Topic 1: The Health Effects with the Current Food System:
Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating:
Michael Pollan Presents the Case for Cooking
https://aeon.co/videos/how-cooking-for-yourself-can-free-you-from-the-grip-of-salt-sugar-and-fat
1. What is a food desert?
2. What is a food swamp?
3. What factors in our current food system have led to the obesity epidemic (make sure you provide the facts from the video)?
4. What solutions does the video suggest to improve the obesity epidemic?
5. What are the top 3-5 things you think about when deciding what you are going to eat?
6. How does this affect your decision?
7. What happens when we let the food industry cook for us?
8. Do you think you mostly make healthful choices? Why or why not? If you are frequently not making healthful choices, which variables can you change and how? If you are making healthful choices, what suggestions can you give?
Topic 2
Real Food | The Best Diet | Andrew Weil, M.D
1. What are the issues with our current food system based on this video?
2. What is the Farm Bill?
3. What are the issues with vegetable fats (soy oil) and inflammation?
4. What foods have changed and are causing health issues (think fat and sugar)
5. What types of foods/ diets should we be eating?
Part 2 Topic 2
This was the in class activity my students participated in for my face to face class. Please paste a food label (you can get them online) preferably of a food item you consume on a regular basis. The food item must have a minimum of 5 ingredients and be a packaged food. Please answer the following questions about your food product. You also need to compare your food item to someone else in the class as one of your student responses for this discussion.
Ingredients (your item):
1. Please list all of the ingredients as they appear on the food label (or provide a picture of the ingredient list). Keep them in descending order as the label reads if you are typing them in yourself.
2. Are there any corn based ingredients in your food item? If so which items? (just focus on ingredients that directly refer to corn)
Nutrition (your item)
3. What are the Calories, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, Fat, Saturated fat, sodium and fiber content of your product? (you can post a picture of the nutrition label for this section)
4. Do you think your food product is nutritious? Explain your answer. (there is no right or wrong answer to this question but please justify your answer i.e. it’s high in protein but it has no fiber and 20 gms of sugar so I don’t think it very healthy)
Packaging
5. How much packaging is included with your food item? Do you think there was additional packaging for this item? If so,what? (think about boxes at point of sale, boxes to transport, packaging, etc)
6. What is the environmental impact of your food item? Do you know where it originated? Consider packaging, transportation, waste, etc. (how processed is your item? for instance if you have a nutrition bar, were all the ingredients processed before they became ingredients in that bar?)
The second video gives you an idea of how something is processed (a cookie) to see the steps to consider from an energy standpoint and waste.
How ‘pink slime’ is made
How it’s made | oreo biscuits
