This Is What Happens To Your Body After 5 Days Of Junk Food!
This Is What Happens To Your Body After 5 Days Of Junk Food!
Five days isn’t very long. One work week. A standard vacation. The length of time it takes to do that 8 page paper your philosophy professor assigned (so boring!). But in five days, high fat, high sugar, highly processed foods can alter your metabolism. Just five days.
According to a study done at Virginia Tech, just five days of a high fat diet changes the way the muscles of the body process nutrients. The study released in 2015 by Angela Anderson, Kimberly Haynie, et al. spells trouble for anyone who is consistently on a high fat diet. Muscle’s ability to oxidize (process) glucose is “disrupted” in just five days. Interestingly, there was not a gain in weight or increased insulin resistance, but those might be longer term effects. Science Daily reminds its readers that they might not be able to get away with a high-fat diet for nearly as long as they thought.
An article in Time Magazine about the same report quoted one of the researchers, Dr. Matthew Hulver as saying that even a McDonald’s diet didn’t contain enough saturated fat for the study. They instead opted for a cheese and butter-covered Western style diet. Ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise and butter, macaroni and cheese and fatty microwaveable meals were the foods that were studied.
Hulver said that his lab’s study was just the beginning. They want to look at how this type of a metabolic change can cause permanent changes in how the body processes nutrients. They also want to see if people who have a chronic high fat diet will gain weight and display insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance is the beginning of diabetes and is the subject of this many studies around the world.
There are few items of note from the study. Firstly, the study was very small, just twelve people. Also, all of the subjects were healthy college students, not middle aged couch potatoes or triathletes. Another important point is that to get this much impact in five days, they had their subjects not only eat high fat foods, but also add butter to things like macaroni and cheese.
What happens to your body after five days of junk food? A great deal. It begins to compromise the body’s metabolism which will likely lead to insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity and more. The most important note is that this is just five days of bad food. What will five months do? Or five years? Or five decades?
