Junk foods are unhealthy foods with low nutrient value that are packed with calories, salt and sugar. Many of us are aware that junk foods do no favors to our health, yet we keep coming back for more because they are manufactured to look and taste appealing. In fact, eating them frequently can cause us to crave them even more, leading to what’s known as food addiction.

Regularly eating junk foods can negatively impact your health in the long run. But their

harmful effects on health start the minute after you scarf them down, as previously noted. Here Bee Wilson, TheGuardian.com, reflects on lost sensory connection with food and how to get it back:

“This is going to sound weird, but I want you to look closely for a moment at your thumbs. See how they flex forwards as well as back. Notice how responsive and grippy the skin is. The human thumb is not just a device for giving the thumbs-up sign or for picking up dropped keys. It is also one of the most efficient and sensitive tools in existence for determining the ripeness of fruit.

One of the hallmarks of being a hominid is having opposable thumbs: stronger, longer and more flexible than the thumbless hands of a spider monkey or the non-opposable thumbs of a marmoset. These opposable thumbs are a trait that humans share with our primate cousins such as chimpanzees. But it has only recently been discovered that our thumbs might have first evolved as a device for measuring whether or not fruit was ripe. In 2016, biologist Nathaniel Dominy studied the way chimpanzees pick figs. Dominy found that chimpanzees use their dexterous hands to give figs a quick squeeze to determine whether they are ripe or not – a technique that works four times quicker on average than the method used by monkeys (plucking figs at random, biting them to check for ripeness and spitting out the unripe ones).

Humans also have these incredible hands capable of identifying the ripest fruit from touch alone. But most of us don’t use them that way any more. If you want ripe fruit, you no longer need to rely on your own sense of touch. You can go into the nearest supermarket and buy a plastic tub of pre-peeled, pre-sliced mango or melon labelled “ripe and ready” or “ripe and sweet” and eat it with a fork.

One of the most striking things about eating in the modern world is that we do so much of it as if we were sense-blind. We still have the same basic physiognomy as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, yet much of the time, we switch off our senses when choosing what to eat. Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing. Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are “our windows on the world” – the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments. Senses are instruments of survival as well as pleasure. But today, we have relinquished many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry – which suits that industry just fine. It suits us less well, judging by the current epidemic of diet-related ill health.”

Read More … Article Source: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/mar/29/how-we-lost-our-sensory-connection-with-food-and-how-to-restore-it?

If you would like to learn other solutions to help control your health … click here?