HLTH 1020

Welcome to my HLTH 1020 Nutrition page! Below you will find some assignments from my course. Please enjoy!

Eportfolio Segment:

• The interactions and interdependence of organisms upon each other and their environment.

        It really depends on the organism in nature. Some organisms thrive off of a symbiotic relationship, meaning two organisms have an advantage that helps the other survive, so they work together for survival, where others thrive solely on competition among other organisms.  This of course all depends on the type of environment. In the desert, you’re more likely to find organisms that fend for themselves competitively such as a snake, where in the ocean there are many symbiotic relationship such as the clownfish and sea anemone.

• Demonstrate knowledge of human nutritional needs and the role of nutrition in improving individual health and the societal economic impact of food choices.

        What we eat and how we move and use our bodies plays a huge role in our overall health as individuals.

People who don’t take care of themselves will most-likely suffer from health conditions. These type of people typically have bad health habits such as excessive calorie consumption and/or lack of physical exercise. This may be a result of foods high in Fat or carbs. An unbalanced diet due to poor food choices could be because the individual may have more money to buy expensive junk food, but many factors play a role in an individual's decision to eat unhealthily.

A balanced diet with controlled calorie consumption is a much better approach to help improve such individual’s overall health. This person could feel a lot better and be a lot more productive with the right types of food in the right quantities. Healthy food is actually a lot cheaper, too! Society is very time demanding of most people, so it’s not always ideal to take the time out and cook healthy meals, but in the long run the benefits will lead to a healthier, happier life and even increase overall longevity.

• Explain the impact that the food industry has on human food choices and the subsequent relationship to health and disease at the individual, societal, and environmental level.

    The food industry plays a large role in people’s food choices. The food industry doesn’t care too much about how healthy something may be, it’s all about how much product they can sell. Let’s take example, the Frito Lay company. They produce Doritos and other tasty chips. The flavor on Doritos chips, the powder, is chemically engineered to be very tasty, and only last for a second or so. As a result, the person eating the chips will want more of that tasty flavor and in turn, eat more chips. This phenomena happens a lot in the food industry and has a large impact on consumer health if unregulated. The more chips being eaten by society, the more empty calories consumed by consumers--which leads to more weight gain, which leads to more obese individuals, which only increases America’s leading cause of death. There are many factors influenced by something as simple as what people intake, but in the end the food companies get the money they want and that’s all that’s important to them.

Reflection:

• Make connections between what you studied in this nutrition course with what you’ve learned in other courses at SLCC or before. Make specific references to your work in this class and in the other courses. How did what you learn in the other courses enhance what you learned in nutrition, and vice versa?

    I’m majoring in electronics, just to get an idea of the type of classes I have taken.There are two connections that come to mind.

The first is what a calorie is. It’s a unit of energy, and we americans often use calories and kilocalories interchangeably. I have used the calorie in Physics and in Chemistry. I had always wondered why we Americans would use calories instead of the rest of the world that uses kilocalories. I realized this when I was learning about the nutrition facts and made the connection!

The second thing that came to mind was issues of modern society, in particular, Obesity. We had a discussion about how companies were starting to deliver food to people’s homes. I found this to be a bad move to help people with obesity, but the companies get more money so why do they care. I took a political science class and we talked about issues like this. I had an assignment in that class where we addressed the obesity dilemma. If only I had heard about food being delivered back then, that would’ve been another great discussion topic and some solid evidence in my paper.

• Reflect on how you thought about nutrition before you took this course and how you think about it now that the course is over. Have any of your assumptions or understandings changed? Why? What assignments/activities/readings were influential in this process? How will you approach (course topic) differently in the future?

I had a pretty good outlook of nutrition before I took this class, but this class has really helped to expand and deepen my understanding of nutrition. I didn’t really understand how minerals worked in the body and what they did prior to this class. I use to be very diligent with taking vitamins and eating healthy, but learned that I don’t really need to take the vitamins if my food is already providing them. Reflecting back on some of the assignments I did, the most influential for me was the $10 challenge. I never realized how much food I could buy with $10. $10 is oftentimes all I will take to the store to get some groceries for the week. Healthy food isn’t actually too expensive like I used to think. To change my approach for the future, I will try and spend at least half the money I spend when shopping for groceries on healthy food, that way I can have more abundance of healthier options.