Evaluation of News Magazine Stories

In this post, I am going to evaluate different news magazine stories related to my major.

CFCF, "Body Cavities" 14 November 2013. Creative Commons.

After exploring Time Magazine, I found several health related articles. One article that caught my eye was Alice Park’s “Why Cutting Back on Fat Isn’t Enough to Help the Heart.” The author argues that it is more important to focus on obtaining healthy fat, the ones found in plants, nuts, and fish, than to cut out saturated fats. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Science policy, discovered that “only 3.6% of global heart deaths can be attributed to eating too much saturated fat, while just over 10% of heart deaths can be traced to eating too little plant oils.” There are numerous studies that Mozzffarian does to prove that heart-related deaths should not be solely blamed on saturated fats.

The most sympathetic characters in this article are those who live in countries such as Russia, Germany and Egypt because they have dealt with the most heart deaths due to lack of vegetable oils in their diet. If this research had come out earlier, these heart failures could have been prevented.

The least sympathetic characters in this article are the doctors and the dietary guidelines that are released by the U.S government that insist that the main and only cause of heart failure is the consumption of saturated fats. These doctors should not have made such a broad statement because now it is a widely known and partially false assumption that in order to have a healthy heart, one must simply cut saturated fats out of their diet. Because of this statement, Americas are replacing the saturated fats they used to eat with carbohydrates, which will evidently turn into triglycerides and be stored as fat.  

After exploring The Week Magazine, I discovered an article written by Andrew Joseph, “Your ancestors’ poor diet may have ‘scarred’ your gut microbes.” Joseph’s main argument is that the assumption that we pass on only our human genes to our children is false; our children also inherit a microbial set of genes from us. This new claim is supported by the research done in mice: their depleted bacterial diversity, resulting form low-fiber diets, was passed on to offspring. The researchers compared mice with diets full of fiber to mice deprived of fiber and the mice with the deprivation had offspring with even lower bacterial diversity than they did.

The most sympathetic character of this story is the child of parents who do not eat nutritiously. It is one thing to not be able to control your own genes, but its another thing to decrease your child’s quality of life due to your own eating habits! I hope these recent studies encourage Americans to consciously eat a diet consisting of fruits and vegetables and whole grains now that it is known that they have the responsibility of their child’s microbial genes.

The least sympathetic character in this story is the parent who does not obtain enough fiber. Before this article was released, one should already know the importance of a nutritious diet. It frustrates me to witness people damaging their bodies and ultimately shortening their own lifespan simply by not eating properly. These studies are just another reason for people to watch what they eat.