Unit 2 Draft

UNIT 2 DRAFT

Throughout the early years of mankind, people would simply eat what their bodies were craving (or what was available) when they were hungry and stop once they were full or satisfied. In today’s society, people will not eat something without first examining its nutritional facts. It also is popular among fitness enthusiasts to plan their daily nutritional intake in a very strict and specific manner. My grandmother grew up without an issue regarding her health and weight because people were not as obsessed with every little thing they ate as they are in modern society. Meanwhile, growing up I would keep track of my calories in a journal before I even turned twelve. In terms of diet and nutrition habits, she grew up in a completely different world than me. A world without technology which made them less aware and concerned about the foods they ate.

Today, technology is constantly putting pressure on what we eat and how we look. Many companies within the food industry have been taking advantage of this sociological trend in society through their persistent marketing and advertising plans. You can't even watch something on television without seeing multiple commercials for restaurants, food products and brands, and anything else that may trigger an individual. Furthermore, nutritional information has become so much more easy to access for all food products. In fact, some restaurants even put the calorie count next to the items on their menu. This may consciously or subconsciously affect what a customer chooses to order.

With the growing use of social media, fad diets are being heavily endorsed by celebrity influencers and making them seem extremely appealing to their fans and admirers. There has also been an increase in food blogs and social media accounts. One account, @New_Fork_City on the Instagram app, is quickly approaching almost a million followers and currently has over 948,000 people following them. As of this morning, they have 3,548 posts, which are all pictures of food products and meals. Every time I see a post I get hungry and start to crave a certain food.

Not only is social media influencing what we eat each day through celebrity influencers promoting fad diets and endless array of popular food blogs and accounts, but it is also affecting the way we see ourselves and how we believe we should. All of these editing apps make everyone seem perfect online and we sit there on our phones looking at their posts wondering why we do not look like them. However, in reality, any of us could professionally edit our pictures to make ourselves look just as good as them. Unfortunately, many of these celebrities even endorse editing apps, such as “FaceTune”. This is causing a problem because since everyone is editing their pictures, everyone feels the need to do so as well just so they could compare to the rest of the Instagram feed. If everyone just stopped editing their pictures, no one would feel the pressure to edit theirs and make themselves look “perfect” because they wouldn’t constantly be scrolling through artificial images of everyone. So next time you see yourself wishing you looked like one of these “influencers” or “socialites”, just remind yourself that they are probably looking at the same photo of themselves thinking that was reality.

New studies constantly coming out and being published discussing benefits and disadvantages of certain foods and why or why not you should consume them. But how credible could that information really be? You can pretty much find an article or study for any food item on the market with controversial opinions. Technology is booming and new inventions and gadgets are being introduced to the market faster than we could keep up. A good example of this are FitBits-- activity trackers, wireless-enables wearable technology devices that measure data such as the number of steps walked, heart rate, quality of sleep, steps climbed, and other personal data metrics involved in fitness.