally dense than all the plant based material found in the rest of the burger - including the bun.
The important part of the equation is not the junk food part. Sometimes you need a hit of fat or sugar to get you through the day. The important part is that we have to move to use that junk food otherwise it becomes a problem for our bodies.
There is NO bad food, there is simply food that if not worked off can cause us issues down the line. STOP criminalising food. It serves no purpose.
