No more Super Sizing

In the documentary, Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock directly demonstrates for all of America to see the affects of McDonald's on his body. For thirty days he ate only McDonald's for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Through Nutritionists and other Doctors he learns the affects of fast food on the human body. He also went into school's and interviewed many people to find out what they serve in the schools. In one school, for kids who got kicked out of the standard New York public schools, they get served very healthy food that's for the most part cooked solely in the kitchen. It's not thawed, and the food is primarily vegetables. This food is the same cost as the more fatty school foods but the food companies will suffer considerably beca
use the cost to prepare the healthy foods is more than the cost of the fatty. This being said, the companies want to sell whats cheap regardless of how bad it is for you.

The affects of fast food on the human body leads to:
increased headaches
becoming addicted
high cholesterol
fatty liver
depression

I also read an article about the affects of soda in The Hartford Courant about soda. This also connects to Super Size Me because the fast food meals all have soda with them. A 12- ounce soda contains 10 teaspoons of sugar. The amount of calories in a soda are almost a meal alone. If I cut out a soda I could go and have another meal to make up for it. A quick fix to wanting something bubby is seltzer and a juice like OJ or cranberry juice.

Communications of the Internet

I learned a lot about Wikis, Social Networks, Rss Feeds, and Social Bookmarking throught the recent presentations. One of the common similarities of all of the topics was how they give the user control over the information online.

For example; on my blog I learned how to subscribe to another blog using the RSS feeds, and this will show me only the specific news that I subscribed too. For example, I subscribed to the latest on CNN which allows me to only get information that I want, and eliminates sorting through news, and RSS feeds make the news extremely accessable to locate.

Social Networking allows a person to create a profile to share personal and proffesional information. This allows a person to control what goes onto their profile, and who they're friends are. When trying to find a job you can post your resume and get recognition. I use Social Networking to Facebook, and I have over 1,000 pictures tagged and 46 albums and over 1,000 friends. This way I can talk to my friends, share, pictures and information.

Social Bookmarking is similar to bookmarking on your own computer, the difference with social bookmarking is that you can save your to a page online, that is visible for others to see. For example, Digg is a site where you can search and locate articles. I don't use Social Bookmarking in my own life, I don't have the time to keep up a page and search for people who have common interests.

Wiki's are really cool, if I do say so myself. I learned that a wiki allows for multiple people to edit a document at the same time, without email. It immediately updates itself when you press save. A really neat site we showed in our presentation was common craft , it showed how a wiki can be used.

All of these techniques can be used to share and obtain information. To view presentations on these topics click this link.

Loopholes in Nutrition

Although nutrition is important and eating healthy foods is the key to improving your diet, there are some untold loopholes. On a blog I read online called Daily Spark a post was focusing on nutritional bars can cause unsuspected cavaties. You think while eating a Power Bar or Zone Perfect Bar, that you're doing something good for yourself, and then the next time you go to the dentist you have a cavity.

I did some research on loopholes in Nutrition and found that there are others that I think people should be wary about. A chocolate power bar has 20 grams of sugar, and a chocolate carmel cluster Zone Perfect bar has 14 grams of sugar. Although these are crucial when your recovering for a workout, the gooey bar gets stuck in your teeth and increases chances of cavities.

Another scary thing I came across in my readings were how misleading some food labels are. Such as an article from the Washington Post about Poptarts with a "made with real fruit" label on it, when it's really only made with three small pieces of fruit, the rest being sugar and chemicals. Thankfully I understand that a Poptart isn't what the food pyramid had in mind when it said you needed five servings of fruit and vegetables a day.
But it's clear that without reading the label, a mom would never know what she was feeding her 8 year old. Hopefully most mother's would't fall for all the propaganda.

The FDA thankfully is lowering the criteria for something "made with fruit" or "healthy" because the healthy products usually have high levels of sodium which isn't good in large doses. These changes in the system are important to keep the level of obesity down also. It stresses how important reading the serving sizes and labels are when deciding what to buy and what's healthy or not.