small objects, LARGE SUBJECT: Artificial Sweeteners

Equal

Splenda

and

Sweet and Low

In this day and age fake food is starting to replace real food. Every where you look you see things like:
" I can't believe it's not butter."
"Splenda is made with real sugar. But it’s not real sugar!”
“Same great taste, with fewer calories!”

But really what is the point to eating things that are fake? Things that have ingredients like soluble saccharin, calcium silicate, anti- caking agent, and beta-carotene are replacing the ingrediants we actually can recongize. Just in case you didn’t know what Saccharin is ( because I didn't):

Saccharin: is an artificial sweetener. The basic substance, benzoic sulfimide, has effectively no food energy and is much sweeter than sucrose, but has an unpleasant bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. In countries where saccharin is allowed as a food additive, it is used to sweeten products such as drinks, candies, medicines, and toothpaste.(Wikepidia)

Companies claim that these fake sweeteners are healthier and provide the same sweetness without the negative affects of sugar.

But how can something artificial actually be healthy?

It can't!!

The real issue lies in American culture and portioning of food. People recognize the negative affects sugar has on health. But instead of changing the portion size or taking sugar completely out of someone’s diet, people replace it with artificial sweetener.

Many people argue they want to loose weight! So they replace sugar and butter with fake supplements. But really how many of those people do you know actually see loose weight?
Your body requires a certain amount of sugar to properly digest and function. These sweeteners fulfill no dietary need and the chemicals in them can actually cause you to gain weight.
Sugar just like everything else is all right in small portions. Eating something that is not good for you in large portions or to often will always end in poor physical health.

Balance is key.

Yes, these artificial sweeteners are a nice to thing to have for people who can’t eat sugar at all due to medicals reasons. But most of the time, the people using them don’t need to!
Our society promotes less fat, fewer calories, diet diet DIET! But it never seems to dwell on feeding your body and nourishing it with what it needs.

An "Abstract" outline

IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID?
by Nicholas Carr

Warrant:
The Audience uses google, a lot.
You find this right in the title
" Is google making us stupid?

Claim:
Nicholas Carr claim is that the internet is taking away the ability for him to concentrate on one thing. Google isn't making us stupid but retraining our minds to process information differently.

"...And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take information in the way the net distributes it."

Subclaims:
-People tend to Glorify things that are new instead of reckoning the harm.
-Old media trys to recreate itself to make it more appealing, and fit the "new Media" pg. 24
-Depending on audiences and what we are using to write our style changes. Pg. 23

Support:
-computers have taken away our ability to concentrate. Pg. 21
-even reaing short articles is a task that is left uncompleted by many people now. Pg. 21
- the internet is taking away a part of your natural instinct.
i.e the clock takes away our natural awareness of time. pg. 23

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Okay, so I am now supposed to write for twenty minuets without stopping. I’m not really positive I can do this…
Nicholas Carrs argues in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” that search engines are taking away our ability to concentrate for long periods of time, and retain in depth knowledge about multiple subjects. I agree with his argument completely, because I have realized this change in myself as of recently.
The NY Times website is my web home page, and I always read the little headline blurbs, and sometimes I will read the article if it catches my interest. Most of the time though I actually never finish the article, and I always ask myself— why? If the article exceeds three pages I usually stop reading, because by the third page my attention span is starting to rapidly unwind and I start thinking about life instead of the article. The article then becomes information I am just skimming through instead of actually retaining …
I am not sure if Google is making us “stupid”, but changing the way we process knowledge. In the article it related the use of the Internet to the use of clocks, and how people started to live their lives by scientific spans of time, instead of natural instinct. The Internet has changed, and is changing learning, just like clocks desensitized our natural awareness of time. The Internet could take away a person’s natural ability to learn. Even though it’s a step forward for technology it has similar effects that the printing press had on learning. Except this time, everything is virtual and gives anyone and everyone an infinite vat of knowledge at there leisure.
What happens though, is instead of retaining the entirety of Google’s contents, whenever it is needed you go your computer, blackberry, Mac book, iphone ect. when you want learn something to be put in your short term memory. But what happens if technology is suddenly taken away? Will the natural instincts that we as human kind use to live by come back immediately? Or would there just be mass confusion? Technology is not a bad thing by any means, we use it constantly and it is now an enormous part of our everyday lives.
Another comparison Carrs makes is between the creation steam engine and the Internet. Showing how the steam engine took away the necessity of physical labor. Just like the Internet could take away the necessity to think.

This is a problem.

Getting rid of the demand for physical labor by machines replaces the need for physical exercise and other ways of keeping our body healthy and in shape. Which, unfortunately, in this country has become something many people do not find important. So, can the same happen to our brains? Will there be an epidemic like obesity that is created from not using certain parts of our cerebrum? Will there be brain nutritionist, personal brain trainers, websites, books, and magazines all devoted to telling us how to keep our brains healthy. The problem is there is no balance, as progress is made the usage of machines and computers become more extreme. Which leaves me with the question:

When does access to so much information become too much?