what do you class as junk food?

[ekkiethump]

in the light of the new research talking about 3 years olds eating junk food it started making me paranoid about what i give my 19 month old.

most of the food i give him are home cooked foods so i dont need to worry. obvious things like crisps, sweets, chocolate, take aways, mcdonalds etc are obviously junk food.

BUT do people class frozen fish fingers, sausages, frozen burgers, spaghetti hoops etc.. as junk food?
is any convienience food junk food????
does it make it better if it is home made cakes and biscuits (i think it is because there are less transfats, preservatives, sugars in it)
would like to know what others think definition of junk food is?

I generally consider that (when it comes to the dcs) anything "made" by a manufacturer is processed food. That said though I don't have an issue with decent fish fingers or stuffed pasta.

anything highly processed like hot dogs etc and most fast food outlets other than fish and chips or baked spuds.

?Junk food is an informal term applied to some foods which are perceived to have little or no nutritional value, or to products with nutritional value but which also have ingredients considered unhealthy when regularly eaten, or to those considered unhealthy.

Orange (covered in breadcrumbs)however, I would class cheaper versions like fish fingers/burgers to be a poor equivelent to a proper fish finger ie these can be homemade.

That horrid smell you get in soft play or cheap cafe - value beans smell, sausages that have little pork and are spongy...yuk!

Yes, homemade is better if eat liberly too. You probably use better quality ingedients too, use less salt/preseratives. If you looked at a diet of someone brought up 1930s/40s/50's you can see that almost everything was fullfat and homemade but generally these people were slimmer and healthier.

The orange in fish fingers is only turmeric and paprika. I prefer frozen fish fingers to home made ones because I am not delicate and I end up with a low fish:breadcrumb ratio.

I would think that generally processed food is higher in salt than homemade. I also don't like shop bought cakes because they tend to have dodgy ingredients.

I think you have to balance the good with the bad eg cheese has high salt and fat but also protien and calcium whereas crisps are high salt and fat but have low nutritional value so imo are junk.

Sausages and burgers etc. are on a sliding scale.

Anything I haven't made myself but I'm weird like that :o

I'm not sure really.
I know I definitely do have things I consider junk, but I don't have a problem with any food and when I start to think about it, I'm not really sure what to say.

How can a burger be junk when it's just minced meat?
Does it matter if a turkey twizzler is vile if it's a one off?

I don't have a problem with any food at all, what I do watch is amounts, and I make sure the vast majority of our food is home made-no additives, and that DD sees cooking from scratch as the norm.

If you looked at a diet of someone brought up 1930s/40s/50's you can see that almost everything was fullfat and homemade but generally these people were slimmer and healthier.

Surely that's because they did almost everything manually though? Laundry, sweeping/scrubbing floors, heaving coal around - I think it was activity that kept them slim far more than food content.

These days we even have a machine to clean our teeth

Best working definition, I think, was by Michael Pollan in his book 'In Defence of Food'. He's a bit of a purist but it's a nice rule of thumb to take with you when shopping....

"Don?t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce."

A good quality potato crisp, for example, might be potato, salt and sunflower oil... just about makes it.

That's a good quote to remember Chili.

It all depends on the quality of the food, IMO. For instance a burger can be full of fillers, additives, flavourings and made with cheap meat. Or it can be made with decent meat, with a bit of seasoning. The same goes for fish fingers; there's a world of difference between one made with cod fillet, for example, and a cheap one made with minced up fish. I think the study is really interesting. However, I think it's part of a wider problem in this country where we have this concept of "children's food" and "adult food". For me, it's always been important that my DS has the same food as us (the only exception being that I tone down anything too spicy). We want him to have a good palate, and a lot (I'm not saying all) so called "children's food" is gimmicky, wasteful when it comes to packaging, and is either pretty bland or too salty!

X-post, but agree with Chil1234 and berri, good quote!

all very interesting
in terms of diet in 40/50s they ate the same amount of calories as us but just our calories have a higher proprotion of fat (surprisingly enough even though they used butter etc on everything) than they ate.
the actual cause of our obesity is that we exercise less and are generally less active than they were.