You are on a road trip and you need to make a stop to eat lunch. The most convenient place to go would be McDonald’s or Burger King, or Taco Bell, or any other fast food joint. You go and eat at one of those places and don’t think much about it and then go back to your drive after. Or, you may see the commercial for the new Big Mac on Instagram or TikTok and all of a sudden you have a craving for it so you are off to McDonald’s to grab it. However, if you knew what fast food really does to your body, you may think twice. And if you are planning a road trip, you may want to pack a few meals in a cooler instead of running to a fast food joint.
You already know that fast food isn’t particularly good for you, however, new research is showing that not only is fast food bad for you, but your body thinks that the fast food you are eating is an infection. Let that sink in!
Fast Food Is Treated As A Bacterial Infection By Your Immune System
How does that even happen? At the University of Bonn, a new study conducted has indicated that when you eat fast food, especially on a regular basis, your body creates an acute inflammatory response the same way it does when you have a bacterial infection. Will eating fast food once in a while do that? It still does but if you keep eating it seldomly, then the long-term effects will not be so dire. If you are on a healthy diet, you may not want to even eat fast food anyway.
Even if you are not taking trips to fast food joints frequently, if you eat foods that are highly processed, high in trans fats and sugar, it has the same effect on your body. A diet full of sugar and fat and other harmful preservatives in fast food can be doing some significant damage to your immune cells and it may be permanent. That does not mean at all if you are on a healthy diet and you treat yourself to a donut once a week or a few cookies that it will harm you. You have to be eating processed foods regularly and daily for it to have such a significant and damaging impact.
When your immune cells are destroyed and constantly exposed to unhealthy foods, that causes damage and increases the chances of you developing conditions such as arteriosclerosis or type 2 diabetes. The study involved putting mice on a diet that was high in sugar and low on fiber for one month. After the month was over, the scientists found that there were a lot more immune cells in their blood. Scientists compared the raised immune cells of the mice that were on the low-nutrient diet to the cells of the mice that were on a nutritious diet. The mice that were on the unhealthy diet had much higher levels of properties in their blood that were indicative that they were repairing the body as if it had a bacterial infection.
That is how scientists found that if you are on a diet of fast food and you eat it regularly, your body is in a mode where it is constantly fighting a bacterial infection based on the condition of the cells as well as the inflammation that your body experiences. Therefore, that in itself should be a motivating factor for anyone to start adopting a healthier lifestyle as it can be resolved in that case. If you already have conditions such as type 2 diabetes, if it is progressed, it cannot be reversed but it can be controlled with a healthy diet.
