XXXL: Why are we so fat?

The Fattening of America
Eric Finkelstein is a health economist at a research institute in North Carolina. In “The Fattening of America” (Wiley; $26.95), written with Laurie Zuckerman, he argues that Americans started to put on pounds in the eighties because it made financial sense for them to do so. Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain. Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined by sixteen per cent. During the same period, the real cost of soft drinks dropped by more than twenty per cent.

“For most people, an ice cold Coca-Cola used to be a treat reserved for special occasions,” Finkelstein observes. Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

The correlation between cost and consumption is pretty compelling; as Finkelstein notes, there’s no more basic tenet of economics than that price matters. But, like evolution, economics alone doesn’t seem adequate to the obesity problem. If it’s cheap to consume too many calories’ worth of ice cream or Coca-Cola, it’s even cheaper to consume fewer.

The End of Overeating
In “The End of Overeating” (Rodale; $25.95), David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, takes a somewhat darker view of the situation. It’s not that sweet and oily foods have become less expensive; it’s that they’ve been reëngineered while we weren’t looking. Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”

Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs: “Conditioned hypereating works the same way as other ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such as compulsive gambling and substance abuse.” For Kessler, the analogy is not merely rhetorical: research on rats, he maintains, proves that the animals’ brains react to sweet, fatty foods the same way that addicts’ respond to cocaine. A reformed overeater himself—“I have owned suits in every size,” he writes—Kessler advises his readers to eschew dieting in favor of a program that he calls Food Rehab. The principles of Food Rehab owe a lot to those of drug rehab, except that it is not, as Kessler acknowledges, advisable to swear off eating altogether. “The substitute for rewarding food is often other rewarding food,” he writes, though what could compensate for the loss of Nacho Cheese Doritos he never really explains.


Fat Land
In the early nineteen-sixties, a mannamed David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.

A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.

“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.

Mindless Eating
The elasticity of the human appetite is the subject of Brian Wansink’s “Mindless Eating” (2006). Wansink is the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, and he has performed all sorts of experiments to test how much people will eat under varying circumstances. These have convinced him that people are—to put it politely—rather dim. They have no idea how much they want to eat or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do French-fry eaters.

Consider the movie-matinée experiment. Some years ago, Wansink and his graduate students handed out buckets of popcorn to Saturday-afternoon filmgoers in Chicago. The popcorn had been prepared almost a week earlier, and then allowed to become hopelessly, squeakily stale. Some patrons got medium-sized buckets of stale popcorn and some got large ones. (A few, forgetting that the snack had been free, demanded their money back.) After the film, Wansink weighed the remaining kernels. He found that people who’d been given bigger buckets had eaten, on average, fifty-three per cent more.

In another experiment, Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for themselves with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and big bottles of sauce, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles. The first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and downed it all. In yet another experiment, Wansink rigged up bowls that could be refilled, via a hidden tube. When he served soup out of the trick bowls, people, he writes, “ate and ate and ate.” On average, they consumed seventy-three per cent more than those who were served from regular bowls. “Give them a lot and they eat a lot,” he writes.

Before McDonald’s discovered the power of re-portioning, it offered just a small bag of French fries, which contained two hundred calories. Today, a small order of fries has two hundred and thirty calories, and a large order five hundred. (Add fifteen calories for each package of ketchup.) Similarly, a McDonald’s soda used to be eight ounces. Today, a small soda is sixteen ounces (a hundred and fifty calories), and a large soda is thirty-two ounces (three hundred calories). Perhaps owing to the influence of fast-food culture, up-sizing has by now spread to all sorts of other venues. In a 2002 study, Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, and Lisa Young, an adjunct there, examined the offerings, past and present, at American supermarkets. They found that during the nineteen-eighties the amount of food that was counted as a single serving increased rapidly. A similar jump showed up in cookbooks; when the researchers compared dessert recipes in old and new editions of volumes like “The Joy of Cooking,” they discovered that, even in cases where the recipes themselves had remained unchanged, the predicted number of servings had shrunk. According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month.

Blog 11

PART I The Meatrix 
Moopheus find leo and want to show him what is the real farm. The place that leo stay is a fantasy family farm. Moospheus give leo two choice that blue pill is stay in the fantasy farm or choice the red pill will show you the truth. leo choose the red pill to see the truth. They go through a crazy transition. They are landing in a horrible place that is a factory farm. In the mid 20th century,greed agriculture corporation want to get the greatest profits that the factory farming born. Animal are living in the very worse environment. They are packed togethday, no sunlight, no fresh air and even can't turn around that make animals are sick. The corporate machine began to add antibiotics to their feed to keep them alive. The factory farming corporating


The Meatrix: Revolting 
The second video shows that in order to increase the production of milk they use hormones.Also the calves are separated from their mothers. They produce a fake milk with cows blood to feed the calves. producing the mad cow disease.The cows tails are cut in an unsafe method.




The Meatrix II 1/2

The third video agent shows how the meat is processed daily they made a lot amount of products,however,the unhealthy conditions that the meat is made is not the agents priority.the profit is the agents number one priority. 

PART II
 I think the biggest issue is that factory farming has affected the family farms the most because they but them out of business without offering them any alternative.Also,it impacts the future of the agriculture as this family farms begin to disappear.We live in a country that the population is over 300 million of people.Forcing the food industry to grow in order to feed all these people.This subject has been a big country for all of us, especially for those who knows the negatives results of Factory Farming. One of the biggest problems is that many family farms are disappearing because of the competition.Therefore farms struggle to stay in business.In fact, the old generation of farmers are not being replace by the newest one. Not only that, factory farming has damage the environment,food, animals ,etc.

I think that the government should take action by helping family farms to grow. It is important for the family farms produce fresh, nutritious,foods, small family farms provide a wealth of help for their local regions and communities.According to the article "family farmers benefit society by boosting democratic values in their communities through active civic participation"  by doing this act it will open new jobs,even more young people will be encouraged to become farmers. At the same time it will diffidently secure the preservation of green space within the community.

Blog 10

In "Imitation of Film: Here's Smoking at You, Kid." Nicholas Balakar states that children in their adolescents like to smoke if they saw actors smoke in the , a nationwide survey published in the November issue of Pediatrics reports. The researchers also said thirty-eight percent of children who begin to smoke is from what they have seen in the movie. The Dr. James D. Sargent, who is the lead author on the study and a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, he said "the R- rated movies have much smoking than other films," and they have the study show the kids start to see this movie since their fourth or fifth grade. The pediatrics professor made a interviewed between 6522 children to see if children who had the greatest exposure to smoking in movies were more than two and a half times as likely to start smoking as these who had the lowest exposure. Dr. Sargent think the study result about the youngest adolescents but may have some children start to smoke before their saw these movies. Balakar also states this is a very seriously problem on those movies and we have to notice it.

As Dr. Sargent said that "The strength of the findings, and the fact that they replicate almost exactly an earlier regional study, suggest that this association should be taken very seriously." I total agree with him because when we are ages from 10 - 14, we can't tell what is exactly right or wrong. We just follow our eyes when we see someone that they so things and no one say their wrong. In our mind, We think that was right and we will follow the things they did. For example, I think everyone has seen the magic show so far and no matter where you saw it during or after the show always have some notices to mention you that they are professional and you don't follow or replicate what they do with yourself, it is dangerous because some magic show are unbelievable. Even though their mention you, some kid would follow what they said. Many year ago, I saw the news from the newspaper. It said about the boy fell from the third floor and died. He imaged that he can fly if he jump from the third floor. Unfortunately,  he can't fly and his died. He believes he can make it. His parents very sad when they got home after work. They can't believe their child follow the magic show their saw together last night.

As a result， I think those problem are very seriously to the youngest adoleseents. We all have to do some things to protect our younger kids, Such as, make a rule like youngest kids can't see those dangerous shows or movies to let them grown up in the health environment.

Blog 9

1. Does Knowledge Make You Happier?
Cornell and Malcolmson’s article states that Neo's overall experience in The Matrix film is an educational process similar to the release of the prisoner in the “Allegory of the Cave.”

Consider both the positive and the negative aspects of education as expressed in The Matrix and “The Allegory of the Cave” and compare them to your experience of education and the educational system. What are the benefits and the joys of learning and what are the downsides and pains of new knowledge? Is it all worth it? Use examples from the texts, your readings this semester, and personal experience to support your ideas.

             Knowledge make us happier. When you get to know more about the things, you aren't going to to do stupid or dangerous things. Knowledge can make us convenient and avoid things, such as, weather forecast; earthquake forecast and so on. Knowledge can make us happier because some technology can connect people even we far away from each other. That's can make us more closer for each other. 
             If you are the new yorker same as me, you will know the weather is very changeable in here. If we don't have the knowledge to find the weather report, we must will sick from this weather because we don't know what we need to wear every day. That's the big problem to us everyday before we plan to go out. Nowadays, everyone is busy for their own business even for me. I'm busy at school during the week and busy at work in the weekend. I don't have many time to travel to my country to visit my relates and friends but now we have many social net work can get connect to each other such as telephone and net chat that we can talk face to face though the internet with the computer almost like "in person". I really happy when i see my friends.
             Knowledge  doesn't easy to gain. you need to pay time on it and you need to practice. Sometimes are very painful during learning. The same situation happened to me, When i first time apply to the school, we have a enter school placement test such as reading , writing skill ,math test. Few days after i got the result, i failed the all english subject test that is mean i can't take regular class to meet my major. First i have to take english class then past all of them. I can take regular class after. I was so sad because i need to pay much more time to concentrate on english first that mean i'll graduated later than other students and lots of money too. I'm still in processing on my english. I worked hard but sometimes even you doing a lot of study you still can't get the result that you expect. I past the reading last semester that i feel happy when i got the result. You will feel sad and doesn't satisfied very much during the process but you learnt something and you got improve after you achieve the point.
             As a result, I think gain for the knowledge worth it because we can find benefit from it. I think people have a desire that has a strong thirst for knowledge. That's why this desire is the reason that lead us to learn the things and gain the knowledge. Every time you know or learn something new, but you doesn't know before, after that you will feel very happy because you learn something.

Blog 8

1.  I Am/ I Am not Living in The Matrix

From the beginning of the story, Neo suspects that something is wrong with his world: that he is somehow controlled or manipulated into believing things that are not true. This feeling that “something is not quite right with the world” resonated with many viewers who agreed that we could be living in The Matrix and not know it. What do you think: are we living in a fake world like The Matrix? How do you know? Explain your argument using evidence from your life and/or the film.

         I am not living in the Matrix. As explains in the movie, "that he is somehow controlled or manipulated into believing things that are not true." However, I don't agree with it. Because i think everything that we did was real. We are living in the reality world. That wasn't everything perfect for me. I can decided whatever i want to do.
         I remember many years ago when i first time watched the matrix. After i watched it that i had many question such as the world we live are real or not. Later on, I found one very interesting thing that can explain this question.Because if you can find infinite that the world you live is real. I have a friend that she bought a apartment want to design her house. She downlode a very simple software that can easy to use such as how the look they can use the software to design the home. They put the carpet, wood floor, anything you can put but the only thing you can't find is a mirror. We can't find answer but I brought the question always with me. I remember  
physics class the professor told us if we want to see what is unlimited. we can use two mirror and face them together then you will get your answer. After the class, i went to ask my professor the question that i have. Why we can find the mirror in that software? She gave me the answer that computer can't imitate the unlimited things. If they do have mirror that can lead the computer doesn't work anymore.
          As a result, i do the same things let two mirror together, then i find i'm still here. That's why i know i am not living in the Matrix.

Blog 7 - Revision for CAT Practice 1

           In " The Dangers of Reality TV," Timothy Sexton states that the reality television give some young people dangerous information to let them think the competition is is much important the value os image over ability, and education aren't important. Reality TV changes the old belief that competition is the way to success. The author said that on many of these shows the contestants even though they have most qualified condition they often lose. If another contestants have very good image, attractively, but not good ability the person could be won. That the information shows the image is more important than ability the author worried the people get this wrong information will think the education isn't important. The "reality TV" makers want to warn the people to face the society.
            When the author said "probably the single most dangerous message these shows dend is that education is completely unnecessary to fulfill the American dream." I agree with author. I think it is dangerous message to tell the people because I think education very important, I have several reason. First, education means knowledge and we need knowledge to do lots of things in our life. Second, money is important, but it isn't the most important things in our life. We need education, we want to show the ability to create something useful to help others.
             Ability is much important in our life. Every people are doing the different things everyday to run our life, and we can't live without them. Such as, bus driver, doctor and lawyer and so on. They are educated, and they important and necessary in our life. If you sick and you can't find anyone to help you. The result is very serious and horrible. So we need education.
             Money are important but it can't buy any skill. Such as if you don't know how to drive a aircraft even you have huge of money you still don't know how to drive it. You have to learn this skill that mean you need education. Education is very important.
             In conclusion, I still strongly agree with the author. In our life we need educated to improve out life quality that why we have to learn the things because we are not perfect we are all human being we need to discover this world.

Blog 5

      when I watched "The Truman Show", I saw the whole world in the show looks like the real world; The world of seahaven compared to the real world would seems similar.He has a very nice neighbor,they are always greeting and nice to each others. He has a family, even though some memories are not good. He also has his first love memory when he was in college like most of people. He married with a very pretty woman, even though he didn't love her much. He had a very good friend since they were children. They talked everything because he trust him. He had a very decent job like most of people, his manage also will let him to do this or do that. It all look the same as real world but i have to mention you that is all control by someone. Everything to him that is all fake but the only person is him who didn't know.  
         If  i were him, I were do the same thing that like he does. Leave the seahaven the prefect world that all made by someone. The first reason is I don't like being control under someone. The second is I don't like to live the place that filled all the lie and i'm the only one don't know. Everything looks perfect but still fake. Have you think about the real deal? Such as his wife, they are married but that's not the true love to connect them because she is an actor. She wants to be a famous person not just because she loves him. His buddy to being with him is just because that's the order from the controller set up to watch him. No one is really want to care about him. He can't do the thing he wants to do. For example, He can't choose his love that he want. That was so sad because life is just once and short and never can go back. Everyone should choose their own life style and do whatever they like to do. That's why i will make the same decision as Truman.

Exercise 3 - Identifying common problems with CATW introduction paragraphs

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