• Question: why does junk food make you fat

    Asked by asiansupreme to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Blanka Sengerova

      Blanka Sengerova answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      It contains a lot of fat (made up of a smaller molecule called glycerol attached to so called fatty acids) and sugar molecules. These are very important for our lives because they provide the energy for our cells to do all the jobs they need to do. If there is too much fat or sugar though, this gets stored (for lean times) and forms the fatty deposits on your body. The reason why so much fat is stored is because we have a relatively sedentary lifestyle that uses a lot less energy than that of our forefathers (eg. the cavemen), so much less of the food that we take in is used for energy production and more of it stored.

      Does that answer your question?

    • Photo: Emma Trantham

      Emma Trantham answered on 3 Jul 2012:

      Yup as Blanka said – it contains lots and lots of calories in the form of fats and sugars. We just don’t use all of these calories at the time to make energy and so our body stores them in the form of fat.

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