Essay \"American’s Nutrition Habits are Threatening Our Health Nationally and Globally\" - grade B+ PDF

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American’s Nutrition Habits are Threatening Our Health Nationally and Globally
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Professor Gabrielle Williams English 102 American’s Nutrition Habits are Threatening Our Health Nationally and Globally Are our nutritional standards in the United States currently leading our nation’s citizens towards obesity, or even more life threatening health issues? Furthermore, are our nutritional standards contributing to world hunger and poverty? This question can, and is being heavily debated on throughout the country. Some people believe that all the blame regarding nutrition should be based on the parenting, or personal decisions of the individual. While others believe that our country’s heavily uneven marketing of unhealthy fast food chains, soft drinks, and candy is to blame. Our problem is that we market cheap fast food, instead of emphasizing our health awareness campaigns. As a child I remember how excited I would get about a “new burger” or “new dessert” that would be showed in these advertisements, which led to me eating them, and eventually becoming overweight. After I achieved my weight loss goals as an adolescent I dedicated myself to learning more about my personal nutrition. American’s nutrition habits need to be addressed and changed to save our country from this obesity epidemic, because it is a threat to our nation’s health. Whether it is by enacting marketing laws limiting these unhealthy company’s budgets on commercials and ads, or by simply putting more government money towards our national health campaigns and agricultural programs. For example, there was a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, where there were 2,541 individuals aged fifteen to twenty-three, that were surveyed in a marketing experiment. They were asked to watch twenty advertisements that had been aired the previous year by fast-food restaurants, with the brand names removed. This would determine how much

of an effect the pictures and scenes shown in their advertising has on our memory, in regards to when we get hungry on the street and we are deciding where and what to eat. According to Auden C. McClure: “Respondents were asked if they had seen the advertisement, if they liked it, and if they could name the brand. A TV fast-food advertising receptivity score (a measure of exposure and response) was assigned; a 1-point increase was equivalent to affirmative responses to all three queries for two separate advertisements. Adjusted odds of obesity (based on self-reported height and weight), given higher TV fast-food advertising receptivity, are reported.”. The results showed that “obesity, sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, fast-food restaurant visit frequency, weekday TV time, and TV alcohol advertising receptivity were associated with higher TV fast-food advertising receptivity” (McClure), and that when related to their research scale that they created for the study, “for every 1-point increase in TV fast-food advertising receptivity score, the odds of obesity increased by 19%.” (McClure). This study would lead to the conclusion that receptivity of fast-food advertising is associated with youth obesity. Reason being because the more our youth remembers these advertisements when they are eating outside of their homes, the more likely they are to stop and eat at these places, because they believe it is popular and convenient to do so. My idea of a solution to this issue would be for our government to enact some marketing laws, and provide some more government funding for our national health campaigns. Limiting the budget that fast-food and soft drink companies have to spend on commercials and other advertisements, and then providing more funding for our national health campaigns would lead to higher levels of health awareness throughout the United States. This would result in people

craving these tempting fast-foods less, and overall lead to people eating and drinking healthier products more often. So what else can we do to start addressing these current nationwide issues regarding obesity, the marketing of certain food items, and other health related diseases related to nutrition in the United States? According to the National Soft Drink Association, sodas are now on sale at 60 percent of middle and high schools nationwide, and almost 20 percent of those schools have also signed contracts with fast-food companies such as Taco Bell and Domino's. I would say that a great first step would be to ban all fast-food and soft drink companies from our nation’s schools. I don’t believe that banning these soft drinks and fast food would completely resolve our obesity problem, but it is definitely a good approach to it. The only reason why these schools are having an issue with doing this, is because they would lose the huge amounts of money these fast-food and soft drink companies pay them to sell their products in the schools, the revenue they get from selling these products at sporting events, and the huge “sponsorship bonus” a lot of these schools receive from the companies for signing the initial contract. In my belief, selling our student’s health is ethically wrong. The administrators say that the soft drink contracts “pay for bands, athletic events, books and the more nutritious lunches prepared in schools' own kitchens” (Greenblatt). For this reason, they try justifying that they need these contracts to allow them to compete against their own open-lunch policies, which allow kids to leave the school during their lunch period and eat where they please. Wouldn’t the better option be to remove the open-lunch policy? This would make it so that these schools do not have to “compete” with off-campus fast-food restaurants and resort to bringing them inside our school systems. Yes, the schools would probably have less money than if they did allow

these companies to stay, but ideally they could get rid of the competition problem, maintain an average school budget, and show that they do care about the health of their students. Some other solutions I have in regards to combating and in the long run preventing these national health issues, would be for our government to provide funding to lower the cost of healthier foods. Right now you can go into a gas station and pay ninety-nine cents for a bag of chips, in contrast to being able to pay four or five dollars for a sandwich or chicken salad. According to Weeks, an investigative journalist named Tracie McMillian realized the harsh truth by working in the United States food system for a year, and came to the conclusion that she had to accept that “Healthy meals were barely affordable on wages of $8 per hour or less. Nutritious choices like fresh fruit and vegetables often were more expensive or less convenient than cheap processed options.” This is a major problem when it comes to nutrition in our country, because due to the working-class citizens having less money and time, the result is that eating healthy and even cooking at home is becoming increasingly difficult. Since the working-class citizens have the growing problem of having less time to cook for themselves, fast-food corporations are monopolizing these areas and pushing healthy food options out of business as well. This brings up the problem that not only do these citizens have troubles making themselves healthier food options, but also finding places to purchase them in general. McMillian says that “Is it really in America's best interest to maintain a food system where eating well requires one to either be rich or to drive a total of thirty miles?”. This is a question that everyone should ask themselves, especially when it comes to debating the topic on whether or not we need to change our nutrition choices. If we stay on the road of taking the easiest option available, we could end up hurting ourselves and future generations to come.

The good news is that the United States Congress is debating over a new farm bill that proposes that the government will provide nearly one trillion dollars over the next decade for agriculture programs. This would include crop insurance, land and water conservation programs, disaster relief and food aid for the poor. The common opposition of this bill comes from the conservative view that our government spends too much money on agriculture programs and food and energy aid such as LIHEAP, SNAP, and WIC. They believe that we should cut the funding for these programs all together because it leads to our citizens becoming to dependent on government aid. Weeks showed that a full cut of these programs is not necessary, because if the farm bill passes the population’s need for SNAP would decline as the economy improves. Which would result in the funding for the aid programs eventually being cut in the end, leaving the left over funds for the citizens who are in actual dire need of the financial assistance. “The Senatepassed bill cuts SNAP by $4.5 billion between 2013 and 2022, while the House Agriculture Committee version would reduce SNAP funding by $16 billion. Legislators said the changes were necessary to protect the program's integrity and ensure that benefits went only to truly needy people.” This bill is a definite step in the right direction towards reducing supplemental programs, while increasing our agricultural production and eliminating food insecurity as much as possible. Another way that our country’s nutrition habits are threatening our health is caused by our obesity in general. Type 2 Diabetes was once known as “adult-onset” diabetes, due to the fact that it is usually the result of physical inactivity and obesity, and that the peak age for diagnosis is typically later than for type 1 diabetes, which usually has a peak age around the mid-teens and is rare and unpreventable for those who end up being diagnosed. According to Greenblatt “the number of overweight American children has doubled in the last 20 years, causing an explosion

in the number of cases of childhood diabetes”. Which we can now simply state that children are becoming overweight and obese at younger and younger ages, so they are developing insulin resistance earlier, which leads to them being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. This quote from Greenblatt lead to me to wanting to find answers to this question: why are our nation’s children becoming overweight and obese at such a young stage in their lives? According to Weeks, “Food and farming issues “affect the health of residents in urban America because of hunger and food insecurity in low-income populations, lack of access to healthy food in low-income areas, [and] chronic diseases related to poor diet such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases,”. This means that obesity and diabetes rates are rising not only due to physical inactivity, but also because of the inconsistent access to food that make up a healthy diet. If children and adults are only surrounded by these specific high caloric, low nutritional benefit foods then we are setting them up for these diseases from the start. Also, since the demand for these foods are increasing so rapidly, we are specializing our crops in large monocultures that erode our crop-growing lands at a dangerously rapid rate. These large monoculture farms produce huge amounts of crop yields for the desired plant, which limits the selection of plants that small and midsized farmers can choose to grow to compete against these larger scale farms. In the end this shows that not only are we pushing small and middle sized farms out of business, we are also setting ourselves up with the issue that we will have less lands to farm on as a whole, due to soil erosion. The solution to this issue is, to bring to light the more effective farming techniques when it comes to fertilizers, crop protection chemicals, and livestock antibiotics. Weeks again states, that “Environmentalists also are paying increased attention to farm policy. Along with academic experts and advocates for small- and mid-size family farms, they contend that large-scale

agriculture focuses too heavily on a few major crops and relies too heavily on synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics for poultry and livestock. Instead, environmentalists say, U.S. farm policy should provide more support for sustainable practices that protect the environment, such as farming organically and taking erosion-prone land out of production.” If we transition to these types of crop-growing practices, and provide more governmental funds to farmers in order to make their production process cheaper; not only will we have more years of sustainable crop-growing and yields, but we will have a more efficient way to provide our lowincome urban areas and poverty stricken neighborhoods, with healthier foods. This will effectively lower the rates of obesity linked diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, etc. Justin Tatham, a lobbyist for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), was quoted in the article by Weeks because he brought up another major concern regarding farming. According to Tatham, “We subsidize too much of the wrong kinds of foods, especially commodity crops, and not enough local and healthy foods,” and that “The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) MyPlate nutrition guidelines, published in 2011, recommend that fruits and vegetables make up 50 percent of every meal, but fruits and vegetables are grown on only about 2 percent of U.S. croplands.” This means that not only are we growing large amounts of specific crops, but we are growing large amounts of specific crops that do not provide us with the nutritional value that we need. This is a problem because the food we put in our body is like jet fuel, so if we put the wrong type of fuel in, we are not able to function to our maximum potential. When I started to look into the topic of nutrition on a global scale as well, John Reganold, a soil scientist that led the work in a journal called Science, was also quoted in Week’s article. Reganold said, “We have the technology and the science right now to grow food in sustainable ways, but we lack the policies and markets to make it happen,”. This is a reoccurring statement

in many of my nutrition textbooks over the past two years. We have made huge technological advances when it comes to farming, food processing, and agriculture. However, we lose focus on the most important part of why we grow the food in the first place, to feed our population. According to worldhunger.org, “The world produces enough food to feed everyone.” However, our country and many other country’s economic and political systems get in the way, due to desire for economic power and profit margins, which leads to the lack of food distribution. In the end this cripples our nation and world’s poor population, and allows for poverty and world hunger to continue. In conclusion, as a country we need to work together to make ourselves more self-aware of our choices regarding farming, distribution of crop yields, nutrition, our marketing of nutrition, and our physical activity. We can start by attacking the problem at it’s roots, which is our nation’s youth. By educating students more in school about nutrition and exercise, providing more funding to nation health campaigns, and reducing the amount of money unhealthy food and drink corporations can spend on advertising, we can help reduce childhood obesity drastically. While on a larger scale, if we teach our nation’s youth the value of sustainable farming techniques, crop rotations, and efficient distribution of crops, the result will be that we have taught them how to effectively start reducing national and world hunger; and the more effective nutrition habits of eating right, exercising, and limiting drugs and alcohol. This will lead the United States, and the world’s future generations into a healthier lifestyle free of obesity and food insecurity, that will eventually lead to them living longer lives. If we can make small changes first, and then work our way into the big ones, we will see huge benefits when it comes to the United States citizen’s health. These individuals will then be able to pass down their knowledge to future generations, which will eventually lower our national obesity rate

drastically. This will lower the frequency of a lot of obesity related health issues, such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, high blood pressure, and other diseases related to nutrition and excessive body weight....