Posted: April 10th, 2015

Keep a log of your diet to generate your own “food guide” and compare it to other “food guides”

Keep a log of your diet to generate your own “food guide” and compare it to other “food guides”

Criteria:
1. Record the foods you eat for a minimum of five days.  Make sure you include the type of food and the amount of calories.  If the calories aren’t listed, look up the food to make an accurate estimate.
2. Familiarize yourself with the diet guide at ChooseMyPlate.gov .  Although the diagram is a plate, it strongly resembles a pie chart.  Create your own pie chart (help: https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Present-your-data-in-a-pie-chart-1a5f08ae-ba40-46f2-9ed0-ff84873b7863 (Links to an external site.)) that depicts your diet during the time you monitored it.
3. Create two additional hypothetical pie charts for people who have very different diets than yourself.  You can choose a diet of a person from a distant land with a different culture, from a historical era (think ancient Egypt or Victorian England), or even the diet of a fictional character (maybe from Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey or Star Trek).
4. Write a paragraph for each of the three diets, describing the diet in detail.  Include an explanation of why each person ate what they did.  For example, to what extent did your characters choose their meals based on their nutritional merits versus cultural drivers or availability?  To what extent did you?
5. Write a fourth paragraph that explains why the three diets are different from one another. Here, discuss the biological drivers and ramifications of dietary choices and restrictions.  You have access to safe food from all around the world, because of cheap transportation and refrigeration, but your evolutionary ancestors didn’t.  How would more access to foods change your three diet charts?  More salad?  More doughnuts?  More steak?  What biological and physiological needs are “desirable” foods fulfilling?
6. Minimum word count: 500 words
7. Please don’t put your name on the document that is submitted to TurnItIn.  It is submitted under your NetID and your grade will be entered accordingly.  I prefer your work to be anonymous to me when I grade so it is as fair as possible.

Tips:
1. Don’t wait too long to get started.  Since you have to record your diet for several days, collecting that data early will keep you from running up against the deadline later.
2. Many students find it easiest to keep track of their diet with a smartphone app.  Some even will scan the barcodes of packaged foods to make it as easy as possible.