Dr. Madsen's Perspective On Childhood Obesity

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During her lecture on April 8th, Dr. Madsen presented her perspective on childhood obesity and discussed why and how our society has become obese. After providing information about how obesity is measured, she provided scientific evidences to illustrate the severity of the issue especially amongst children and adolescence. She mostly focused on eating habits and stressed how our behaviors determine our weight. Dr. Madsen then eluded on experiment done in a high school to test the caffeine addictive outcomes of use of soft drinks among teenagers. According to Madsen, a sample of students participated in a pre-post experiment. The participants had 3 days of typical drinking soda and then 3 days with no soda. Participants were asked about their …show more content…
The rational choice theory, with emphasis on cognition, provides a contingent view of future. This theory implies that human desires to get the most benefit with least cost and therefore cognitively makes a decision by analyzing his costs and benefits. Human invests in his future experience by anticipating about what he will feel in the future if he takes upon a certain action or behavior. The Berkeley soda tax intervention assumes that people are rational in making decision not to consume soda because by analyzing the costs and benefits, the consumers who desire to get the most benefit with least cost change their soda drinking behavior either by quitting drinking or decreasing their consumptions. On the other hand, one could argue that this intervention assumes that small increase in the price of soda could change people’s behavior. It is possible that this intervention might influence adults’ decisions in soda drinking but not all age groups, especially teenagers, exercise the cost-benefit analysis and do not make the money in the first place to spend it wisely or consider it “cost”. Therefore the impact of this intervention on teenagers might not be as strong via rational

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