Sodium

Looking through my daily food journal I noticed something that I have known about myself for a long time, I love sodium. Sodium manifests itself in anything and everything, and while I may love this habit at the moment, it has the potential to carry me down a destructive path ending in possible hypertension and cardiovascular disease. To give you some perspective into the world of sodium, “Many processed foods contain 1000 mg or more per serving, while typical restaurant meals contain 2300 to 4600 mg of sodium (TABLE).”(JAMA), yet the NHBPEP(National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s National high Blood pressure Education Program) recommends a sodium intake of less than 2400mg/d. The disconnect between what people in the United States are recommended to consume and what they actually choose to consume is enormous, and because of this disconnect, a very prevalent issue has arisen in todays society over the risk of prolonged overconsumption of the delicious ingredient sodium. “Both the social and economic burdens of the present high salt intakes are huge, as salt accounts for a big proportion of high blood pressure levels, strokes, and heart attacks in all industrialized communities.”(ScienceDirect), and we the people are the ones facilitating these companies to produce sodium induced items because we are the ones buying and promoting their product.

Personally, I feel as though I am one of sodium’s biggest promoters/supporters, eating at least one bag of snack mix made up of 5 servings each containing 310mg of sodium, I consume 1550mg of sodium as a snack. I don’t think you understand what I just said, 1550mg of sodium AS A SNACK! I am a college student eating “restaurant meals” at least twice a day because of the cafeteria, meaning, I am consuming somewhere from 2300mg to 4600mg times two plus 1550mg of sodium at a MINIMUM. Thinking about how long I have possibly been consuming this much sodium is beginning to disturb me more and more. “Dietary surveys have also indicated that in 1999 to 2000 salt intakes in the United States were remarkably higher than in the late 1970s.¹¹ It is of considerable public health interest that, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the age-adjusted prevalence of high blood pressure has also shown a turn to a marked increase in the US population aged 20 years and older.”(ScienceDirect) Being so young I have an almost invincible attitude feeling as though no matter what I do to my body, it will have the ability to fix or heal whatever harm I do. This idea is beginning to fade as I learn the truths that the food industry tries to hide from you, like the health consequences associated with high sodium diets/products.

This topic is very interesting for me because of my obsession for any and every sodium induced product, if I try to keep up the pace I am consuming sodium, I will have serious blood pressure as well as hypertension issues. The Finnish initiated “the progressive decrease in salt intake, which has continued in Finland for 25 to 30 years, has played an important role both in the impressive fall in the average blood pressure of the population and in the pronounced 75% to 80% decrease in both stroke and coronary heart disease mortality in the population younger than 65 years.”(ScienceDirect) Personally, being able to see the direct consequences of too much sodium intake shows a great point of view of the situation, yet actually being able to statistically show the advantages of sodium reduction in a certain culture is much more convincing and moving. If I knew that by eating one less bag of Gardetta’s each day “that I could possibly increase my life expectancy 5-6 years like the Finnish population did during the past 25-30 years”(ScienceDirect Paraphrase), I can tell you 100% that I would abandon my obsession with sodium completely. What will you do with the information that has been presented before you? 

Sources:

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?volume=298&issue=12&page=1439

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062006000831

Commonalities

Very few of the Blog Post #8's mentioned eating breakfast or even having anything before 1 in the afternoon. For me, I usually try to eat breakfast on the weekends because my pioneer card allows me to get an omelet, yet during the week I follow much more of the same pattern I am seeing other classmates use in their Blog Posts. As a college student breakfast is a very difficult meal to eat on a consistent basis unless you have an early class or a specific dining plan. The absence of breakfast during the week in my life is due to my meal plan as well as my class schedule and because of that it is very difficult for me to try to work it back into my daily routine. 

It also surprised me how much food was eaten away from the cafeteria and or school affiliation Sodexo food

Food Log

Friday:

·      12 pm – 2 Chicken Breasts, some fries, and carrots – 2 beverages

·      2:30 pm – Bag of Gardettas chips

·      6 pm – Quesadilla with chicken, chips – 1 beverage

·      9 pm – Snack mix consisting of pretzels, oyster crackers, and nuts

·      9 pm-12 am – 8 or so beverages

Saturday:

·      9 am – Omelet with cheese, bell peppers, and onions – 2 beverages

·      1 pm – 1 Chicken Breast, a salad with carrots and bell peppers, a couple saltines – 2 beverages

·      5 pm – 2 nutri-grain bars and a beef jerky stick

·      7:30 pm – A piece of white chicken, mac and cheese, and honeydew – 1 beverage

·      9:30 pm-11 pm – 6 or so beverages

Sunday:

·      11:30 am – Omelet with cheese, bell peppers, and onions – 1 beverage

·      3:45 pm – Chipotle chicken burrito with beans, corn, salsa, cheese, ect – 3 beverages

·      5:00 pm – 1 piece of pizza and carrots

·      5:25 pm – 1 banana

·      9:30 pm – 1 orange

·      12:00 pm – 1 bag of Gardettas chips

The Banana

Yesterday morning I woke up much earlier than normal and decided to treat myself to a nice Sodexo style omelet filled with cheese, onions, and peppers. After enthusiastically indulging the 290-calorie meal Sodexo likes to refer to as an omelet, I grabbed myself a nice looking Fuji apple and began scavenging through the banana basket, searching, for the perfect, unharmed yellow crescent moon fruit. Why I feel the need to get a yellow banana opposed to a yellow and brown or yellow and green banana is historically based in my past as well as in my distrust for Sodexo food, even a harmless fruit like a banana.

Since I can remember, my Dad always had a fresh, cut up piece of fruit in the car while driving my sister and I to school. While I loved this daily routine, I have now noticed that I have become very picky about which fruits I choose to eat, as well as what condition said fruit is in. While looking through the bananas I noticed how many of these yellow fruits were either inedible or covered in bruises and wondered to myself where in the world Sodexo was getting these bananas from. With a little research on my part about the history of the banana I didn’t necessarily find out where exactly Sodexo was getting their bananas, but I was able to find out the origin of the banana as well as where I think these bananas are coming form.

What I learned about the history of the banana in my research was that, “The earliest documentary reference to bananas in Africa is from the sixth century A.D. Historians and archaeologists often thought that bananas were probably introduced to Africa via Madagascar, which was colonized by people from Southeast Asia in the first millennium A.D.”(Robertshaw) These facts interested me, yet as I scoured over the Internet I still couldn’t find where exactly Sodexo was getting their fruit/specifically their bananas. Although I gave up on the search to find where these bananas were coming from, just the fact that I couldn’t find the country, continent, region, even hemisphere where Sodexo was getting their food products, has changed my relationship, not necessarily with the fruit, but with the Sodexo Company all together.

Although I am sitting here writing this paper eating a banana that came from the cafeteria and in about and hour will be going back downstairs to get a nice Sodexo style meal, the way in which I view the meal and its components have changed drastically. This distrust that I now have acquired for the Sodexo Company is not going to force me to stop eating in the cafeteria or to stop eating all Sodexo productions, yet it has made me more aware of what is going into my body and the risk factors of such food being inadequately maintained or prepared. Because of the low risk factors of ill prepared and maintained fruits and vegetables, I have noticed myself migrating towards a more vegetarian lifestyle while eating at the cafeteria.

When researching the production the banana, I came across and interesting source that spoke about the problems of huge supermarkets and mass distributers wanting evenly ripe bananas and how traditional methods of ripening the bananas weren’t efficient enough. The author states, “The problem has been that consumers demand bunches of bananas that have ripened evenly. This was difficult to achieve with their traditional method of hanging bunches from the kitchen ceiling. So farmers were unable to supply quality fruit on a regular basis. One farmer, Juma Mgwane, experimented by putting bunches in an underground pit and using smoke to hasten ripening.”(Anonymous), which ties back to my essay “Faster” about how it now seems that the only thing that the food industry cares about is efficiency. The source goes on to say, “The smoking process takes about 20 minutes. After smoking, the pipe is closed and the pit left for about 24 hours, when it is opened. The banana bunches are evenly ripened and ready for packaging and selling.”(Anonymous), instead of waiting for the natural development of the banana to occur, the farmer chose to speed up the process and in doing so possibly jeopardized the product, all for the sake of efficiency.

Learning about the banana and its production has definitely changed my relationship with the food in a subconscious sense, yet I still love bananas and although there may be some sketchy methods of speeding of the ripening process, I still have a banana every day. For me, even with this new information, the benefits of bananas far outweigh the negatives of the ripening process and mass production. With this in mind, enjoy your next banana and see if your taste buds can detect the smoky nature of the yellow crescent shaped fruit.

Sources:

http://0­-proquest­.umi­.com­.bianca­.penlib­.du­.edu/pqdlink­?did=1659597681­&Fmt=3­&clientId=48347­&RQT=309­&VName=PQD

http://jc3th3db7e.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Africa%27s+first+bananas+%28History+of+the+banana+in+Africa%29&rft.jtitle=ARCHAEOLOGY&rft.au=Robertshaw%2C+P&rft.date=2006-09-01&rft.pub=ARCHAEOLOGICAL+INST+AMERICA&rft.issn=0003-8113&rft.volume=59&rft.issue=5&rft.spage=25&rft.epage=29&rft.externalDBID=n%2Fa&rft.externalDocID=000239756000013

National Eating disorder

Pollan points out many problems with the way in which Americans go about picking and choosing which foods they are going to put in their bodies, and says that because of these problems, America is one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. Pollan looks at the changing diet fads that stress one nutritional group over the other, such as the Atkins diet, which stresses a carb free life in order to be “healthy” and look in style. What I thought was most interesting about this article was when Pollan stated, “So we've learned to choose our foods by the numbers (calories, carbs, fats, R.D.A.'s, price, whatever), relying more heavily on our reading and computational skills than upon our senses. Indeed, we've lost all confidence in our senses of taste and smell, which can't detect the invisible macro- and micronutrients science has taught us to worry about, and which food processors have become adept at deceiving anyway.”(Pollan, 4) This statement truly captured to me the American food culture and how people in the United States pick and choose which foods they are going to eat. With the food industry playing perfectly into these changing diet fads, the facilitation of this cultural shift will continue to thrive and allow the food industry to prosper and make money off of carb crazy Americans, due to the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t have to deal with this problem. Pollan’s talk about Europe and the European style of eating interested me due to the fact that I had wrote similarly on the last paper and I was reading to learn facts that I didn’t know. I really enjoyed when he talked about France and Italy having a traditional meal set up and how that set up has not changed for centuries, and because of that, the diversity of the food in their 3-4 hour meal allows them to get all the nutrients out of all the different food gr

Out of Site

I really enjoyed this article because it finally began to look at our relationship to animals and how we treat them in specific situations. These specific situations range from giving our pets like our dogs and cats presents at Christmas time or their birthday’s to clinical testing and animal cruelty. This article was especially interesting due to the fact that right now I am learning about animal testing/animal ethics in my Ethics class and this article plays right into how humans take advantage and exploit animals on the basis that they don’t have the capacity to feel some of the emotions we feel or have the ability to rationalize. What this article did was show exactly why billions of people all over the world are so ok with eating animal meat and why they don’t question it. Just because these animals are being tortured and slaughtered out of our site doesn’t mean that we are not playing a part in those animals being tortured and slaughtered. By buying the food or products that are produced from animal testing/slaughtering we are silently supporting a business that I guarantee none of us would do first hand. Think about actually have to go and find a chicken for yourself, pluck the feathers, slaughter the chicken, drain the blood, cook the chicken, after finishing this process, how appetizing would that meal be knowing you were the one to end another organisms life. This is only half of what the meat industry does, these companies raise animals for the sole purpose of being slaughtered and eaten at a later date, how in the world are we as people ok with other living things being tortured and mutilated as long as we don’t see it?
 

Faster

Bryce Rothenberg

FASTER!

Horwitz’s article about ‘Eating on the Edge” illustrated how food, has become "an additive to a situation, such as a cigarette would be, rather than being definitive"(Horwitz 1).  This idea of eating food or having a meal becoming more of task than a leisurely social activity has resonated with me much more ever since coming to college. Due to how busy I am, I have noticed that I tend to eat much more food on the go and my appreciation for the food that I eat has decreased drastically due to it becoming a more individual experience. This idea is not only shared by me, "In the US, unstructured eating patterns have become more common, while taking time to share food with others is becoming less familiar"(Horwitz 4), many restaurants have now begun to implement fast-service food ideas to the layout of their store, to the way that the store is run, allowing people to get their food efficiently, use their food as a utility if needed, yet also allows them the ability to relax and eat with friends. Both Chipotle and Illegal Pete’s are Mexican grills that service mostly college students, and in my opinion because of the proximity to the University of Denver and the youthful, fast moving culture, the unique efficient layout of each restaurant allows many different people to eat their meals in many different ways. What I mean when I say the restaurant “allows many different people to eat many different ways” is that no matter how a person wants to treat their specific meal at Pete’s or Chipotle that day, either getting it to go and eating it in class or at work, while on the go, sitting alone studying in the restaurant, conversing with your friends sitting at a table, ect., the point I am trying to make is that the accessibility and or utility of the food being produced at these restaurants is absurdly versatile.  This culture that we live in has transformed the meaning of a meal from something that use to be shared with your friends and family, to a means, a utility, that facilitates an ends, being full.

Coming to college I knew that some things would change drastically but I never thought that my appreciation for food or a meal would diminish so substantially. Being on the crimson meal plan, I am not allowed to enter the cafeteria before 11 o’clock in the morning, yet after 11 and until 7 o’clock at night I am allowed to get as much food as I want as many times as I want. This being said, my eating patterns and my appreciation for a specific meals such as breakfast, lunch, or dinner have diminished drastically due to my inability to fully experience or indulge in a specific meal. Due to this change in my eating patterns, I have noticed that I tend to eat much more food on the go and my appreciation for the food that I eat has changed from something I used to completely and utterly love, into a utility. For me this change is something I have come to accept due to the situation that I have been placed in, and the priorities that I have established for myself have put my academics and or my personal success above my enjoyment of specific meals. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely sit down and enjoy my meals every once in a while, but food itself, at this point in time, has become a utility that is essential to my survival and nothing more.

Although this food culture is changing, into a faster paced, efficiently based system, the nice sit down family and friend meals that once were so popular are still present, yet fading into the background. This transition between sitting down and having a meal with your family or friends, to grabbing food on the go, has not only made food a utility, but has changed our culture into a more individualistic society that doesn’t value relationships like they use to. With the introduction of the television as well as the computer our society has changed drastically. While this transition was taking place technologically and culturally, the food industry recognized this significant culture shirt, also known as the “efficiency boom”, and began to make products that suited this emerging generation of fast American youth.

Since the invention of the “TV tray”, the food industry has tailored their products for efficiency and utility, moving farther and farther away from the sit down family meal that use to be the American culture. With the food industry encouraging and advertising, efficient easily accessible meals, the American culture and especially the U.S. youth are being pushed to accept and conform to this fast paced (efficient) utility driven meaning of food. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the food industry is the reason that Western culture is defined the way it is, what I’m trying to say is that the technological revolution that we are experiencing now, and have been for the past 20 plus years, caused a serious cultural shift, which the food industry recognized and began to cater to. Since the 90’s and the “efficiency boom” (technological revolution), Western culture has become a goal oriented, fast paced, future driven society, much more involved in personal success and business than relationships and leisure. Now as time progresses we are beginning to see restaurants around densely youth populated areas, such as colleges, becoming more fast-service food oriented, rather than sit down, order at the table restaurants, that became so popular in the late 20^th century.

            Being a college student, and living around a college campus allows me to realize the different fast paced culture of the youth, where utility and efficiency are characteristics most sought after. Restaurants who set up shop close to campus have been forced to integrate fast-service food into their layout and management of the store because of the growing demand for fast quality food. “Often, the bottlenecks in service are due to the restaurant’s overall design and setup. ‘Many operations that I have consulted with made all of their mistakes in the design phase,’ Kharasch says. ‘They did not think through every step an employee has to make to get the food out and they did not think about where a guest stands when waiting to order food, or how many registers they may need if the sales are above expectations’”(Brox, Fast Food Fast). For Pete’s I feel that this fast-service food idea was absolutely implemented into the layout of the restaurant, due to the placement of the menu in comparison to where the customers line up, to how checkout and or ordering process goes, Pete’s was tailored for efficiency and the “on the go” college student.

            These “on the go” college students have forced the restaurants surrounding the University of Denver to transform how their food is utilized and appreciated. What I have noticed personally is that these restaurants have changed their layout and or style to accommodate the fast paced youth culture, yet these restaurants have not compromised their ingredients or finished product to allow this service to be faster. Although the food culture maybe changing into an on the go, fast paced system, the integrity of the food and freshness of the ingredients will always be cherished by the provider and the consumer.

            People have become so custom to eating on the go, and because of this, when people are not able to get something quickly and efficiently they will more likely than not to skip the meal than take the time out of their day to sit down and enjoy the meal. In Europe this idea of grabbing a meal to eat while on the go or even skipping a meal is almost unheard of. Food in European cultures is more about the experience than anything else, being able to sit down for 3 hours with your friends and or family and have a leisurely meal is the norm and eating alone is preposterous.

European culture has not been as affected by the “efficiency boom” or technology as the United States and Western culture have, as you can see through the leisurely European approach to food and work and how they intertwine. Work in Europe is seen as just that in itself, work, meaning that people in Europe work to support their family and give themselves the ability to experience leisure, rather than working to be rich, which is seen so much in Western culture. In Europe, during the entire month of August, no matter where you are or what profession you are in, you are on vacation. The way that Europeans view work is that they feel that if their employees are well rested and have time to relax and recuperate that the work that they produce will be much better and a much higher quality. Going along this same line, every day for lunch, European workers get a two-three hour break for lunch during which they can do anything. The importance that companies in Europe are placing on scheduled time for leisure is what is keeping Europe from turning into a more Western based culture. A blog post claiming “I’d Rather Eat at My Desk” launched a massive discussion, “In response to folks writing wistfully about some European countries with their long lunches, Larimore pointed out that, for the working parent, a long lunch is just more time you're not with your kids. Maybe that's the point (they don't seem to be having many kids in Europe these days). But many of us like spending our evenings with our families.”(Vanderkam) For people living in the West in such a goal driven, fast paced society, the idea of long lunches and leisure, as enjoyed by people in Europe, is ridiculous because it is impossible in the society that we live in.                       

With technological advances changing how the Western society we live in operates, the food industry has begun to tailor their products and advertisements to this changing culture, and in doing so are facilitating the fast paced society we have come to know.  As our life becomes more dependent on these fast-service food restaurants, easily accessible, efficient food products, the food industry will continue to make more efficient, utility driven means of food, and the society that we live in will continue to become exponentially faster paced. 

           

             

Works Cited

Brox, Denene. "Fast Food Fast." Quick Fast Food Service Crucial to Success. QSR. Web. 25 Apr. 2012. <http://www.qsrmagazine.com/ordering/fast-food-fast?microsite=5>.

Horwitz, Jamie. "Eating at the Edge." University of California Press. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2009.9.3.42 .>.

Vanderkam, Laura. "Should You Eat at Your Desk?" CBSNews. CBS Interactive, 30 Apr. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500395_162-57423885/should-you-eat-at-your-desk/>.