You are What you Eat

       I just watched four very informative videos on health and the foods we eat and I am honestly shocked. These videos taught me so much about the foods we eat and their affects on us and the earth. The first video was about a guy who lived for a year eating extremely healthy and living healthy. He had to eat right, exercise, meditate and many more things. Noise pollution can effect your health because loud noises initiate your fight or flight response which can effect your cardio vascular health. To help him with noise pollution he had to where earplugs a lot. Another thing he had to do to be heKathy was wear sunscreen almost everywhere. He had to put on a shot glass amount of sunscreen on eveytime he went in the sun to help protect his skins health. Doing all of these things were good for him in the fact that his cholesterol went down and he lost weight but they were also bad for him. A lot of the things he did were very time consuming so he didn’t have a lot of time to be social. He didn’t get to spend much time with his family and friends therefore his mental health went down. After watching this video I learned that being physically healthy is important but being mentally healthy is important too. Joy is very important to your health both physically and mentally so you have to make time for things that bring you joy. 

       The second video I watched I thought was a little gross at first. The video is about eating bugs. Eating bugs may sound strange and gross to us but 80% of the world already eats bugs. Insects are considered a delicacy in many places in the world. You may not realize it but you accidentally eat 500g of insects a year. Insects are in our foods such as tomato soups. They are also used to make a dye that is commonly used to dye fish is sushi. We need to stop think insects are gross and start eating them. People are getting wealthier and are eating more meat. Eating meat is bad for us because it creates a ton of waste that is ruining our environment. We are also closely related to the meat we eat so we can get diseases from them. We are not closely related to insects and they make significantly less waste than the animals we eat. Eventually we will have to eat insects because we will run out of meat if we keep eating it the way we are now. Insects have lots of protein and are healthy for us and for the environment so we should start eating them now. I have never eaten insects before but I am definitely willing to try them if it will help our environment. 

       The third video I watched was about how livestock is killing us and our planet. Livestock is the second highest contributer to atmosphere altering gas. Nearly 1/5 of all greenhouse gas is gernerated by livestock production. This is happening because when cows toot they produce methane which warms the earth’s atmosphere 23 times as much as carbon dioxide does. This wouldn’t be that bad but we have way more cows than we need. 70% of all agricultural land is used for raising livestock and 30% of all of the earths land is directly or inderictly devoted to raising livestock. This wouldn’t be half as big of a problem if we limited our meat intake or stopped eating meat all together. 2 billion animals are killed in the USA every year. Everyone thinks we need to eat meat to be healthy but we would be way healthier without meat. It might be very hard for people to completely stop eating meat but we eat way more meat than we are supposed to. It is recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat a week. If we ate what was recommended not only would we be healthier but the earth would be healthier. 

         The last video I watched is about hunger and obesity in the world. Millions and millions of people are hungry all over the world. Just in America 49 million people are hungry and 16.7 million of those people are kids. In some places in Africa we can buy kids school lunches for a year for only $50. Not only is a lot of america hungry but a lot of the people there are obese. 1/3 of American children  are obese and 67% of American adults are obese. The reason so many Americans are obese is because of the amount of processed foods they eat. Humans aren’t supposed to eat as unhealthy as most Americans do but the children are brought up to eat that way. 1/5 of the children in America drink soda before they are 2. 1 billion of the people in the world are obese and 1 billion are hungry. 

        After watching all of these videos I looked really closely at the food I eat. I have a pretty decent diet. I do eat a fair amount of processed food and meat but I also eat a ton of fruits and vegetables. The video that inspired me the most was the third one I watched on livestock. I realized that I probably eat way too much meat. Reducing my meat consumption is definatley something I am going to try to do. I will also try to convince my family to eat less meat. Watching all of these videos taught me a lot and I am ready to change my diet to make me and the world more healthy.

         The project for the little unit on healthy foods was to make a self portrait. The fun part about this is I got to make the portrait digitally out of foods that I eat. I picked all of my favourite foods and layered them over a picture of me to make a delicious portrait. I used Comic Life’s tool called instant alpha to edit all of the photos and put it together. I also used Paper 53 to outline my photo. My hair is ice cream, my head is an apple, my neck is french fries, my chest is pizza, my left arm is chicken nuggets, my right arm is churros, my eyes are ravioli with cucumber iris’s, my nose is spinach, my mouth is a grapefruit, and my eyebrows are carrots. After spending lots of time working on it I am very hungry and get a craving for ice cream every time I look at it.