Junk food is fast emerging as a serious health hazard. It is a major cause of obesity, which is rapidly becoming a leading global cause of avoidable death.

Regulated eating can counter obesity, but many people can’t regulate themselves.

Why?

Because they often try to change their eating without changing their thinking, especially their thinking about what comprises enjoyment.

Trying to extract extra enjoyment by stimulating the senses more is like throwing a boulder on a sponge to squeeze out more water.

Their definition of enjoyment is determined by the culture’s prominent mode: passion. This mode fills their brain with the junk belief that extravagant sensual stimulation is the expressway to enjoyment. This belief is junk because the senses’ capacity to provide enjoyment is limited, like the amount of water in a sponge. Trying to extract extra enjoyment by stimulating the senses more is like throwing a boulder on a sponge to squeeze out more water. A little more water may come, but the sponge ends tattered. Similarly, excessive sensual stimulation may bring a little more pleasure, but it leaves the body damaged.

The Bhagavad-gita (17.09) states that foods providing excessive sensual stimulation are in the mode of passion, and cause distress and disease. This could well be a description of junk food, which is known to lure with its surplus of stimulants such as salt, sugar and fat.

As long as people buy into the junk belief that greater sensual stimulation means more enjoyment, they will fall for junk food unthinkingly and sometimes even unwillingly. That’s why lasting solution requires a revision of their definition of enjoyment.

For those seeking such revision, Gita wisdom offers systematic education about their true identity as souls and the supreme happiness available in spiritual love for Krishna. That lasting fulfillment is the essential fruit of Gita wisdom with freedom from the lure of junk food being an incidental benefit.

 

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