Reflection Blog Post

I enjoyed the readings by Pollan a lot. I felt that they were very educational about food and that the source we were reading was correct and unbiased. I also enjoyed watching Food Inc. I felt that Pollan's essays paralleled that movie very well. I also learned useful research skills and how to use the library website as well as google scholar effectively. This is important because these skills relate to many other classes and this knowledge and ability to do research effectively will be very helpful. I plan to build upon this knowledge through practice researching and information that I will learn in future courses.

Complexities of Nutrients and Food

American's have the tendency of going along with any and very health craze that is popular at the time. This doesn't sound like a bad thing, however many of these health regimes actually end up being unhealthy for you. Something will be said to be great for you or bad for you and then flip flop the next year. This is because of many factors such as bad science and bias of reporters.

One recent craze is that of Nutritionism, which is discussed in Pollan's essay, "Unhappy Meals". While the word nutrition automatically sounds healthy in ones mind, this craze has actually proved to be unhealthy for Americans. Food is very complex, and when it is broken down to figure out what exactly is healthy about certain foods scientists often make mistakes. Scientists have figured out that a diet consisting of many fruits and vegetables helps protect one from cancer. Because of this they isolated the compound beta carotene, and turned it into vitamins and supplements. But in fact, "beta carotene ingested as a supplement, actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops."(Pollan). No matter how much scientists do experiments, and add nutrients that are thought to be healthy into processed foods, nothing is going to be as healthy as the natural untouched foods.


The essay, "Angels and Vegetables" by Dupuis, also demonstrates the faultiness of listening to the popular belief of what is healthy. As well as the fact that food is complex and scientists have problems understanding everything about it, there is also the problem of bias by those giving the advice about what to eat. McCollum said that having a diet of plants creates things such as, "are characterized by small stature, relatively short span of life, high infant mortality"(Dupris 41). He also said that his diet consisting primarily of milk and dairy is far superior, but, "What cannot be ignored here is McCollum’s close relationship to the dairy industry"(41). 


The reality is that experts opinion about what is healthy is always going to be influenced by their own personal views and business connections. Meat companies and lobbyists sue any people that say negative things about there foods. While there is a great amount of information out there, it is very hard to figure what foods are actually healthy for you.
 
 

Comments on SE5

I learned from Bryce's blog that Americans as a population consume a lot more sodium than is healthy. I never really think about the effects of my sodium intake. When eating a bag of chips or some other kind of junk food I look at the package and my eyes go straight to the calories and grams of fat, but to look at sodium never crossed my mind.

I learned from Scottie's blog that Chai tea acts as an anti-inflamatory, antioxidant, and digestive aid. I love drinking chai tea and did not ever know this. I am happy to now one of my favorite drinks is so good for you.

Consequences of Skipping Breakfast

            Since I have arrived at college it has become a common occurrence for me to skip breakfast. Because of my desire to sleep in before my morning classes, I do not wake up early enough to go down to the cafeteria and eat breakfast before class. This results in my first meal of the day being when I come back from class around 12 o clock. I also often skip breakfast on the weekends because I enjoy sleeping in until 11 or later. I noticed in reading other peoples food logs that I was not alone in skipping breakfast and that many of my classmates were doing the same thing. The notion that skipping breakfast is bad for you is always repeated, however there is actually statistical and medical evidence to support this claim. 

            The article, “Breakfast skipping and health-compromising behaviors in adolescents and adults” presents a statistical analysis that was done by The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition to test many variables such as the frequency of times a week a subject ate breakfast compared with the co-occurrence of health compromising factors such as smoking, alcohol use, sedentary lifestyle, and overweight or obesity. The study showed that, “The co-occurrence of two or more health-compromising factors was significantly (P<0.00001) more common among breakfast skippers than breakfast eaters,”(847). Given this information, it is hard to know whether there is a cause and effect relationship. This relationship between having these health-compromising factors and skipping breakfast could be related to other factors such as lower socio-economic status and the general lifestyles of that group of people. But still, this data does support the idea that skipping breakfast seems to be worse for your health.

             The study also showed that skipping breakfast led to more snacking later on in the day. I would say that this is true, if I do not eat breakfast I tend to snack more and eat a much larger lunch than I would have had I eaten breakfast. My total intake of calories to make up for skipping breakfast is probably greater than the amount of calories I would have absorbed had I just eaten breakfast. This is consistent with this study’s finding that a high BMI is associated with skipping breakfast (851).

            While more research needs to be done to show a completely persuasive argument that skipping breakfast is indeed bad for your health, this article does show many correlations that seem to suggest this. The article writes about the fact that it is not only adolescents that have a high frequency in skipping breakfast but also adults. Reading our food logs, I assumed that it was just common among college kids because of our fast paced lifestyles. But, reading this article I have seen that this is not true, adults also have fast paced lives and have a hard time fitting in breakfast. If the findings of this article are correct and skipping breakfast is bad for your health, then as a society we need to find a way to make morning breakfasts a more regular occurrence.

Work Cited

Keski-Rahkonen, A., Kaprio, J., Rissanen, A., Virkkunen, M., & Rose, R. J. (2003). Breakfast skipping and health-compromising behaviors in adolescents and adults. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 57(7), 842-53. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1601618

Observation on Food Journals

I noticed many people were skipping breakfast, especially on the weekends. I also noticed that many people were eating at fast food restaurant near campus including Chipotle, Wendy's, and Burger King. Many people were getting quesadillas from Nagel. This is probably because it's a nice change of pace from always having the same thing at Halls or Nelson. People also were snacking a lot rather than having actual meals and eating things such as chips or an apple.

Food Log

Sunday:
Breakfast - 2 eggs over easy, toast, hash browns
Lunch - stir fry pasta
Dinner - cesar salad from mad greens with tomatoes and avocado
Desert: froyo
Snack: oranges

Saturday:
Lunch - hummus and pretzels
Dinner - cesar salad, chicken and rice, cheesecake
Snack: oranges

Friday:
Lunch - top ramen
Dinner - quesadilla, cake batter ice cream
Snack: oranges

Corn

Corn is arguably the most important crop in the US. It can be used for almost anything and everything, and is in a surprising amount of our foods. In addition, it is fed to most of the livestock we eat. While hearing this you don’t think of it as a bad thing, corn sounds natural and healthy; after all it is a vegetable. However, the ways the corn is genetically engineered and transformed for other purposes is very unhealthy. But, because of the FDA’s loose laws on genetic modification, bio technicians are allowed to genetically modify corn in anyway they want and put it in anything they want without the general public having any idea about it. While there is no denying that corn is an important crop in America, it is currently being used for many improper uses and is affecting our country and its people negatively overall.

            When you go to the grocery store the isles seem so full of many different and unique types of food. However, this is not all true. When further examining the ingredients you will be surprised to discover just how many of them contain corn (Food Inc.). Companies use words such as high fructose corn syrup, dextrin, maltodextrin, dextrose, glucose, food starch, modified, food starch, xanth gum, and many more to disguise the use of corn in their products (Corn-derived food ingredients I avoid). After reading this article I went to the convenience store in Centennial Halls to see just how many of the foods I was eating contained some amount of corn and was very surprised by the high number I found. There were more foods than not that contained some form of modified corn. Some of the being: Nutrigrain bars, Pop Tarts, Cheeze-its, Rice Krispy’s, Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nilla-Wafers, Kettle Potato Chips, Stacy’s Pita Chips, Cheetos, Sun Chips, Doritos, Ruffles, Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes, Ramen noodles, M & M’s, Reeses, Pringles, and so many more I cannot even list them all. One thing that I found very surprising was that modified cornstarch was the second ingredient in Ruffles potato chips. When buying potato chips, you assume that you are getting only potatoes along with whatever other oils and seasonings the companies use. People do not think that they are getting a high amount of corn along with this. This is a clever trick devised by the company in order to make more profits. Because corn costs are so low, sneakily incorporating it into their products can up their profits. The fact that the majority of the foods in the halls convenience store contain corn and cornstarch is not good. Having these only these foods and not natural foods readily available can only add to the high intake of high fructose corn syrup and other unhealthy modified corn products.

            Now the next question one may ask is why is having corn in these foods such a problem. Corn comes from the ground, it sounds natural, what could be bad about that? Well the form of this “cheap grain” has nothing healthy about it. It is vastly over produced because of all the government subsidies it is the cheapest crop and biggest legal cash crop in the US (Michael Pollan). Pollan writes, “I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of Americans are now overweight”. One main modified form of corn, high fructose corn syrup, has been linked to causing obesity by researchers at Princeton. They found that if they gave one group of rats high fructose corn syrup, and the other regular sugar, the group that had was given the high fructose corn syrup gained a significant amount of weight, while the other group did not. There is no way to deny that high fructose corn syrup isn’t good for you, so the next step is to have it removed from all foods and have regular sugar replace it instead.

            Another use for these huge amounts of corn that we are producing is that of feeding livestock. Cows are now fed only corn because it is much cheaper than their natural grass diet. Because this isn’t the cow’s natural diet they excrete more and spend the whole day standing knee deep in their own feces. This causes many diseases that are spread from cow to cow and therefore are very prevalent in the meat that is being sold at stores and fast food restaurants. Because the government and taxpayers subsidize corn, a total of 19 billion dollars a year is going directly from the taxpayers to the farms. This makes corn unbelievable cheap and causes people to try and find every use possible for it. The truth is, corn is not the answer to everything. Cows natural diets have been made up of grass for millions of years and this can’t just be changed without many unintended consequences arising.

            While I have only wrote about the negative aspects of corn, there are some positives as well. Corn farming is the largest cash crop in the US and brings in huge sums of money for our country every year. It also creates many jobs and helps to stimulate the economy. Still, the health of Americans as well as our livestock is being negatively effected by this overuse and disguising of corn in the foods that we eat. In order for the obesity epidemic to end and Americans to become healthier, health foods such as vegetables have to go down in price so that they are affordable. In addition, corn needs to become less prevalent and less available. If Americans are not being bombarded with corn products they will inevitable eat less of it and become overall healthier.

Work Cited

Parker, Hillary. "A Sweet Problem: Princeton Researchers Find That High-fructose Corn Syrup Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain." News at Princeton. The Trustees of Princeton University, 26 Mar. 2010. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/>.

Pollan, Michael. "We Are What We Eat." Center for Ecoliteracy, 2006. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/we-are-what-we-eat>.

http://www.vishniac.com/ephraim/corn-bother.html

Ethics of Eating Meat

         The articles "An Animal's Place" and "Fowl Trouble" are both opposed to the eating of meat and specifically chickens in the way that we are currently doing so. "An Animal's Place" is focused on the ethics of eating meat and causing harm to other animals. It goes over all the reasons why it is unethical and how "speciesism" is going to be looked back upon as being as horrible as the holocaust. I think this article provides some very good and logical points as to why it is wrong to kill and eat other animals. However, I still don't think this article addresses that fact that eating other animals is a part of human nature and built into out instincts. A great majority of animals are carnivores and it is the natural way of life. I cannot see humans as a whole species completely giving up eating meat.
        The other article, "Fowl Trouble" is focused on how horribly chickens are farmed. Reading this article, while it was much shorter, had a stronger impact on me. I could argue my way out of "An Animal's Place", while it did have some very good points. But, when hearing the facts it makes it hard to deny that what we are doing is wrong. I think that eating meat is apart of our lives and it always will be. But, I do think that the way we are doing it now is very unsafe, unethical, and harmful to both the animals and factory workers. Movies like Food Inc. which actually show the process of how we obtain our meat are very hard to watch. If we cannot even look at or think about the way we obtain our meat this means as a race are clearly doing something wrong. We have become so unattached with where we get our meet from because as Pollan discusses, we do not ever see the animals we eat anymore and this has left us confused and uninformed about where we are getting our meat from. I think that these articles brought up some very interesting and thought provoking points and have informed me a lot about the different opinions regarding eating other animals.
   

Pollan

It is confusing to think about that Americans value health food the most when if fact we are the most obese country. This phenomena can be explained by American's snacking, eating alone, and binge dieting only to gain all of the weight back. While Americans don't think negatively of the recent trend of making out diet our own and eating as we please despite what are friends and family are doing, it is in fact affecting the populations health as a whole negatively. I think that we should adapt to a more french style of living. The French think of foods such as chocolate cake as "celebration" while Americans associate it with "guilt"(Pollan). This is a much better attitude and lifestyle to live. The French are able to live this way because they eat small portions, don't snack or eat alone, and meals are lengthy communal affairs. While it is hard to just up and change a whole culture, I think that this lifestyle and way of eating would greatly improve the happiness and health of Americans.

While being in college, it is hard to have meals be lengthy social events. It is also hard to not snack through out the day and avoid eating unhealthy convenience foods. I can see why the American food culture has adapted to be the way that it is now. However, once I get older and start a family I want to try to live a more French lifestyle consisting of long meals spent with loved ones, where we are able to eat the foods the we enjoy with out feeling guilty about it.