If I eat really crappy food, like McDonald’s, before work where I walk upwards of 6 miles a day or more, I’m obviously burning off some of the bad stuff in the food, but why? What makes walking burn off and lower the consequences of eating really bad food?
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It is really as simple as movement requires energy – food (as long as it isn’t a lethal dose of something) will be digested to produce usable energy.
The reasons that McDonald’s is “bad” for most people is twofold:
1) It is calorically dense – a single cheeseburger is like 1/4 of an adult man’s daily recommended calorie intake, and a big mac meal is more calories than most adults need in a day. This is the main reason why “junk” food makes you fat – your stomach gets “full” based partly on volume, and high caloric density means more calories for a given volume.
2) It is pretty empty nutritionally – calories are the simple measure of energy, but there are other nutrients that you generally get through eating things that modern processing takes out of food.
It’s worth noting that for some people, caloric density is *good* – if you are doing a lot of physical activity, you need the extra calories to keep yourself energized. Swimming in particular sees people eat a lot of high-calorie food, because the act of swimming burns a lot of calories, but being submerged in water you use more calories even at rest to keep yourself warm.
So you will burn the calories by walking, but you will have to get your vitamins and other nutrients from other sources.
There is more to it than that, as it turns out nutrition is an extremely complicated thing. But those are the barebones basics.
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