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A meal of chips, burgers and cola can make you feel sick. US researchers explain how and why.
Do you feel queasy after eating a cheeseburger and a carton of chips, washed down with a cola?
If so, it's not your imagination. These 'foods' are playing havoc with your metabolism, say US researchers. In the hours after a meal, they produce wild swings of blood sugar, blood fats, and hormones. And they cause the body to release dangerous inflammatory chemicals that damage the walls of arteries and predispose to heart disease and stroke.
Normally when you eat, enzymes in your stomach and intestine break food down into fats, protein and carbohydrates, and these are absorbed into the bloodstream. It's a slow, ordered, gradual process, say researchers from the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, writing in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology last month.
But not if the meal is a typical takeaway. They describe what happens to the body in the hours after consuming a cheeseburger/chips/cola combo, and it's enough to make you feel distinctly off-colour.
These 'foods' are highly processed, so they're quickly broken down and absorbed. They flood the bloodstream with large amounts of fats and sugars.
The sugar from the soft drinks and the flour in the burger bun cause 'post-prandial hyperglycaemia': a big spike in blood sugar levels. This in turn creates a surge of insulin (whose job normally is to keep blood sugar levels from getting too high). Too much insulin is produced and it forces blood sugar levels back down again to well below normal levels (which is why you feel faint, and often hungry again, in the hours after a takeaway meal). Levels of the stress hormone cortisol are raised.
The large amounts of saturated fats from the fries, the ground beef, bacon, and cheese flood the bloodstream with triglycerides and fatty acids that interfere with insulin and raise the blood sugar further.
The effect is like pouring petrol on a fire. The excess sugar and fats drive the body's metabolism into overdrive, producing too much of one of the normal by-products of cell metabolism the free radicals. In normal amounts, these would be mopped up by the natural antioxidants in the body. But in excessive amounts, they constrict and inflame the arteries, make blood clots more likely, and raise blood pressure.
The more you consume the takeaway meal, the more likely it is that the damage from the lipids, the free radicals, and the high blood pressure etc, will be permanent. Regularly consuming junk food combos like burgers, fries and cola raises your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes (and all the complications that come with it).
But you can get your body back to its normal balance and quickly too by cutting out the junk food combos and eating smaller portions of those foods that nature intended us to eat.
Carbohydrates should come from high-fibre, plant-based foods like vegetables and fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts. Experts recommend green leafy vegetables such as broccoli and spinach, and fruits like grapefruits and cherries.
These foods are high in fibre and water, and they are absorbed much more slowly. The body has time to break them down and they don't produce sugar spikes or overwhelm the body's metabolism.
Proteins should come from egg whites, fish, game meat and other very lean red meats, skinless poultry breast meat, legumes and whey protein (or other non-fat dairy protein).
The diet should contain 'good' fats that is unsaturated fats found in fish, avocado, nuts seeds and vegetable oils like olive and canola oils.
Foods with high amounts of natural antioxidants in them are a plus deeply pigmented plant-based foods and drinks such as berries, red wine, dark chocolate, tea, and pomegranates.
Meal sizes should be modest. (One of the problems with the burger/fries/cola combo is that the portion sizes are usually large, contributing to the overdose of sugars and fats).
Two diets got the thumbs up: the Mediterranean diet (bread, grains, olive oil, fish, a little red wine and lots of fruit and vegetables) and the Okinawa diet (small portions, low calories, little or no meat and plenty of fish and green and yellow vegetables). These are the modern day equivalent of the ancestral hunter-gatherer eating patterns we've inherited and to which we're still adapted, the researchers say.
They take longer to prepare and you can't really eat them in a car. But they won't make you wonder what you ate that made you feel so unwell.