I’m sure you know the drill: You’re eating with a friend whose diet usually consists of junk food and you notice that he is munching down on a piece of fruit or a salad. You make the joke that the healthy food will put him into shock.
Is this actually possible to some degree?
It sounds ridiculous, but we all know the hazards of having someone who is out of shape suddenly trying to excersise. Injuries are not uncommon. Is there any kind of risk for injury to someone who never eats correctly making a change too rapidly for his body to keep up? What risks are there, if any?
I’m not talking anout death here. I’m talking about problems like diarrhea, things that might come about when you eat anything that your body is not used to getting.
Switching to a diet high in fiber from one that isn’t high in fiber can cause constipation. So if you are normally eating pizza and pepsi and switch to fruit and nuts (and start eating 40-50g fiber a day) that can cause some bowel problems for a while. Beyond that I don’t know.
Speaking as one who foolishly switches between junk food and ultra-healthy food, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. It shouldn’t kill you though, just make you feel sick and make the stomach a little wobbly.
Fresh juice (from a juicer, not a carton or bottle) can make me feel very ill if I drink the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time; for instance, living on junk food for a week and then necking a pint of fresh apple juice. Strong vegetable juices (like cabbage or beetroot) have a similar effect on me, and the more unhealthy my recent diet has been, then the more nauseous I feel when I down some potent juice.
I find that the better the food I eat, the less I feel like eating junk food. After you get above a certain nutritional-quality threshold, then the cravings for junk food fall away, and then it’s eating junk food that makes me feel ill, not the glasses of apple juice.
Here I classify junk food as anything that contains excess sugar, salt and fat, and very little in the way of vitamins, minerals or enzymes. Ultra-healthy food generally has to be raw (apart from basic carbs and proteins)- cooking destroys so much.
Haven’t you ever heard of carrotosis? Sickle celery anemia?
I am not a doctor. I am not a dietitian. I am a former kidney dialysis patient who learned more about nutrition than I care to recall.
In the case of drinking a whole bunch of orange juice at once after drinking soda for weeks, a person might feel a little under the weather due to the large potassium bolus. Starchy junk food is not, as a rule, very high in potassium, which is found in bananas, oranges, potatoes, milk, tomatoes, beans, and meats. A diet of Diet Coke, M&Ms, Doritos and cold Pop-Tarts might earn you a potassium deficiency (not to mention diabetes). Taken to extremes it is called hypokalemia, which is fatal.
Chugging orange juice and bananas until you puke is not the answer. You’ll be happy to know that too much potassium is called hyperkalemia and is also fatal. Your kidneys usually flush out excess potassium into your urine, so unless you’re in the habit of mainlining the stuff (the potassium, not the urine) you’re unlikely to leap straight into cardiac arrest by putting too many banana slices on your Post Toasties. But you might not feel entirely well until the kidneys get rid of the surplus.
I’m not trying to be alarmist here; the two lethal extremes are often caused by things such as kidney failure, excessive diarrhea or vomiting, diuretics and laxatives, or other non-diet related health issues. Simply trading junk food for a healthy and balanced diet probably won’t cause a person to instantly die, though it might take the body a few days to sort out the new influx of chemicals and electrolyte balances.
Eating a bad diet can cause deficiencies in other important vitamins and minerals which have the same range of extremes — not enough is bad, too much is also bad. Calcium leaps to mind in this regard. See that your magnesium intake is sufficient. And eat those Flintstones vitamins, but not too many. Start with Betty.
Fresh apple juice contains vitamins, but it also contains a large amount of sugar: 27 g of sugar in 1 cup (248 g). The same amount of a typical carbonated soft drink contains 22 g of sugar.