How to Apply Nutrition to Your Daily Life

In my last blog post, I talked about how important Nutrition is for teens. I also stressed that portion size is very important to eating a healthy meal. You can eat less of something really good, and its twenty times better for you than a ton of junk food. I really liked this topic for teens, so I searched CNN to find some more articles related to health and fitness, and found something about portions.


One of the articles linked to the section that caught my eye was "For the Love Of Food". So I clicked on it, and found a blog run by Darya Pino, of San Fransisco. I read the article on "How to Get Started Eating Healthy Balanced Meals" because I've stressed about how important nutrition is, and now I wanted to give ideas on how to apply the information to daily life. The hardest part of nutrition is making it work for you and I think this blog has 5 great steps on how to do this.

In addition to the last website I linked to, I found a list of 25 superfoods that are great for your body. Some include blueberries, for antioxidents, walnuts for Omega 3's, and even dark chocolate for magnesium! Those are simple ingrediants that we can find in the grocery store and traste good too. Finding healthy things that you want to eat is important to maintaining a healthy diet.

A Teenage View of What Matters in Health: Nutrition

The next topic I chose to cover is how important Nutrition is as a teenager. When we're in highschool and have busy schedules with sports and extracuricular activities, our bodies need good fuel to run on. Protein is very important to help boost our metabolism and keep us going. Without fuel, we're draggy and tired and we can't function as well without it. I've researched many websites with articles about nutrition in order to share this with teens.

One point made in many of the articles was that portion control is very important to maintaining a healthy weight for teens. Although carbs are important, things like potato chips is not a healthy choice in a daily meal, but having a small amount won't kill you. I think it's important to stress that you can have sweets in your day, but instead of having three scoops of icecream at night, have one. Because I don't think I'd be able to live without icecream! Knowing how to maintain the main portions of food and well as managing your sweets is key to having a nutritional lifestyle.

There are five main categories in Nutrition; Bread, Vegetables, Fruit, Dairy, and Meat. These are very broad categories, because there are a lot of different foods that can fill your servings per day. For example the Bread category also contains cereal, rice and pasta and Dairy contains milk, yogurt and cheeses. For the Vegetarians, to fulfil the servings of meat, you can substitue dry beans, nuts or eggs. So there are alternatives to nutrition, and you can come up with fun ways of combining what you need with what you like.

The biggest meal of the day is breakfast. It jumpstarts our body to work for the day and will keep our body going until a snack or lunch. A doughnut from DD doesn't satisfy our metabolism in the morning, rather fills us up with sugar that wears off in an hour. Bagels may taste good, but are mainly carbs, and don't supply us with that protein. Find things with protein because its the key ingredient to breakfast, whether its in eggs, yogurt with granola, oatmeal, or a protein shake with fruit. Healthy isn't always bad and if you look hard enough, you can find something you like.

When you think about when you've last eaten when you wake up, its about 8 or 9 hours ago; so obviously your body is going to be hungry. The saying "Eat breakfast like a king, Lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper" should be a reminder of the importance and size of each meal. Making these decisions are small, but in the end can help a lot in your everyday life.

A Teenage View of What Matters in Health

I chose the topic of Health because I read an article about slept deprivation and how it can lead to colds. This began me thinking about what teenagers feel about health and what's important to us, not all of the extra fluff that the media writes about. I wanted to read and share this because high school kids don't get enough sleep and it gets me mad because it's bad for our health. I think that school's should start later, so that kids can get enough sleep at night. When you don't get as much sleep, your body can't fight infections and produce as many white blood cells to protect yourself from virus's. Teen's as well as the head of the education department need to be aware of how important sleep is. I first went to cnn.com and found an article about how important sleep is. Also another article showed that when you don't get enough sleep your brain actually shuts down.

In this blog I'm going to talk about article's weekly, like this one, to make others aware of the health concerns out there. I want to look at it from what's important for a younger audience because some of the concerns about health are for a much older era, and I don't feel that that's important for my blog.

Connecting Learning and Blogging

In this generation, the internet is just another tool to be connected, so it seems fit to use it in our learning techniques. Blogs are a current tool to connect our ideas with other authors ideas in one place. I can write how I feel in my blog without being judged because its my space to write. Another way to share ideas is to link your blog with other people, so I've linked my blog to everyone in my class. This helps me learn because I can get feedback by reading their blogs and seeing how they blog; being a beginner blogger it's nice to have other examples to look at.

Blogging connects your thoughts to reading with inserting links into the text. If I used a source or read something I thought was cool and wanted to share, I could link it to my post so that others could revert to what I read. This also allows them to develop their own opinions about the reading and write about it in their own blog. A Blogger across the country could blog about something that I wrote about and then we could start a conversation through our blogs about it.
The benefits of blogging is sharing our opinions about various topics with people all over the world wide web. The only downfall I can see is that it's all on the computer which limits exploring the real world and talking to people face to face. We lose the personal aspect of it, but gain a lot more through internet acess. Another downfall is for people who are better speaking their mind and can't type their thoughts out as well have a disadvantage blogging. So the good outway's the bad in my opinion.

Another reason blogging is an advantage of learning is that I'm so much more accustomed to sitting at my computer and checking the news and so forth, than I am to pick up the newspaper and read it. The newspaper companies know that the internet is more common, which is why they've begun sites online. They lose a lot of money from the lack of interest in this era, but have started to make changes to get profit from online newpapers, such as a charge for reading stories. Young people are more inclined to go online to read the news because the internet has a way of summarizing and making the important/interesting news more direct and in my face, almost forcing me to read it. We are a much more GO GO GO society, I for one, hate wasting time sitting down and reading, which is sad, but true. I'd so much rather check my email, facebook and read the news in 10 minutes tops.

What I've learned...

The most important and interesting thing that I've learned so far is what makes a news story. We were explained how to use techniques to draw the reader in, such as where to put the most interesting facts to keep the audience reading the article, and how you can cut an article if you're short on space. There are different audiences that you write too, so focusing on topics that will appeal is important to have your story read. Understanding this component to journalism has helped me to see how to apply it to my own writing. I hope to continue to learn about what makes a story interesting to the reader and how to appeal to the reader.

In the last two weeks I've learned about Blogs, Wiki's, the Inverted Pyramid, and how to break down a news article. To learn how to "blog" we actually created a blog, which your now reading. We can edit our blogs and create new entries on topics we cover in class. To help us grasp the idea of what a journalist has to do to get information to write a story, we went to a game online. I searched for more games because I really liked doing that activities, it really helps to show you in a hands on way how to collect information to write a good thorough news article. This was important for me to learn because I want to be able to pick up any story, figure out what the important news is and be able to write about it.

For me, being able to write about something other than sports is important to accomplish because not every audience I'll be writing for will want to read about sports. We also collect news article's to analyze them, when we did this I saw trends in the writing such as the titles; they were very exciting and inquisitive, to get the reader to click on it and continue to read. Searching for interesting articles online also showed me how to insert hyperlink's into my writing. Many of the online news will refer to other stories they've written about the topic or to another site that was used as a reference. I also really want to develop more interesting story ideas because on the first day of class that was hard for me to do, and this is an important component in a story.

Wrongly Accused?

On Monday, a new article was published on the coach from Louisville, Kentucky who was charged with reckless homicide because one of his players of Ridgefield High School collapsed at practice and then died days later. Prosecuters apparently withheld information that could prove that the death was an accident. The coroner has also stated that the Adderoll that the Smock was taking attributed to the cause of death.

The timeliness of this information is newsworthy because the information came out the day the trial starts and is very important for the defense to help prove that the defendant is innocent. They may not have discovered this information in time to use it, so for it to be released now is key in the trial. The Prominence of the article is that many sports team's practice in the extreme heat, so it brings a lot of attention to the issue and how important paying attention to working out in these temperatures is. The Proximity is in Louisville, Kentucky, and the person involved is David Miller Stinson, the high school football coach, who is being charged with the homicide. The Consequences are that a coach, like the ones at our school, could also be charged if an accident happened such as a heat stroke. The Human Interest is that he might be innocent and wrongly charged for this boys death.