It’s a rather intriguing and quite compelling question to consider: To what degree do early childhood experiences influence us as adults?

Do I, for instance, have faith in my intellect today, in part, because of what happened on a field trip in first grade 51 years ago?

As the tour guide showed my class the main exhibit at the Reading Museum, she asked related questions. I correctly answered the first half dozen or so.

I don’t remember how hard the questions were. But I do remember that I never knew the answers for sure and just made intelligent guesses, that I felt this wonderful mix of exhilaration and satisfaction with every correct answer — and that I was standing in the back of the group and saw that no one else ever raised a hand.

Now I share this story of precociousness not to impress, but to explain why this column is such a great gig. It provides the opportunity to feel that wonderful mix of exhilaration and satisfaction and feel like a kid again.

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A study published in the journal PLOS Medicine this fall serves to confirm what many have already suspected: The more junk food you eat, the more likely it is that you’ll contract certain cancers.

To reach this conclusion, researchers at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Paris led by Mélanie Deschasaux, along with specialists from numerous other research institutions, analyzed the data collected from nearly 500,000 people over a period of more than 15 years gathered for the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition.

Based on the information provided, the researchers calculated the associations between foods with various nutritional qualities and the risk of developing cancer and found that regular consumption of foods with low nutritional quality — in essence, junk food — was associated with an increased risk of stomach and colorectal cancer, postmenopausal breast cancer, and lung cancer in men.

The logical follow-up question here is twofold: What about junk food creates the cancer and why was a link between the two already suspected? The answer to both is found in the free radical theory of aging first proposed by Dr. Denham Harman in the 1950s that later drew nationwide notice in 1982 with the publication, aggressive promotion, and surprising popularity of Life Extension, a book by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw that spent weeks atop the New York Times bestsellers list.

Simply put, free radicals damage your body because they create a series of chain reactions in it that kill cells or cause them to mutate. Cell death ages the body, and cell mutations can lead to cancer.

Junk foods are not only chocked full of free radicals, but eating them also reduces the amount of healthy food you ingest. Healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are loaded with vitamins, minerals, and phytochenicals that function as free-radical scavengers, and the scavenging reduces the number of cells that die prematurely or mutate.

As a result, the link between consuming junk food and contracting certain cancers, especially ones related to the digestive process, should come as no surprise.

The end result of other research published this September in the journal Molecular Psychiatry should cause no surprise as well. In it, 41 prior studies were examined to ascertain if there was any link between diet and depression.

The number-crunching revealed that eating what was deemed as pro-inflammatory food — especially sugar, saturated fat, and any foods that are highly processed — raised the risk of depression.

Plant-based diets, such as the Mediterranean diet, however, were previously found to fight inflammation, which prompted Dr. Camille Lassale, a research associate in UCL’s Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care and the paper’s lead author, to state that their research demonstrated “a clear pattern that following a [more healthful], plant-rich, anti-inflammatory diet can help in the prevention of depression.”

Stretch a rubber band excessively and it’s bound to break. It’s that sort of cause-and-effect relationship that supports something else related to eating too much junk food that makes sense: Dieting stresses the body and yo-yo dieters — those who repeatedly lose weight only to gain it back and lose it again and again and again — are more likely to experience the sort of internal stress that causes heart attacks, strokes, and early death.

In fact, when researchers at the Catholic University of Korea in Seoul, South Korea, along with the help of some other institutions, compared the health records of nearly 7 million people over a seven-year period, they found a 41 percent increased risk of stroke, a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack, and a 127 percent higher risk of any type of death for those who had yo-yo dieted as opposed to those who had not.

The researchers, whose findings appeared this fall in the journal Circulation, reviewed information initially gathered by the Korean National Health Insurance system that checked each participant’s weight, systolic blood pressure, cholesterol, and fasting blood sugar on three separate occasions.