Junk food is a pejorative term for cheap food containing high levels of calories from sugar and fat with little fiber ,protein,vitamins or minerals and also known as per-prepared or packaged food that has low nutritional value .children ages 2 to 11 consumed about 9 percent of their calories from junk food .On a given day, researchers calculated 34.3 percent of children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 eat junk food .Two-thirds of them take at least 25 percent of their calories from these meals .Adolescents are the future adults of the country who will be responsible for development of the country. This accounts for the importance of healthy children and the need for emphasizing on their diet. The increase trend of urbanization and modernization has resulted in the adoption of western trend of lifestyle in our Nepalese culture .In addition to this, the growing junk food like high sodium, high calories, unbalanced & cholesterol rich diet and fast food industries with alluring advertisement have increased threats to our traditional healthy patterns and has increased invitation for the chronic illnesses such as obesity, heart diseases, diabetes,high blood pressure etc. Junk food is usually high in calories .Our body does not like to waste energy; therefore, the excessive calories are usually stored as fat, causing weight gain . Eating junk food for the long periods of time can lead to obesity, vitamin deficiencies, heart diseases and other healthy problems.
The junk food issues have been very important in the developed countries and in some countries of south east Asia like Malaysia and even in India. Various research studies have been conducted to find out the levels of awareness among adolescent students and study have shown that still there is gap or lacking in the awareness regarding its harmful effect on healthy. Anti-junk food measures have been adopted by developed countries like USA to decrease its consumption .The food choice of school children are affected by various factors like social background, peer pressure, food availability, attractive advertisement etc as shown by various studies .Junk food consumption not only affects physically but mental effects have also been proved. There is a need of intervention program for youths that should focus on behavior change along with acquisition of knowledge regarding importance of healthy diet. Public awareness and necessary actions by government to discourage junk food advertisement is the need of today's society to develop healthy manpower tomorrow. Our body may retain water if we eat too much sodium, leaving us felling puffy,bloated, and swollen with the following healthy complication such as
- Headache
- Shortness of breath
- High blood pressure
- Blood sugar spike
- Insulin resistance
- Depression
- Heart disease or stroke
- High cholesterol .
On the basic of study findings,it is seen that majority of adolescent have adequate level of awareness regarding junk food . However, most of the adolescents are still unaware about the major physical and mental health hazards of junk food. From study survey, the adolescents from private School have adequate awareness compared to adolescents from public school but there is no significant relationship between level of awareness of adolescents from public school and Private School. On showing the association between level of awareness of adolescents and selected social-demographic variables, educational level of parents with awareness level of adolescents was found significant . This indicates the need of inclusion of junk food and its health effects in the curriculum of secondary school level.
Here, a question may be raised that how the adolescent can reduce the use of junk foods. The answer is very simple, let us write a list of our favorite junk foods. If we can identify our top favorite junk foods this will help prepare us to minimize them in our diet. Once we know what we crave, we can better manage those craving and plan for a healthy swap. In the way,we go through our kitchen and remove most of those favorite foods.
It is very urgent to plan healthy education to school children . For parents, should have knowledge about the junk food and its health hazards. Hence, it helps them to maintain a healthy balance diet pattern of their Children. For School Curriculum makers, should add impact of junk food topic in secondary school curriculum to create awareness to the school children. For healthy programmer planners should make different policies with collaboration with governmental as well as Non-governmental sectors to decrease the advertisement of junk foods during children's programmer, to ban the availability of such food around schools. They can collaborate with medias to organize various types of Radios, T V , Internet,etc giving emphasis to health hazards of junk food and assist to change adolescents eating behavior in near future .
