Teenagers adopt food habits that become detrimental to their health. They gorge on unhealthy junk food and follow inappropriate eating patterns. Here we have compiled five food habits that a teen should avoid.
1. Skipping usual meals
Most of the times, teens show extreme negligence in taking their usual meals. They forgo their breakfast and skip their lunch too. Instead, they find it easy to munch on an apple or take a bite of pizza. If you have been lenient about such habit of your teen, it is high time you get serious. This faulty food habit can lead to severe health consequences like malnutrition, gastric problems, acidity, etc. Gastric and bile juices are excreted out of the digestive organs after a gap of every three to four hours. In absence of enough food to react with the same, the juices turn out to be acidic, lying in the stomach. This creates indigestion and other problems.
2. Junk food
Mostly due to peer influence, teens prefer junk food in place of home cooked or healthier options. Junk foods include finger chips, rolls, fish fry, chocolates, ice cream, and confectionery. So, before gifting your kid with a large box of chocolate candies, think twice. Junk foods contain high amount of calories, added salt, fats, and fatty acids. Hence, they are difficult to digest. Moreover, overeating of such foods leads to obesity and complications of raised cholesterol level in the blood.
3. Eating in a hurry
Teens usually suffer from immense shortage of time whenever they need to sit at the dining table for their meal. They do not even chew the food properly because they are always in a hurry. They literally gulp it down. The resultant is that they develop complications of indigestion and weak immunity. Chewing the food is extremely vital in order to promote proper assimilation along with supply of essential nutrients to the body. During the process of chewing, the saliva secreted from the mouth breaks down the food into simpler form, thus making it easy to digest. The digestive juices further act upon it and release the important nutrients in it so that they get absorbed in the blood. So, eating in a hurry often causes malnutrition and decreased immunity as a consequence.
4. Carbonated drinks
Given a choice between fresh coconut water, real fruit juices, and carbonated soft drinks, teens will always opt for the last one. Soft drinks contain greater percentages of sugar and artificial coloring agents. Thus, when teens consume them on a regular basis, the sugar present in it act upon the enamels of the teeth and gradually leads to tooth decay. They can even become overweight and develop juvenile diabetes. Further, the coloring agents present in carbonated drinks are often so harmful that they might make kids vulnerable to carcinogenic effects.
5. Binge eating habit
Most of the children become over conscious about their physique and looks by the time they advance towards teenage. Many of them develop binge eating habit. In this circumstance, they overeat during the binge episode, followed by starvation in the next episode. Statistics show that during the phase of overeating, they chose high calorie junk foods that are poor in nutritional value. The period of starvation too exempt the teens from nutrition. As a whole, they suffer from lack of nutrition. Hence, kids develop weakness, inferior bone and skin health, inferior immunity, and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia in the longer run.