Personal Responsibility in Eating Habits

各位留学生大家好！今天100Due教员组给大家分享的是一篇营养学essay代写范文，主要内容是讲：饮食习惯中的个人责任。随着现代社会的高速发展，人们的身体越来越不健康。肥胖已经导致了各种各样的难以治愈的疾病，损害了每个人的个人健康，人们倾向于将其归咎于吃错了种类或不准确的食物。作为生活必需品之一，食物比以往任何时候都更加重要。因此，人们不禁要问，吃饭是否是个人的责任，人类是否可以控制自己摄入的食物。

With the high-speed development of the modern society, people are getting unhealthier nowadays. Obesity has caused various intractable disease that harm each individual’s personal health, and people tend to blame it on eating the wrong kind or inaccurate portions of food. As one of the life essentials, food has only gained more importance than ever before. Therefore people cannot help but wonder whether eating is a matter of personal responsibility and whether human beings have the control on the food they take in.

Many literatures have given similar opinions on eating habits and food choice. Michael Pollan’s excerpt “Escape from the Western Diet” talks about eating natural food instead of processed food; Mary Maxfield’s essay “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating” shows her own opinion that people should eat diverse food instead of insisting on certain kinds; Michael Moss’s article “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” discloses the degeneration of food process factories; Marion Nestle points out in “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate” that supermarket can make people believe that their consumption is at their free will, but the truth is that people are manipulated by those supermarket giants. Some of the above opinions focuses more on the nature of food, while others deals with the problems in food-packing houses and supermarkets. In sum, all these literatures show different attitudes toward human beings’ control over health.

When it comes to food choice as a personal responsibility, Pollan and Maxfield both discuss modern eating habits in their writings while focusing on different dimensions of the issue. In her essay, Mary Maxfield addresses how today's generation links fatness, diet, and health (444). She uses other writers’ article as reference such as Michelle Allison’s piece “Eating”, that once were are grown up, we are free to eat whatever and however much we want (17). This means what an individual eats is not influenced by how they eat it. It is true to claim that companies in America mainly aim at getting customers and not really supporting their healthy life. This is evident in the study by Paul Campos and Kate Harding, whom she also uses as references. Campos asserts it is not a coincidence that “lies about fat, health and fitness serve the Americas $50-billion per year diet industry” (444). According to Kate Harding who supports this fact, it is likely to find in an article about obesity, information on an organization developing drugs for weight loss (444). Therefore, as Maxfield explains, diet, health and weight are neither closely connected nor do they depend on each other. Healthy eating comes from the right choice of food more than the amount of food, and hence as human beings we are in control of the food choices we make.

Michael Pollan, on the other hand, turns his attention to the problem of getting rid of unhealthy processed food in the Western diet while guiding the public in ways to acquire better eating habits. He points out that "People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets...[T]he solution to the problem {is] Stop eating a Western diet" (421). Actually, in modern society, the food factory and the medical community have formed a vicious circle. The more junk food people eat, the greater profit medical institutions will obtain. To avoid such consequences, Pollan insists that individuals should begin to control their time and make rules about their health in particular what they eat. In other words, human beings do not have much flexibility in their eating choice, but need to abide by rules. In his view, we should follow his advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” (426).

From a different perspective, Marion Nestle points out that among the 320,000 edible products sold in the United States, 40,000 are sold in supermarkets (495).This is supposed to entice any buyer who gets into the supermarket. She adds, “it is no coincidence that one supermarket is laid out much like another” (496). This is because big companies that own supermarkets do so intentionally to force customers "to go past thousands of other products" (497). On to this, she adds that supermarkets do everything to make the choice theirs and not the consumer's, despite the fact that shoppers think that they are making their own decisions. The result is that consumers are manipulated into buying products that the retailers want them to buy, eating food that lead to health problems. As Nestle points out, the object of supermarkets is to "maximize sales and profit consistent with customer convenience" (498). Supermarkets accomplish this goal by exposing shoppers to the largest number of items for them to buy. Nestle’s argument makes us question whether food decisions at the supermarkets are really our personal responsibility. If not, then neither are we completely responsible for our day-to-day health, since we consume food that are heavily advertised and prominently displayed in supermarkets. It seems ridiculous that we cannot even decide what we want to pay for at the supermarkets. Since we still have our responsibility to choose good health over diseases, we human beings need to take control and make the right judgment.

On the other hand, Michael Moss points out that people are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns (477). In other words, people cannot control the determination of their food. He proves this by describing an event occurred in 1999 where 11 leaders of America’s largest food companies attended (477). These were people who controlled the majority of the processed food products sold in supermarkets, which meant that they stood to lose the most money if the food industry issued guidelines on the sales of food to young people. No manufacturer has stood up this much and accept their responsibility. In addition, Michael Mudd, who is mentioned in Michael Moss’s article, was the vice president at Kraft, a “junk food” corporation in America. He supported taking action to fight childhood obesity. He even admitted the fact that something had to be done. Mudd asserts that “more than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population - 40 million people - clinically defined as obese” (473). Sanger, the leader of General Mills, said, “Don't talk to me about nutrition; talk to me about taste” (476). Due to this we can obviously realize that food process factories don’t care about the health of the consumers. And also, Sanger makes other statements in which he talks about protecting the "sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful" (476). It seems that making money has already become the most important work nowadays, and that food engineers have to find the most perfect version to affect human (479). This cause people lose their mind and even can’t make the right choice by being addicted to junk food.

All articles offer certain controversial viewpoints on healthy eating in US. Among all these authors, Mary Maxfield may be the most optimistic one. She claims that people have their own choice in choosing food. Michael Polan has opposite ideas to that of Maxfield. Polan is a bit one-sided and thinks all human beings need to avoid “Western diet” and follow by one well-behaved that is eating natural food not processed. Therefore, Pollan deals with avoiding processed food, while Maxfield focuses on eating whatever people want. These two authors subjectively state how human make their food choices. In other viewpoints, Marion Nestle and Michael Moss objectively analyze the market and companies’ effect on people. Marion recommends that even though the market is trying to confuse consumers, but we still have the choice to make our own decisions. It is our personality that to choose the right things or not. However, Michael believes that the food chemical composition controls people’s bodies more than people’s mind. People can’t get rid of it but instead are addicted to it.

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