Junk food getting popular among Pindiites

Rawalpindi : Fools soon waste their money. This is how the saying goes? These days that seems to truer than ever before. My grievance is about the way people hand over their hard-earned cash.

This the impression that you exactly get when you see Pindiites especially youngsters on a splurge, men and women, and kids devouring noodles, burgers, pizzas, and fried stuff before dinner. Unhealthy snacking is on the rise.

What does a bad snack do? It kills appetite for a healthy meal leads to obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes.

A study conducted on snacking among Rawalpindi residents suggests that loading up on fast food before dinner is becoming common. The blame lies with long working hours, the convenience of picking up a snack, and the gap between lunch and dinner. Nutritionists admit that many people reach for junk food to prevent acidity caused by a gap of 4-5 hours between meals.

According to the study Rawalpindi trails behind Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad in pre-dinner snacking, it stands second in unhealthy snacking. At least 95% of women and 88% of children aged 5-12 in Rawalpindi consumes junk between 5 pm and 7 pm. Short eats like samosas, pakoras, noodles, burgers, pizza, chaat, biscuits, chips are at the top of the unhealthy menu.

The study surveyed 1,000 respondents covering homemakers, working mothers aged 28-40 years, and children aged 5-12 years. It found that while snacking is common in mid-morning, teatime, and post-dinner periods, it peaks before dinner. It is no longer shocking to find people in their late 20s or early 30s suffering from obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, or cardiovascular diseases. They are fast food lovers.

What you see is not necessarily what you get these days, especially when it comes to food. How many of you have gone to a MacDonald, Burger King, or whatever fast food joint takes your fancy and been more than a little disappointed with what you got for your money?

Fast food retailers’ delivery trucks are pictures of the yummiest good-looking burgers. They really do make the youngsters go out and buy one. However, every time they purchase one of these burgers, more often than not it turns out to be some shrunken, flat, half-cold pathetic looking thing. It looks nothing like the picture the advertising people use.

You must be thinking they might have learned a lesson by now. Ostensibly, they have not though, because the pictures always draw them back in the vain hope that one day, just maybe if they are lucky, they might find that perfect burger just like the one they saw on the billboard.

There ought to be a law against these kinds of marketing tricks, or at least, they should compensate people with a couple of free burgers.