Over the past three months, I have broadened my understanding of nutrition in my core NEW. My learning and capabilities have been enhanced in English, Technology, and Bio Science from the nutrition unit my class has delved into. In this unit I have not only studied what we eat, but also how and why we eat.
In Science, I learned about three major functions of the human body and plants, focusing on the intake or creation of energy to support life. My first lab was about animal cell respiration, In which I learned how ATP (energy) is produced from sugar and oxygen. This was important to know because it perfectly ties into our unit, since it demonstrated the fact that what substances we eat are exactly what enters this process (simple, yet it is not common to think about), which is especially critical because this is one of the processes that keeps us alive. Something I always remember now as I eat is that everything I put into my body has to go through this entire system, meaning that I shouldn't try to stop worrying about some food I ate just because I couldn't see it, for it would be in my bloodstream fairly soon. After learning the basic digestive system, I went deeper to investigate what happens to the substances like these that the body does not want. This is where my "teachback" to other students comes in, since the knowledge I acquired about my subject, the liver, was directly given to other students in my class who then learned about it just as I had did while I enhanced my understanding. The part that I tried to stick in their minds as well as mine was that the toxins that were not compatible or were too strong for the liver's enzyme, Cytochrome p450, went directly to the rest of the body!
This new understanding troubled me about my eating habits. I had always thought that food didn't make an impact on the body after it left it, especially for a lifetime afterwards. I didn't want to think about what was being put in my body because often I didn't even know what it was that meal was composed of, so I wondered why I was led to believe in such an oblivious eating style. This all made sense when I reviewed my stats from the field trips I took to the local supermarkets Safeway and Oliver's.
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| Oliver's |
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| Safeway |
After going inside both stores and doing a survey of the differences of the prices, I found that items that were processed were all cheaper than their organic twins.
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| Data of Organic vs. Conventional Food Prices in Oliver's and Safeway |
I had been so blind to what I was eating because I was an "industrial eater" (someone who is oblivious of the origins of their food, who only look at it as a price and bar code), a term in which I was introduced to by Micheal Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma". All who have eaten McDonald's, KFC, processed corn fractions (which by the way takes up an enormous amount of our food), pesticide stuffed apples, or anything of the like are guilty of this offense, but can redeem themselves by finding out the truth about their food.
To test the distinction between a "pure" meal and a industrial meal, I thought up an experiment dealing with organic and conventional strawberries.
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| The Strawberries - Organic Strawberries on the Top, Conventional on the Bottom |
In this experiment a strawberry of each type would sit in a beaker full of different combinations of two enzymes (the extremely small proteins that speed up the digestive system) amylase and pectinase. The reasoning behind this was to see how differently the pesticide stuffed conventional strawberries were broken down in contrast to the (hopefully pesticide free) organic strawberries.
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| The Experiment - Strawberries Being Broken Down by Enzymes Over Time |
Sadly for now, this lab in still in the process of data collection. The data when collected will give me an idea of what is going on in our bodies when foods filled with chemicals go through it, so far our data points us towards an unreadable distinction between the two kinds of food, hypothetically making an almost unreadable difference between the two as if they were already in the body. Hopefully after all of our data is gathered this lab will answer our final questions about nutrition.
The 8 weeks I have gone through in NEW were at first challenging, but it is amazing to see how much information I have retained so far. Whether its from observing the deceiving tactics of industry, or the process in which our organs store up or filter toxins and waste, I will always remember what it means to have good nutrition, especially now that I have the tools to do so.
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