Nutrition Courses: A Reflection on Contemporary Society's Obsession With Healthy Eating

These nutritional courses have helped to comprehend why peoples food choices which can be either nutritionally informed or otherwise. They have made me reflect on the contemporary society where people are obsessed with what is considered healthy or not healthy. Everyone wants to become the next model on social media websites; we have become engulfed in the opinions of others. We sit on our smartphones brainwashed by social media and video games. We are at the point in time that we would rather text one another than have a face-to-face conversation. We would rather play virtual sports than get a neighborhood pickup game together. Our diets are not our most pressing nutritional problem, but rather our sedentary lifestyle.

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Learning the importance of getting nutritional value makes me see the ignorance among our people that makes them adopt unfavorable lifestyles. We sit on our couches binge watching our favorite shows, ignoring the adverse health effects. On average, Americans sit for more than 11 hours a day. Our lack of daily activity and poor diets contribute to over 300,000 deaths in the United States. Of all the ends of people 35 and older, 20% of them can be attributed to a lack of physical activity. Finally, our sedentary lifestyles are responsible for $24 billion in estimated medical spending. I chose a sedentary lifestyle as the most pressing nutritional issue because a healthy lifestyle can help reduce many of the problems induced by other dietary predicaments.

An active, healthy lifestyle can reduce some of the side effects of a poor diet. Exercise, not only improves your physical health but it can also improve your mental health. When compared with other nutritional problems such as obesity, a sedentary lifestyle is a precursor. You just don't become obese, with some medical exceptions, it's a choice, and it starts with a sedentary lifestyle. It begins with spending numerous hours on the couch, consuming empty calories. Your body has no use for the energy you are in taking, so it stores it as fats. This process continues until it kills you or you take on an active lifestyle.

In terms of potential interventions to a sedentary lifestyle, I believe that it starts at youth. Parents, schools, and other institutions need to promote an active and healthy lifestyle for our young people. We need to educate them on not just the negatives to a healthy lifestyle, but how they can prevent themselves from falling into the trap. Food companies are master marketers; they can make a can of sugar sound beneficial to you. They twist words around to promote "junk" food, and we are doing nothing to educate our youth. I was never taught how to read a nutritional label in school that was something that I had to learn on my own. If we are going to prevent sedentary lifestyles, we need to start educating our youth now.

On another note, there are different stakeholders affecting policy decisions, from the everyday consumer to the actual government. Two of the most significant stakeholders in this game of "policy tug-a-war" are the scientists and the policy-makers, both dictated by their separate agendas. As we are aware, money runs most things political, and it is no different for these two groups. For example, policy-makers value the input of large food corporations. When food policy negatively affects a food corporation, they often show their disapproval in the action of decreasing funding to a particular candidate or policy-maker. Policy-maker, of course, relies on these financial contributions to fund his/her campaigns. This aspect is quite similar to the economic stakes that scientists have in nutrition policy issues.

Reflecting on my past life, I used to spend a lot of money on food, like way too much. One day, my dad told me to print out my bank statements and highlight every time I spent money on food. I highlighted A LOT and immediately stopped when I realized how much money I was wasting. This exercise was no different. It was pretty easy recording everything for this assignment. I've known I don't have the best eating habits, but I never realized that they were this bad. I did not meet the calorie goal on any of the days I tracked my meals. That is bad for me because I exceeded my Psychical activity goal of 150 minutes and did 210 minutes, but I was not meeting my calorie goals. So on top of not meeting my daily caloric intake, I was also taking away from the calories I did eat by burning them off! I am not over-consuming anything except cholesterol; I am under-consuming or "ok" with about everything. We have learned that healthy eating can really make or break you now and in the future.

The sedentary lifestyle continues to lives on because we let it. There is no effort to denounce companies' sketchy marketing tactics. Instead of increasing the funding the FDA, we decided to cut it. We continue to raise the prices of youth sports and remove physical education programs in schools. If we are going to kill the sedentary lifestyle, then we need to start promoting an active lifestyle. The change is not going to start with our youth; it needs to start with our elders. Parents need to start protecting their children from the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle.