Documentary Review
“Fresh”
Fresh examines the problems and consequences of our current food system and the industrialization of food production. The documentary does this by focusing primarily on the farmers, thinkers, and business people across America who are creating new ways to address environmental, health, and economic challenges throughout the food chain. Although, at first, it may seem that Fresh is a documentary about food and agriculture, its intent is to change one’s perspective about their food consumption. Fresh, shows how we are the creators of our reality. It offers a vision for the future of sustainable agriculture, and empowers ordinary people to take action that encourages real change.
This documentary showed the importance of buying local fresh food and how fresh food is beneficial to your health. How unprocessed food is healthier and better for you as opposed to processed food loaded with chemicals and lacking necessary nutrients which help strengthen your immune system. It shows you the perspective of farmers whose farms are kept as they are supposed to be. It showed me that there is a cost to the “cheap” processed and industrialized, unhealthy food and that cost is your health as well as the environment.
This documentary showed the importance of buying local fresh food and how fresh food is beneficial to your health. How unprocessed food is healthier and better for you as opposed to processed food loaded with chemicals and lacking necessary nutrients which help strengthen your immune system. It shows you the perspective of farmers whose farms are kept as they are supposed to be. It showed me that there is a cost to the “cheap” processed and industrialized, unhealthy food and that cost is your health as well as the environment.
Inner Monster
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v3M1pyk35933N9DErakBBpk5EomdtWj0wvaDgv9lvXg/edit
Through Experience
Bullies often have subtle ways of making you feel miserable; they seem to find all your weak points and aggressively attack them. Cliques spread awful rumors about you and your so-called “friends” abandon you.
I spent three and a half years of my life being excluded, talked about, put down, mocked, tripped, and so on. It was always hard for me to make friends. I would talk to people and really try to make friends, but everyone would ignore and exclude me. Every time I would talk, they would say awful things to me and call me names. All I wanted was some friends, some kids to talk to me and play with me at recess. When I finally did manage to get two friends, the really mean girls took them away from me. What really hurt me was that I could feel my friends start drifting away. I could feel that they would talk to me less and hang out with the other girls more until they were completely ignoring me. The worst thing was that none of my teachers would ever say or do anything about it.
The mean girls relied mostly on name calling, taunting, judging, and spreading rumors about me, and I almost never answered them. I just took the judgements because I believed they were mine to take, that all those things they said were true. My mom would go to school and talk to the teachers and the moms’ of the bullies, but it got them even angrier because I got them in trouble. They ended up doubling their harassment and encouraging others to join in.
One day, I wanted to look pretty and my dad had bought me a pink dress with high heels. I went home very excited, I was going to wear them the next day, but when I showed up to school the next day, people were making fun of how I looked. They would say awful things about how I looked and then laugh at me. The teachers made me sit on the blacktop because I couldn’t wear high heels at school. So I ended up sitting alone, with no one to talk to, for forty-five minutes. I was terribly sad that day and went home crying.
It feels awful when no one wants to sit next to you, or when you are constantly being ignored or hurt to the point where you could say “I’m used to it”. After everything, I always tried to hide, to blend into the background. From being excluded, I learned to keep to myself. I was used to being alone and judged. I would stay silent because I would prefer for people to think I was dumb or annoying than to talk and remove all that doubt. I would speak only when I had something important to say or when I felt like it would be better than my silence. I was so self-conscious to the point where if someone was looking at me I felt like they were picking out all of my flaws.
People think I’m shy, but really I just like to keep my opinions and thoughts to myself. I learned that I can’t control the lies people say about me or what others may believe. The reason I don’t mind it is because I always know the truth about myself and I don’t let other people bring me down with lies. Throughout this horrible experience, I learned that you have to be the better person and not let them get to you. No matter how lonely it can feel to have many people against me, there are other people who love me and are always on my side.
I spent three and a half years of my life being excluded, talked about, put down, mocked, tripped, and so on. It was always hard for me to make friends. I would talk to people and really try to make friends, but everyone would ignore and exclude me. Every time I would talk, they would say awful things to me and call me names. All I wanted was some friends, some kids to talk to me and play with me at recess. When I finally did manage to get two friends, the really mean girls took them away from me. What really hurt me was that I could feel my friends start drifting away. I could feel that they would talk to me less and hang out with the other girls more until they were completely ignoring me. The worst thing was that none of my teachers would ever say or do anything about it.
The mean girls relied mostly on name calling, taunting, judging, and spreading rumors about me, and I almost never answered them. I just took the judgements because I believed they were mine to take, that all those things they said were true. My mom would go to school and talk to the teachers and the moms’ of the bullies, but it got them even angrier because I got them in trouble. They ended up doubling their harassment and encouraging others to join in.
One day, I wanted to look pretty and my dad had bought me a pink dress with high heels. I went home very excited, I was going to wear them the next day, but when I showed up to school the next day, people were making fun of how I looked. They would say awful things about how I looked and then laugh at me. The teachers made me sit on the blacktop because I couldn’t wear high heels at school. So I ended up sitting alone, with no one to talk to, for forty-five minutes. I was terribly sad that day and went home crying.
It feels awful when no one wants to sit next to you, or when you are constantly being ignored or hurt to the point where you could say “I’m used to it”. After everything, I always tried to hide, to blend into the background. From being excluded, I learned to keep to myself. I was used to being alone and judged. I would stay silent because I would prefer for people to think I was dumb or annoying than to talk and remove all that doubt. I would speak only when I had something important to say or when I felt like it would be better than my silence. I was so self-conscious to the point where if someone was looking at me I felt like they were picking out all of my flaws.
People think I’m shy, but really I just like to keep my opinions and thoughts to myself. I learned that I can’t control the lies people say about me or what others may believe. The reason I don’t mind it is because I always know the truth about myself and I don’t let other people bring me down with lies. Throughout this horrible experience, I learned that you have to be the better person and not let them get to you. No matter how lonely it can feel to have many people against me, there are other people who love me and are always on my side.
Why Diets Are Bad For You
Obesity has become a huge problem in society with over 60% of Americans being overweight or obese today (Sarah Dray). According to National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), more than 23 million children and teenagers are suffering from the same problems. The media has made society believe that there is one “image” of how you must look in order to be considered “attractive”. All over the world, people use diets in an attempt to lose weight and achieve this image that models and many celebrities have set. The problem with diets is that instead of making a person lose weight, it can make them gain weight in the end. According to a UK survey, one in every three women and one in every five men, are on a diet trying to lose weight the “fast and easy” way. It is specifically this reason that so many end up being overweight. Now you may be asking, “how can doing something good for you make you gain weight?” Or “why do diets make you gain weight instead of losing it?” What most people don’t know is that diets can throw the body off balance, put the body under stress, and encourage people to eat “fake” foods that are unhealthy.
Most people who are on diets constantly go on and off their diets because when they accidentally eat something that wasn’t part of their diet, they feel like they blew it, which brings them back to their unhealthy eating habits. This constant changing on ones eating habits can throw the body off balance. Another problem with dieting is eating fewer calories. But “wait” you say, “Why is this bad?” When people diet and cut calories, they also cut stored fat out which can lead to an excess of leftover carbohydrates the body can’t burn, which get stored away in the bodies fat cells (Cynthia Sass, MPH, RD). When eating less, our body slows down our metabolism and stores more fat. In the book Dieting Makes You Fat, Geoffrey Cannon explains how “our bodies are not programmed to understand diets, they are programmed to understand hunger signals.” This might sound crazy but when eating less, your metabolism slows down and your hunger increases. The reason this happens is because the body thinks there is a risk of starvation. Even though it might be possible to lose weight doing a diet, what you end up losing is usually muscle and not fat. So once you go back to your regular eating habits, you regain the weight you lost back, but it will be in the form of fat (Sarah Dray).
Another problem with diets is that they are filled with “fake” foods. Low-fat, fat-free, low-sugar, sugar-free, and diet-foods are loaded with tons of artificial additives, which can actually cause weight gain and many other health problems. One example, all foods labeled “fat free”, “low fat”, “sugar free”, and “diet”, don’t actually contain any sugar. You might be thinking, “Why exactly is this a problem?” The sugar is replaced with aspartame, saccharin, and/or sucralose (Splenda), which are called artificial sweeteners. They cause weight gain by stimulating carbohydrate desire. They trick the body into thinking that these products contain glucose, when there was never any real sugar, and your body does not understand how to regulate these artificial sweeteners (Sarah C. Corriher). Not only should we care that it makes you gain weight but the artificial sweetener found in these products, Aspartame, has actually been found to create short-term memory and ‘destroys’ intelligence, it can cause brain tumor, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and causes depression and anxiety attacks (Food Matters).
People should eat healthy instead because when you don’t eat healthier foods your metabolism isn’t as fast which contributes to weight gain. Eating healthy is one of the best ways to prevent health problems and to lose weight even without doing any exercise. When eating healthy aim for balance, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, eat small portions of unnatural sugars, and try not to eat any trans fat. Also drink lots of water. This has the advantage of keeping the metabolism up or increasing it, which causes the body to burn more calories and much faster, even when resting.
Most people who are on diets constantly go on and off their diets because when they accidentally eat something that wasn’t part of their diet, they feel like they blew it, which brings them back to their unhealthy eating habits. This constant changing on ones eating habits can throw the body off balance. Another problem with dieting is eating fewer calories. But “wait” you say, “Why is this bad?” When people diet and cut calories, they also cut stored fat out which can lead to an excess of leftover carbohydrates the body can’t burn, which get stored away in the bodies fat cells (Cynthia Sass, MPH, RD). When eating less, our body slows down our metabolism and stores more fat. In the book Dieting Makes You Fat, Geoffrey Cannon explains how “our bodies are not programmed to understand diets, they are programmed to understand hunger signals.” This might sound crazy but when eating less, your metabolism slows down and your hunger increases. The reason this happens is because the body thinks there is a risk of starvation. Even though it might be possible to lose weight doing a diet, what you end up losing is usually muscle and not fat. So once you go back to your regular eating habits, you regain the weight you lost back, but it will be in the form of fat (Sarah Dray).
Another problem with diets is that they are filled with “fake” foods. Low-fat, fat-free, low-sugar, sugar-free, and diet-foods are loaded with tons of artificial additives, which can actually cause weight gain and many other health problems. One example, all foods labeled “fat free”, “low fat”, “sugar free”, and “diet”, don’t actually contain any sugar. You might be thinking, “Why exactly is this a problem?” The sugar is replaced with aspartame, saccharin, and/or sucralose (Splenda), which are called artificial sweeteners. They cause weight gain by stimulating carbohydrate desire. They trick the body into thinking that these products contain glucose, when there was never any real sugar, and your body does not understand how to regulate these artificial sweeteners (Sarah C. Corriher). Not only should we care that it makes you gain weight but the artificial sweetener found in these products, Aspartame, has actually been found to create short-term memory and ‘destroys’ intelligence, it can cause brain tumor, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and causes depression and anxiety attacks (Food Matters).
People should eat healthy instead because when you don’t eat healthier foods your metabolism isn’t as fast which contributes to weight gain. Eating healthy is one of the best ways to prevent health problems and to lose weight even without doing any exercise. When eating healthy aim for balance, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, eat small portions of unnatural sugars, and try not to eat any trans fat. Also drink lots of water. This has the advantage of keeping the metabolism up or increasing it, which causes the body to burn more calories and much faster, even when resting.