Junk food is ruining your body – and here’s how I proved it
AS A nation, we are hooked on fast food. Between us, we scoff an astonishing 22million takeaway meals a week, and despite all the health warnings, there are now an estimated 56,000 junk-food outlets in England alone.
Takeaways are part of everyday life, so much so that research suggests that one young person in six munches on burgers, pizza or fried chicken up to twice a day.
That’s a statistic that ought to terrify anyone remotely concerned about the implications of Britain’s eating habits on the waists, health and brains of the next generation.
For our parents and grandparents, a takeaway was an occasional treat. Fast-food outlets were few and far between and most families couldn’t really afford to eat that way. Now
they are everywhere, portion sizes are bigger than ever, and competition has driven down the cost.
Ultra-processed foods such as snacks, desserts or ready-to-eat meals now comprise nearly twothirds of the average adult diet in Britain.
But how quickly can eating these things start to have a serious – and I mean potentially lifethreatening – impact on your health?
I suspect most of us think we can get away with months, or even years, of regular takeaway treats without doing too much damage to ourselves – especially if we exercise regularly and our waistlines aren’t expanding too fast.
If that is what you believe, then brace yourself for a shock. Because the results of my new documentary, The Junk Food Experiment, where six household names agree to binge on junk food for three straight weeks, will surely horrify you as much as they did me.
Our challenge for the six celebrities was this: for one week they would try to eat just burgers and chips; another week they would be eating just fried chicken; and for a third week, only pizza was on the menu.
Part of the reason for doing this experiment is that we wanted to see which of Britain’s three favourite takeaways would lead to the most weight gain and which would prove to be the unhealthiest.
But none of us expected that taking a group of healthy men and women, and asking them to overindulge for a relatively short period, would affect their health quite as profoundly as it did.
THE TAKEAWAYS LOADED WITH SUGAR, SALT AND ‘BAD’ FATS
SINGER Peter Andre, MP Nadine Dorries, former Olympic champion Tessa Sanderson, Coronation Street actress Hayley Tamaddon, Made In Chelsea star Hugo Taylor and The Chase mastermind and barrister Shaun Wallace all volunteered to put their bodies on the line in the name of science.
First we asked each to undergo a weigh-in. They also had a thorough health check at the start, and then regularly throughout the experiment, to assess the impact of this new diet on their bodies.
And we carried out a detailed nutritional analysis on each of the three takeaway delights to see exactly what was in them.
So what did we find? Well, on average, a portion of burger and chips contained half of an adult’s recommended daily allowance of fat, salt and sugar.
Fried chicken turned out to be relatively low in sugar, but twothirds of the samples we checked exceeded the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of six grams, or one-and-a-half teaspoons, of salt. And the fat content was truly shocking, easily exceeding the total daily maximum of 70g in a single meal.
Worse still, one of the chicken samples contained high levels of trans fats. They are the worst kind, proven to cause widespread inflammation in your arteries and raise LDL, the ‘bad’ cholesterol.
The recommended level of trans fats is zero.
But for me the biggest surprise was that neither burgers nor chicken came close to pizza in the fat and salt stakes.
The 18in pepperoni that we tested had more than double the 6g daily salt allowance and packed in twoand-a-half times the RDA for fat – equivalent to eating three-quarters of a packet of butter.
Why do we find junk food so addictive? Well, we are programmed to enjoy fat, salt and sugar, particularly when they are mixed in just the right combinations. They stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain, presumably so that our ancestors, who lived in times where food was far more scarce, would quickly learn to prioritise highenergy foods. But our ancestors obviously never ate them in the quantities we do today, or in the highly processed form in which they come.
THE RAPID DECLINE OF AN OLYMPIC HERO
I WAS genuinely shocked and worried at the speed at which some of our celebrity volunteers began to decline as a result of their junk-
food binge. The impact on their bodies was far faster and more devastating than anyone, including the experts who were overseeing the experiment, had anticipated.
Although they started to put on weight, much of the damage was invisible to the naked eye, occurring deep inside the body in blood vessels and vital organs. Take Tessa, 62, who represented Great Britain at the highest levels of athletics for many years, winning javelin gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
With her sporting background and concern for the future health of her six-year-old twins, she lives a pretty healthy lifestyle, with lots of fresh food and regular exercise. But within two weeks of starting on junk food, Tessa was in trouble.
She woke up one morning with a thumping headache, and when we checked her previously healthy blood pressure, it was sky-high – dangerously so, in fact.
Salt is known to increase the risk of high blood pressure, and after less than two weeks of eating junk food, Tessa’s body was responding badly.
My colleague Dr Enam Abood, a Harley Street weight-management specialist who was overseeing the health of the volunteers, warned Tessa she was at risk of a stroke and advised her to stop.
Hayley, who has suffered from irritable bowel syndrome in the past, was also soon in trouble.
Fatty, greasy foods are known to aggravate the symptoms of IBS, causing intense discomfort that severely affects quality of life. Pretty soon, Hayley started to suffer severe stomach pains. She later admitted the pain was much worse than she was letting on.
Another who really struggled was Hugo, who was so stressed by the fast-food regime that he began suffering anxiety attacks.
In fact, none of our volunteers came through the experiment unscathed.
SURELY THE ODD BINGE CAN’T HURT?
EVERYBODY enjoys an occasional blowout. But what is a single fast-food fest going to do to your body?
To find out, as part of The Junk Food Experiment, I gorged on a 6,000-calorie (more than double a man’s daily recommended intake) mega burger. As I did so, Dr Matthew Campbell, a nutrition expert from Leeds University, checked my vital signs, such as body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and the state of my arteries, using an ultrasound device to measure their elasticity.
Stiff arteries increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Halfway through the meal, I was ready to quit and I wondered, for a brief moment, if I might actually die. Not a heroic death and certainly not the way I hope to go. I was astonished at how dreadful it made me feel.
While eating the mega burger, my heart rate soared because my body was working so hard to digest all that food, my core temperature jumped, and my level of blood fats more than doubled.
Ultrasound checks showed that the junk-food binge also temporarily reduced the elasticity of my arteries, putting me at increased risk of a heart attack or stroke. And it’s a real risk because studies suggest that binge-eating can increase the chance of having a heart attack in the hours that follow.
You might argue that, in real life, nobody lives on junk food alone and this experiment has little to do with how most people eat.
But I disagree. What we did is condense the effects of years of poor eating into a few short weeks to highlight what junk food is really doing to our bodies.
According to a recent study by scientists at the Paris-Sorbonne University, for every ten per cent increase in our intake of these foods, the risk of dying prematurely increases by 14 per cent.
And if you are concerned about your waistline, then another recent ground-breaking study might put you off reaching for a supermarket convenience meal.
For this study, American researchers asked 20 healthy-weight adults to come into a laboratory and live for two weeks on processed foods, followed by two weeks of healthy, home-cooked meals made with fresh ingredients.
Both the healthy and the junkfood meals contained roughly the same amounts fat, sugar, salt and carbohydrates.
But to their surprise, the scientists discovered that when their volunteers were eating processed convenience meals, they ate an average of 500 calories more a day compared to when they were eating real food.
As a result, they put on an average of 1.7 lb on the processed diet, while they lost 2.4lb on the healthy regime. All that, of course, is bad news. The truth is, I’ve been investigating the effects of different foods on our bodies and our brains for many years, but the results of my TV experiment, short though it was, genuinely shook me. And I hope it shakes you as well.
The Junk Food Experiment will be broadcast on Wednesday, February 27 at 9pm on ITV1. Dr Michael Mosley is currently touring the UK, sharing stories from his long TV career. Details of where and when he will be performing are available at michaelmosley.co.uk.