Swiping on a fast-food delivery app to find your perfect pizza or swinging in to check if they still have that deal going on, fast food has been an essential part of our daily life. Going to our favorite restaurant happens more often than some of us would want to admit. The term “fast food” primarily represents a certain set of food that we eat up and consume quickly. It is also commonly referred to as junk food, and we know why.

Eating fast food occasionally on a Saturday night or a Monday evening won’t hurt. But making a habit of it, surely will. Consuming fast foods on a daily basis could seriously take a toll on your health in a number of ways, resulting in both short term and long-term negative side effects. The logic underneath this is that fast foods are highly palatable. They do not need much chewing which is why our bodies break it down very quickly, leading to a rapid activation of the reward centers in the brain.

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Most of these fast foods we consume have tons of carbohydrates, and very little to no fibers. When these foods are broken down by our digestive system, all these carbohydrates are released in the form of glucose into our bloodstream, resulting in an increase in our blood sugar level. To respond to this spike in the glucose levels in our blood, our pancreas comes into action and releases insulin. What insulin does is transport all this sugar to all those cells in your body that need it, or storing it in reserve. This is how your body manages to return to normal.

Insulin is essential to the digestion of sugars in our body but using it too much can leave your body feeling tired. And using it on a daily basis can lead to harmful diseases like diabetes. So the key takeaway being that while an occasional evening of fast food is okay, eating it as a substitute of real food has some serious side effects. There’s extensive scientific research proving that an excessive consumption of junk foods can lead to obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, fatty livers, cardiovascular malfunctioning and in some serious cases even cancer.