Junk food

What is junk food? Junk food is soft drink, potato chips, hot chips, ice cream, and hamburgers, hot dogs and other kinds of take away food.

What's wrong with junk food? Too much fat! Junk foods such as hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken and chips usually contain loads of saturated fats. Too much saturated fat in the diet will cause people to put on weight and get fat or obese (very fat). Being overweight is a risk to the health of the heart and can cause other diseases.

Too much salt! Junks foods often have too much salt. There's a lot of salt already in foods such as bread, breakfast cereals and biscuits and cakes. So people are getting more salt than they need when they eat junk food. Too much salt is unhealthy for the heart.

Too much sugar! Soft drinks, cordials, biscuits and cakes all have loads of sugar. That's what makes them taste so good! But too much sugar makes people fat, rots the teeth, is bad for the blood and may cause other diseases.

Should people eat junk food? Junk food does have some of the good things that the body needs for good health. And the body needs some salt, fat and sugar for energy to burn while we work and play. However too much fat, sugar and salt is bad for our health and eating lots of junk food will overload your body with these things.

It is probably OK to eat junk food sometimes! But people should look for foods that are low in fats and salt and sugar. Choose grilled fish and chicken rather than fried, fish burgers instead of beef, grilled lean beef burgers, and vegetarian pizza and pizza with seafood instead of fatty meat type pizza.