Jack Averty: The maddening thing about junk food

For those who aren’t familiar, the documentary follows an American journalist who embarks on an experiment to find out how bad McDonalds is for you – by eating it for every meal for a month.

The concept is to show how bad fast food is for you and, spoiler alert, it is absolutely terrible.

But rather than watching it and being grossed out and vowing to never put a cheap burger in my mouth again, all me and my partner did was crave some Maccies.

See, for all the talk of diet and superfoods in the last few years, nobody ever really mentions how unbelievably good fast and junk food tastes.

Sure you feel rubbish afterwards but can you honestly tell me you’d rather have a fresh leaf salad than some sweet and sour chicken in batter from your local Chinese takeaway? It’s absolute rubbish.

Telling people not to eat at McDonalds, KFC etc and to avoid fast food forever is just horrifically unfair. It tastes good and we enjoy it, in such a fractured world are we really going to be denied that as well?

Of course the key to all of this is moderation and having a plan in place that works for you.

In my first year at university, Billy-no-mates living in a foreign students’ halls of residence, I was eating some form of takeaway pretty much exclusively every night. From a mixed meat kebab with all the trimmings to a fatty sandwich from the corner shop, nothing was too rough for my stomach. Cooking was out of the question.

The effect it had on me? I gained an unbelievable amount of weight and made myself pretty ill on a number of occasions.

But when I finally woke up and realised things had to change did I vow to just scrap junk food altogether? Of course not, I found a way I could still eat it without binging on it 24/7.

Now I’m eating pretty good everyday and going to the gym 3/4 times a week, with the occasional chocolate or fast food binge every week or two.

Is it healthy? Probably not, I’m sure I could be a lean, mean writing machine if I cut all the rubbish out of my diet altogether. But it tastes good, and it’s not something I’m willing to give up.

The problem, like my university experience, is when people are over-reliant on it.

As Morgan Spurlock showed us in Super Size Me, too much fast food makes you really quite sick. You get heavier, your cholesterol increases dramatically, as does your blood pressure and liver enzymes. Perhaps worst of all it makes you very lethargic, slightly depressed and borderline impotent.

The problem starts as a child. Obviously as a hyper youngster you crave sugar and the good stuff. You want chocolate, pick and mix, pizzas etc. Parents resist as much as they can but occasionally they have to relent – how can you not when you’ve got a child screaming in your ear?

So the children start to build up a taste and crave it more and more. Then from the parents’ point-of-view they don’t see any majorly negative results so they allow them to eat that bit more and bit more.

And of course they wouldn’t see the immediate results. As a child you spend most of your days running around like a headless chicken in your school’s playground and taking part in PE classes. All that exercise is going to help stave off any major weight gain and keep you relatively fit.

But what all this bad eating as a youngster does is give you a taste for the bad stuff.

So suddenly, as you get older and spend more and more time in front of a computer rather than running around a playground, you start to balloon in weight and all the terrible side-effects of eating junk food kicks in.

First of all parents need to be strict and do their best to monitor and try and limit the amount of bad food their children are consuming. Stock less chocolate and crisps in the cupboard and try and keep them active as possible, be it going for walks or taking them to the park to kick a football around.

But there comes a point when it is no longer the parents’ responsibility to look after their child’s food intake, much to my mother’s agony. It’s up to the child, by this point no longer a child, to take some responsibility of their life.

They need to be aware of what they’re eating and, if they’ve had a terrible day full of junk food, they need to balance it out with some days of clean eating and keeping active.

I actively despise people who tell us to cut out the good stuff altogether, but at the same time films such as Super Size Me really do hammer home the need to be a tad careful with what you’re shoving down your gullet.

Junk food tastes great, and we should all be allowed to eat it. But as my mum used to tell me when my eyes lit up in the supermarket: “Don’t go mad.”