It's the end of a long, busy day. You have, to quote Winnie the Pooh, a rumbly in your tumbly. You're really not in the mood to think up something delicious to create for dinner from your fridge full of slightly elderly items you bought while you were hungry and tired after some other long and busy day. So, you head off to Steers or McD's or one of the other many, many establishments in the world that sandwich a dead cow and some MSG between two nutritionally deficient pieces of bread (if you're lucky, they'll put a piece of limp lettuce, a slice of squishy tomato and some overcooked mushrooms on it to contribute to your five daily servings of fruit and veg). You have a yummy meal, supplemented with large doses of caffeine and sugar (or aspartame, which is bad for your mental health, if you're a Coke Zero sort of a person) and go about the rest of your evening. It's a win, right?
Wrong. We'll leave aside, for the moment, the long-term effects on heart health of the saturated fat and sodium in burgers and skip onto the point of this article. A number of studies have been done by scientists in various parts of the world that show an increase in the incidence of asthma among people who have high sodium diets. A double-blind study in New Zealand showed that children who ate high sodium diets suffered more from asthma than their healthy-eating counterparts. In this study, the data was corrected to take into account the BMI of the children, negating the effect that their weight would have on respiratory health (obesity has been linked to a higher incidence of asthma). While the study has limitations (Wickens et al. talk about them in the discussion section on page 4 of the article. I'll leave you to read it if you're really interested), it makes you think twice about takeout, huh?
Wrong. We'll leave aside, for the moment, the long-term effects on heart health of the saturated fat and sodium in burgers and skip onto the point of this article. A number of studies have been done by scientists in various parts of the world that show an increase in the incidence of asthma among people who have high sodium diets. A double-blind study in New Zealand showed that children who ate high sodium diets suffered more from asthma than their healthy-eating counterparts. In this study, the data was corrected to take into account the BMI of the children, negating the effect that their weight would have on respiratory health (obesity has been linked to a higher incidence of asthma). While the study has limitations (Wickens et al. talk about them in the discussion section on page 4 of the article. I'll leave you to read it if you're really interested), it makes you think twice about takeout, huh?
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