P9

        How do people decide what a healthy diet is, and who should the “restrictions” be directed toward? For centuries, people have been trying to decide what the perfect healthy diet for people is, and every few years or so brings new findings that substances we are eating are not as good for us as we thought they were, or something that is good for us that we either did not know about, or thought was previously bad for us. In the two articles by Dupuis and Pollan, the writers focus a lot on this topic, discussing how food became more about what is in it than what is actually is. Dupuis writes, “By World War I, nutrition professionals had become less interested in promoting the least expensive diet for workers and began to focus instead on the best diet for optimum public health and vitality” (40). This shows how professionals began to change their viewpoints from what is cheap and easy to get a hold of, to what the best options were nutrition wise for large numbers of people. Pollan writes of days when companies would proudly show the place of origin for the product on the brightly colored packages, but “now new terms like ‘fiber’ and ‘cholesterol’ and ‘saturated fat’ rose to large-type prominence” (2). Once people discovered what was really in the foods we were eating, we started to drift away from those diets and stress eating healthier and paying attention to what was in our food. 

        After reading the two articles, I can think of so many examples of it being more about what is in the food rather than what the food is. High cholesterol runs on my dad’s side of the family, so he, my brothers and I all try to watch what we eat. When shopping, I tend to look for foods that are low in cholesterol, or buy products like Cheerios that claim they may help reduce cholesterol (really I just love Cheerios, the low cholesterol thing is just an added bonus). Recently, however, my dad and I have decided that rather than just looking for such foods, we start monitoring what we eat and do so in portion sizes. It got to the point where worrying about what was in the foods made shopping much more of a chore than it needed to be, so we still eat goods good for keeping cholesterol low or lowering it, but less often. This is not the case for many people, however. When shopping, I see so many people look for foods that advertise for low cholesterol, high fiber and protein foods rather than looking for healthy options that also taste good. People would rather buy products that don’t taste good but claim to be low in cholesterol, fat, etc., than eat the foods they like and portion the “bad” ingredients they worry so much about.