Health and Career Education has always been something that I never really enjoyed, but this year I think it’s going to be a little different. So yes, we just started the Health and Career unit, and we are already diving into the projects. In this post, I will be talking about healthy living. Our first task was to watch four Ted Talk videos, two about healthy living and two about the worldwide food crisis. Each video showed a person’s unique opinion on food and what it has to do with our world, and I’m surprised how much I’ve learned from watching them. In the first two videos, two people expressed two very different solutions for living health, and for sustaining a more healthy diet. For instance, Ecological entomologist Marcel Dickie foresees in the near future that insects will be the main part of our diet. Marcel goes on to say that livestock production accounts for 70% of all our agricultural land and with the extreme upwards growth of the population we won’t have the amount of land needed to farm the protein, and let alone the amount of resources such as water and electricity needed to farm meat as we are today. He makes some really strong points such as that with 10 kg of feed we can produce 1 kg of beef but with the same amount of feed, we can produce 9 kg of locust meat. Researchers have shown that Locust meat is of excellent quality, and is even comparable to beef. On the other hand, the other person approaches the topic by going on a journey following all the steps to being healthy in the Bible. He subjects himself to live the cleanest healthiest life he can, and at the end, he actually takes some of the skills he learned and applies them to his life. I didn’t learn as much from this video as I did from the others, but I thought it was a really cool and interesting process.

Here are the links to the two videos here, feel free to watch them for yourselves.  Why not eat insects?   How healthy living nearly killed me.  After watching these videos I did some further research on the use of insects proteins in western diets. A company called Entomo Farms is already making cricket flour and other foods containing crickets that are much more affordable, much higher in protein, and much more obtainable.

The other two videos focus more on the Worldwide Food Crisis. The first video (of the second two) talks about the food we eat, what it’s doing to our bodies, and how it’s putting our entire planted at risk. His main points are that we are eating too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food and too little home cooking. He expands on this by saying that we (the human race) are not born craving junk food, and it’s the un-relentless marketing of the cheap fast food that makes it so easy for us to buy, and eat it. The last video focused on Hunger and Obesity,  and how they’re not that different. In the video, the host talks about how much worse hunger and obesity is than we really think. There are over one billion obese people in the world, and at the same time, there are over 1 billion people who suffer from hunger. Personally, I didn’t know the extent to how bad it’s gotten, and this video really enlightened me on the topic. To help solve hunger, Ellen Gustafson (the person in the video) came up with a program called FEED where you can give buy a bag where all the money goes towards giving a hungry child food for his whole school year. This doesn’t only feed the child, but it gives him more of a compelling reason to go to school.

After watching the last video I went and did a little more research on the FEED site if you want you can go and check it out for yourselves here.

After watching the videos we had to really think about the statement, You Are What You Eat, because now it was time to transform our face into all of the foods we ate.

This is mine:

As you can see from the picture that I eat a lot of types of food, some more healthier than others.  I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and a variety of meats, but I also like to treat myself to an abundance of junk food. Such as soda pop, fast food, chips, and other not so healthy snacks. overall, I would say I have a pretty healthy diet. Most of my meals are home cooked by my mom and she usually makes very healthy, very balanced meals. I am also in very good shape, I have a lot of exercise throughout my day, and I used to play tennis two times a week throughout the school year. The picture I made of myself reflects on a lot of what I eat, (I think I eat a little too much cereal) and someday I would like to make it so that most of the foods I eat are more healthy for me, and the environment. I mainly used one very helpful app to edit the photo. First, I took a picture of myself and imported it into an app called Photoshop Mix. This app allows me to stack photos on top of each other, and it also allows me to remove the background of the image. It took me a while to find and edit all the pictures onto my face and body, but in the end, I think it turned out pretty good. At the end, I sent it to an app called Snapseed where I added my name to the picture.

This project has not only taught me a lot about healthy living and food, but it was also a wake-up call for me about the food situation in our world. I learned a lot and it was and enjoyable project.

Thanks for reading!