Junk food consumption during pandemic
Since the start of the pandemic, have you reduced/eliminated, maintained, or increased the junk food in your diet?
Junk food consumption during pandemic 4 votes
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I've been avoiding all junk foods since the spring of 2020. Yes, I even skipped the holiday treats. Unhealthy foods weaken the immune system and promote inflammation. This is a double-whammy - reducing your body's ability to fight off the coronavirus AND more risk of the inflammation that leads to the deadly cytokine/bradykinin storm behind the severe cases.
At the same time, I've been doubling down on healthy superfoods. I now treat probiotics as an essential food group, much like fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. I've increased the quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables in my diet, especially in winter.
Although I've never had any reason to be concerned about my weight or my figure (because I've always been thinner than most other people), I've found that my all-healthy-food diet enhances summer weight loss AND reduces winter weight gain. In spite of my winter weight gain, I'm over 20 pounds lighter now than I was 2 years ago.
As I see it, the pandemic multiplied the risks of junk food consumption by orders of magnitude. Gone are the days when the biggest risk was increased blood cholesterol. I figure I'll have plenty of time eat junk food after the pandemic is over. I suspect that the biggest benefit of avoiding junk food for 2 years will be losing my taste for my old favorites, which will make it easier to consume a healthy diet in the future. I wonder if I will still like ice cream, cake, pie, hash browns, and Portillo's Italian beef sandwiches.
What confounds me is that there is no mainstream national dialogue about the role of the junk food in this pandemic. I believe that it's been making things MUCH worse and is why the US, Canada, and Europe have been faring so much worse than the countries of eastern Asia and equatorial Africa.
While vaccination, masking up, and physical distancing are necessary, these precautions are NOT enough. Is junk food sacred? I consider it to be a very small sacrifice compared to everything else. Does going 2 years without junk food make me THAT much of an outlier? What percentage of my fellow Americans have been doing this? 1% 0.1% 0.01%?