The following is an excerpt of Colin’s 7th grade paper “The Introduction and Evolution of Processed Foods.” Colin is now in high school but continues to enjoy a diet of real, unprocessed foods.
“Processing foods is something that not many people comprehend greatly. It’s a transformation of manufactured ingredients into a nightmare. A nightmare for the body to process. In other words, food into other forms. But this transformation, this processing, takes artificially grown crops, or diseased, sick and unhealthy butchered animals, and transmutes them to create attractive, marketable, and often long shelf-life food.
All this processing and sick food affects the body. For example, the body is like a machine, and contributing bad bacteria or grease into the works clogs it up, and does not permit it to function properly.
Processing foods not only affects our internal longing for a sugary, tasty meal – that rumbling in the pit of your stomach, but it also affects our minds. And food industries contain this knowledge, and also know our propensity towards this convenience. So, what do you see on food labels? To name a few phrases that appeal to our minds:
- quick
- jiffy
- minute rice
- boil and eat
- heat and serve
- easy
Food companies know what appeals to our minds and our grumbling abdomens. And though the consumers are blinded by the wonderful convenience of it all, the creators are blinded as well. Blinded by greed and the sweet permeation of the greens slips of paper they get from their products.”
Colin wrote this paper for his charter school’s unit of study on the impact of fast food. His perspective comes primarily from his diagnosis of type 1 diabetes at the age of 7. Read more in Colin’s post Type 1 Diabetes and Real Food.
(For more on his diagnosis see Why My Son Got Type 1 Diabetes.)
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I agree with your perspective, Colin. You are encouragement to others, especially other teens.
Thanks for sharing!
🙂
Thanks Angela! Forwarding to Colin. 🙂
Way to go Colin. This excites me that a youth such is yourself is acknowledging and understanding how artificial food just doesn’t work. I’m reading Brain Maker, by David Petlmutter, MD. My eyes are opening at the ripe age of 51 to the important jobs of good gut bacteria for our brains and bodies! I’m going to have to work hard to change my eating habits. I got addicted to processed Gluten free foods when I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease in 2003. Now I’m re-learning how to eat properly. I feel better both mentally and physically. So seeing your essay reinforces I’m on the right track. Thank you!
I can’t wait to forward your response to Colin. That’s so interesting about the gluten-free addiction, Felica! It makes sense that it’s easy to replace one version of processed food for another. Thanks for taking the time comment.