Junk Food Addiction?

As a child and teenager I definitely had an issue, perhaps maybe even an addiction, with junk food. When I look back on my after school snacks I cringe thinking about the sugars and carbs I chose to load my body with. My pallet craved the fattiest, processed foods out there; it’s a miracle I managed to escape a diabetes diagnosis. For instance, in my later years of elementary school (and earlier years of middle school) I would consume a package of Bagel Bites, a cup of Ramen Noodles, and either a coke or a root beer to wash it all down after a long day at school. Today, I cannot fathom eating this way on a daily basis. Looking at a box of Bagel Bites, one can find that there are 190 calories per serving. Not so bad, right? Wrong. “Per serving” unfortunately only accounts for four bagel bites, and there are twelve that come in each tray. Therefore, every time I microwaved and devoured one tray, I was eating 570 calories, and that was just part of my snack. In addition, there are two trays per box, meaning one box of bagel bites is a staggering 1,140 calories. Wow. Aside from the calories, one box has 18gof sugar, 2,040mg of sodium and 27g of fat.

Cup of noodles make bagel bites look like a walk in the park. One small cup has 296 calories, and an astonishing 1,434mg of sodium- that’s 60 percent sodium. The product also has 14.1g of fat, and that’s just in one serving. To top off my after school snack calories, I was getting a nice 140 calories from a can of coke. So basically, my after school snacks accounted for over half of my caloric intake for the day (going off of eating 2,000 calories/day).

Even today, at my wise old age of 21, I still find myself attracted to the likes of ramen noodles and bagel bites. Whenever I eat them, I can never just have one. This could either be a question of poor will power (my initial thought), or the product of an actual addiction (as I claimed earlier). A health article published by CNN says the latter, making me an innocent victim of processed foods! According the article, a study concluded that “the same area of the brain that lights up on scans when people use drugs, also shows increased activity when study participants consume, or even look at, high fat, high sugar foods like ice cream or bacon” (CNN 2013).  The article continues to inform that fatty foods may trigger the brain to want more, just as drugs signal the brain to want more. In this specific study, experimenters used rats and Oreo's to illuminate the addictive effects of junk foods.  

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/16/oreos-as-addictive-as-cocaine-in-lab-rat-study/