Even though many may disagree on the approach, the bottom line is that we all want to be healthier. I must admit that I have not always lived a healthy lifestyle, having spent most of my childhood being obese; but I did learn an important lesson from my experience—the more we know about health, the more well-armed we are. In recent times, the complicated issue of obesity has been under intense debate. While some skeptics insist that it is blown way out of proportion, I argue that obesity should be a serious concern because the evidence is straightforward: gaining too much weight increases the likelihood of heart problems, diabetes, and death. However, an even more pressing matter is what we should do to solve this predicament. On the one hand,
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But first, I want to detail my own personal struggles with childhood obesity to provide a glimpse into what that experience is actually like. When I was twelve years old, I weighed 180 lbs and my doctor informed me that I had very high levels blood pressure, which convinced me I needed to lose weight. Being both desperate to find a solution and completely uninformed about proper nutrition, I had to investigate many approaches to weight loss. I found that many advocates assert specific dietary guidelines to help lower weight; these diets often vary, but what they have in common is that they all rule out certain foods as unhealthy. Journalist Michael Pollan, for instance, strongly urges his readers to adopt a diet that essentially involves a dichotomy between whole and processed foods (the former being encouraged for consumption, and the latter being inadmissible no matter what). In his article, “Escape from the Western Diet,” he proposes, “instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that is more the product of industry than of nature” (Pollan 424). Pollan’s point is that people should not take the word of researchers who claim their chemical-filled food is healthy, but rather they should eat a diet of whole foods that come from nature. After all, our bodies did evolve specifically to eat food derived from nature, not from some scientist mixing a bunch of chemicals in a
But first, I want to detail my own personal struggles with childhood obesity to provide a glimpse into what that experience is actually like. When I was twelve years old, I weighed 180 lbs and my doctor informed me that I had very high levels blood pressure, which convinced me I needed to lose weight. Being both desperate to find a solution and completely uninformed about proper nutrition, I had to investigate many approaches to weight loss. I found that many advocates assert specific dietary guidelines to help lower weight; these diets often vary, but what they have in common is that they all rule out certain foods as unhealthy. Journalist Michael Pollan, for instance, strongly urges his readers to adopt a diet that essentially involves a dichotomy between whole and processed foods (the former being encouraged for consumption, and the latter being inadmissible no matter what). In his article, “Escape from the Western Diet,” he proposes, “instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that is more the product of industry than of nature” (Pollan 424). Pollan’s point is that people should not take the word of researchers who claim their chemical-filled food is healthy, but rather they should eat a diet of whole foods that come from nature. After all, our bodies did evolve specifically to eat food derived from nature, not from some scientist mixing a bunch of chemicals in a