Snacks: Delicious but dangerous

Santi Hendrawati, Contributor, Jakarta

Candy, potato chips, chocolate, taffy, ice-cream, milk and other snacks as well as instant noodles are consumed in large quantities by many children and in some cases are the staple of many a kid's diet because some parents allow their children to eat such junk food.

Andang Gunawan, a nutritionist who graduated from the Queensland Institute of Science in Australia, has conceded that it is not easy for parents to prevent their children from buying and eating snacks, which are available in various forms, tastes and colors in the supermarket, in small shops and in food stalls near schools.

Processed foods such as the aforementioned, are cooked several times and lose most of their nutritional value. Other processed snacks are produced through a long dissolving, heating and evaporation process, which eliminates not only vitamins, but also minerals and various other kinds of nutrition needed by human bodies.

The use of additional ingredients, preservatives and seasonings such as MSG, can have an adverse effect on brain development in children. Other chemical substances can be even more dangerous to human health, as those materials have been found to disrupt metabolism and eventually leads to brain damage.

Disruption of the metabolism is detrimental to the brain, which consists of the smallest, the softest and most sensitive cells in the human body, and damage to those cells can be very detrimental indeed to overall health.

"No wonder there was a one-year-old child who cheerfully waved his hands at his father who left for the office in the morning, but suddenly could not recognize his parents and others around him in the evening because he suffered from autism," said Andang.

Autism is a mental disease that emerges from a metabolism disorder which is often not easily recognizable by parents. It takes a long process before the disruption of the metabolism resulting from insufficient brain nourishment develops into autism.

Obesity or extreme thinness among children is also common today. Various allergic diseases, skin diseases, coughs, influenza and asthma are also prevalent among children. A contributing factor in those illnesses is often related to an excessive amount of junk food, according to Andang.

Soft drinks, such as one American-based, world renowned cola, contain carbon dioxide. In addition such drinks can also greatly boost gastric acid. When the body has too much acid, the calcium in the body will melt down.

One of the solutions normally taken by parents to keep food and soft drink intake at a minimum is to make sure that kids first eat enough nutritious food before consuming any junk food.

"Ice cream, chocolate or cookies will do no harm," said Andang. " As long as the child wants to consume fruits and vegetables to balance his or her diet, 60 percent of the child's intake should at least comprise fresh fruits and vegetables."

The 60 percent intake of fruits and fresh vegetables will balance the body's need for base acid, thus preventing the body from becoming too acidic. Fruits and fresh vegetables contain a variety of enzymes, vitamins and oxidizing agents to rid the body of toxic substances.

Some parents who are fully aware of the importance of fruits and vegetables for children, and are finding it difficult to make children eat them and instead, try to correct the imbalance by giving the child vitamins or food supplements.

For example, to meet the child's need for vitamin C, parents often force the pills on the children. The problem is that the intake of vitamin C that is derived from sources other than fruit will undergo a different process in the body. The body will not absorb synthetic vitamin C directly even if it was extracted from natural products.

Such vitamins have undergone chemical changes and the working mechanism is different from the vitamins that comes from fresh, natural food. "They (the vitamin pills) will have to be digested," Andang explained. However, during the process of digestion, the body will first detect the food. When a food is considered alien or something that will cause illness, the body's defense system will automatically reject it.

"Because without enzymes, each food that comes into the body will be regarded as a disease, so take a vitamin together with your meal" Andang advised.