Understanding Food Health Nutrition And Diet Media Essay

Good nutrition is vital to good health. With such multiculturism and modern society, food has established to be much more sophisticated and in variety. Our world is swept away with not we eat as a normal food but it has been triggering our taste buds by colourful advertisements. Although minority of people in uk may eat well but most of them from backward and disadvantaged society care less about how they eat. Poor nutrition is the major problem in our country, unhealthy diet and physical inactivity, have produced to the growth of obesity in our country.

The purpose of this assignment is to create a difference between food and diet and similarly it includes how the media representation has affected our lives with unhealthy choices and the impact on health wellbeing. The assignment reflects on the policy of food manufactures which influences the range and quality of the food consumed, and furthermore we will focus on unhealthy eating habits which have lead a threat to different kinds of diseases in Uk.

Background

As food industry is rapidly growing we will focus on how early advertisements for foods had helped in changing the way of food we eat. The word “advertising” is acquired from the French advertisement which is also said as a giving attention or broadcast. The aim of the advertisement is to publicly convey the information through mass communication. Advertising brings focus to variety of products such as consumer products, including food which is also a major consumer of advertising. Advertising depends on individual manufactures or as in a group and by wholesalers,retailes and distributors

Get Help With Your Essay

If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!
Find out more about our Essay Writing Service

According to the long history of advertising, modern advertising began with discovery of printing in the sixteenth century. The early advertisements for foods which were implied those for books, medicines, cures and remedies meant to be for foods and drinks that were first dominated by upper class people. The English first reported coffee in 1652,chocolate in 1657 and tea in 1658. there was no significance expansion of print advertisements until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The growth of the advertisement began to spread by changing and developing trade patterns especially the rail network and the improvement of roads, therefore the improvement of transportation granted the expansion of extended regional and national trade networks. As the goods and products began increasing they had to be more efficient and effectively distributed and marketed. The early stage of advertisement included the print media, the spread of literacy, newspapers and magazines ,after 1850 ,the development stimulated. In the last hundred years that advertisement has developed in a major industry. So it has become important that it is the core to the production of general communications and provides the commercial basis that qualifies to exist.

Understanding Food, Health, Nutrition and Diet

Food

Food can be defined as the any substance that provides the nutrients necessary to maintain life and growth when absorbed. However when most of the animals feed, they repeatedly consume foods necessary for their wellbeing but in humans, however, do not eat .they eat. Over the last 100 years the society has believed that the apart from supplying basic energy ,food has very little sustain on physical and mental health .food then, is something very powerful rather that of mere nourishment ,it forms the significance of the very being.

Health

Health comparable to love or joyness is hard to explain or basically impossibly to measure. According to WHO (World health organisation),health is defined as” a state of complete ,physical ,mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of diseases and infirmity”. This definition of health has a whole dimension of meaning on how we understand health. Our health is affected by how we choose to live our life and these aspects of life depends on mental issues ,significance such as climate ,our intake in nutritional food ,comfortable shelter, clean air to breath and pure water to drink and socially how much we are connected with our family, friends and in our workplace.

Health is how we take decisions in our daily life, sometimes the social and physical environment present obstacles to making healthier choices. Health is not something that happens miraclously.There is three main things to remember about health.

Being free from symptoms of disease and pain as much as possible.

Being active ,able to do what you want and what you must at the appropriate time.

Being in good spirits and feeling emotionally healthy most of the time.

Nutrition

Nutrition is the study of all the intercommunication that occur between people and food. It includes the understanding which nutrients we need ,where to find them in food ,how they are used by our bodies,and the result they have on our health .It s also considered the other factors such as society ,culture, economies and technology, which are involved in maintain and choosing the food we eat. we do not eat specific nutrient,we eat food and we choose the right amount of combination of foods and thus our diet provides all the nutrients we need to stay healthy and if we choose a poor amount of food in our body the essential nutrients will be missing in our body  but however to maintain the right nutrients it can be very challenging and difficult because we eat for many other reasons but we do not eat thinking that we need nutrients to maintain a good diet .

There are over 40 different nutrients important to human life. We need to consume these nutrients in our diets because it  is not made by our body and it cannot be made in large amounts to get healthy. Different food contains different nutrients depending in amounts and combinations. Nutrients provide three basic functions in the body. Some nutrients provide energy, some provide antibodies and some provide structure. Each nutrients has its own unique way of performing all these functions and all the nutrients together are needed for growth, to maintain and repair the body and to allow us to reproduce

Diet

Diet is the right amount of food we eat according to our body’s resistance. Once our nature of diet is determined, it is important to develop and control of what we eat .this is important because to provide enough energy as well as balance our metabolic needs . Although we have the right amount of our nutrients it is important to have a balance diet. As for the formal routine of our meals which is three square meals depending on what we eat in our breakfast, lunch and dinner but many of us end up eating much more than how much we have to eat . we indulge ourselves with several snacks or treats thorough out the day depending on our food and energy .the pattern of eating has been changing thus to maintain of body nutrients we need to have a  balanced diet and approach to healthy eating.

Life style and behaviour

Early childhood is considered the most important stage of the development. Healthy early child development includes the physical. Healthy early child development includes the physical, social (emotional and language) and cognitive behaviours each of which is equally important . our early childhood stages of influenced by wellbeing ,obesity, or stunting ,mental health, heart disease,literacy and numeracy criminality and economic participation through life. 

The relationship between lifestyle and health is regardless of understanding the consequences and of personal decision making and patterns of behaviour that have tremendous effect on health and on the nations economy. The range of other behaviours that adversely affect health is tremendous. Our dietary behaviours such as consumption of fat ,sodium, and sugar ,leading to an epidemic of obesity  and associated problems. Fast food has donimated the cycle of food industry .the cheaper price and tasty way of changing  how eat .it is impossible to count and focus on how to check the intake of carbohydrate and fatty food . on the other hand if we talk about exercises , it is yet very essential to at least jog or walk a mile everyday to reorganise our body but because of growing number of facilities and remedies were prolong to give ourselves some time, so should we blame on modernisation? We have easily coped with modern society and its technology .many researchers has revealed that too much spending time on for example television can cause harmful illness as it has less physical activity. These days children has no outdoor activities because they are lured in computers, video games and mobiles.

Difference between Food and Diet

food

diet

Provides nutrients(proteins, fats carbohydrate, minerals)

Habitual eating

Origin from plants and animals

Maintains body nutrients

Two methods

Hunting, gathering and agriculture

Restricting over eating according to our height and weight

Consists variety of such as vegetables, meat and dairy products

Healthy lifestyle

 Nutritional requirements

Proper nutrition is a very essential to our body because it keeps or body functioning normally. Our body cannot function on its on it needs nutrients from food to transfer all the energy we need and the nutrients is obtained from our diet therefore our body will store them .

Nutrition also targets on how diseases, conditions and the problems can be prevented with a healthy diet but moreover it helps in recognizing certain diseases or problems such as poor diet ,food allergies and other metabolic diseases. A well-nourished body equally distributes all the nutrients in the food to all parts of the body. Nutrition is categorised in two ways macronutrients and micronutrients, both has a vital role to providing the right amount of nutrients. Macronutrients consists of carbohydrates, proteins and fats where as micronutrients includes minerals, vitamins and water.

Advantages and disadvantages of processed food

Food processing is the process of changing raw food materials into more readily usable form. Its advantages and disadvantages are:

Advantages:

1. We get food materials out of season.

2. It prevents spoilage of food stuff.

3. It enables the availability of food material at distant places.

4. Storage period increases.

Disadvantages:

1. Processed food-stuffs often lose nutrients.

2. Milled and polished rice results in loss of iron and vitamin B.

3.  There is loss in weight and nutrients.

4. The original taste changes to some extent.

Function of food advertising

Advertising has plays an vital role and has number of functions. it is meant to launch new products. It is used to increase the sale of the products that are already established in the marketplace. In 1956 the advertisement for the biscuit company ,manufactured by Cadbury caused a high increase in its sales.the main function of advertisement is to promote the growth of the product.with higher incomes,fancy eating and changing drink makes a competition in the marketplace to regain its market strength.

Costs of Advertising

Plenty of money is being spend for food advertising. In Great Britain in 1999 the top food advertiser was Mars, a confectionery firm, which spent $99,488,921 (£63,629,000) on its advertising; the second, spending $82,966,590 (£53,062,000), was Kelloggs (GB), followed by the supermarket chain J. Sainsbury with $76,846,990 (£49,151,000). The top brand was McDonald’s fast-food restaurants, which spent $66,260,524 (£42,379,000). Other highly advertised brands include the other fast-food restaurants, Kentucky Fried Chicken $19,279,797 (£12,331,000) and Burger King $17,604,550 (£11,259,000). Among the high food advertisers were supermarkets that promoted both their stores and their branded products. Sainsbury’s was the top supermarket brand ($45,528,848, or £29,118,000) followed by Tesco ($28,564,912, or £18,286,000), then Asda ($25,034,171, or £16,010,000).

As these figures suggest, not all foodstuffs are advertised to the same extent. In Britain in 1999, highly advertised foods include cereal products, confectionery, ice cream, potato crisps, snacks and nuts, margarine, lowfat spreads, and cheese. By comparison, small sums are spent on herbs and spices, excluding pepper and curry. Advertising-to-sales ratios vary greatly between products. For herbs and spices and fresh vegetables the figure may be as low as 0.06 percent and 0.07 percent respectively. Many foods had less than a 1 percent ratio. Intensive advertising at 11.31 percent was noted for cereals. Generally, advertising of food products shows a lower percentage of expenditure than that of other products, including alcoholic drinks and tobacco

source: http://www.answers.com/topic/advertising-of-food

Advertising Media

Food is advertised through a number of channels. As new technologies have become available, the opportunities for advertising have enlarged. A number of these are especially important. Newspapers and magazines have long been a significant vehicle for advertising. Newspapers in Britain published advertisements in the seventeenth century, and, as the provincial press expanded, greater opportunities became available for food advertising. In the later nineteenth century, magazines increasingly started to carry advertisements: In the United States in the 1930s, some 20 percent of products advertised in the major print advertising media of women’s and domestic magazines were for food and drink products. When radio networks were discovered(in 1926 and 1927 in the United States), they used advertising to bring in cash flow. Food and drink manufacturers sponsored programs and also advertised their products in short “commercial breaks.” In the 1950s television introduced a further medium that owes its effectiveness to the wide range of means that can be used to promote a product: moving pictures, sound (voice and music), and the written word. In the late twentieth century the introduction and extended use of the World Wide Web and e-commerce had an enormous initial growth. In the United Kingdom, growth rates for online marketing since the mid-1990s have been consistently well in excess of 100 percent, year after year. Internet advertising is undertaken through a number of means. In the year 2000, the majority (81 percent) of advertising took place through banners, and small numbers through sponsorship (9 percent), classified advertisements (7 percent), and other means (3 percent). Internet advertising includes sites from manufacturers, product manufacturing boards, supermarkets (which allow for online shopping and home delivery), and food enthusiast sites (for example, for British products in the United States).

Other media have provided further means of advertising food. Billboards and hoardings were first used for this purpose in Britain in the 1890s and are found over a wide geographical area. Light displays in cities, such as those for the carbonated drink Irn-Bru in Glasgow and Coca-Cola in London, have presented advertisements as visual images within central cityscapes. Buses and electric cars (especially since the 1890s in the United States) have carried advertising, usually on their sides or rear. Manufacturers advertise their products on their distribution vans; some also have special promotional vehicles that they use in campaigns where they take their product to public places or special shows to advertise it. Sponsorship of major public popular and sporting events is undertaken by a number of manufacturers. Flora margarine, made from sunflower oil, which is high in essential polyunsaturated, has been the sponsor of the London marathon in the late 1990s; the Bell’s open golf championship is sponsored by Bell’s, the whiskey manufacturer.

Advertising and promotion of foods is undertaken within the retail industry. Fancy displays draw attention to one or a range of products. In Britain, displays from the 1860s included decorative tins with hinged lids developed by the biscuit manufacturer Huntley and Palmers of Reading. As self-service supermarkets developed, largely after World War II, products could be displayed to draw special attention to them. Three-dimensional displays promoted a single product or a range, and tended to be developed by manufacturers. Supermarkets sometimes hold special testing events where customers can sample a product, thereby encouraging them to buy it. Food is also sold in special promotional packets, sometimes at a “special introductory price” or a “special promotional price.” These may hold a sample of the product that can be packaged in a way that reflects the packaging on the regular-sized product.

A range of temporary material is distributed to food wholesalers and retailers by manufacturers and others involved in processing and distribution. Some of this, including calendars, pens, and pads of headed note paper, is intended to remind the consumer of the product on a daily basis.

Coupons, which allow the consumer to receive a discount on the product when they present one to a retailer, are found in a range of print media, especially newspapers and magazines.

The medium that is used to advertise a product is selected for its appropriateness to that product, the nature and scope of the advertising campaign, and its desired target audience. Each medium has its own values and qualities. When television started to become widely adopted in Britain in the mid-1950s, Bird’s Eye decided to use this new medium to advertise its frozen food products. The company was aware that families with televisions were more likely to be interested in new ideas such as Bird’s Eye’s products. At that time it was recognized that there was a potentially large market for frozen food, which was a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1920s daily newspapers were best suited to advertise foods and other products that were bought on a regular basis. Magazines that were to be read by a particular social class or group carried advertisements for foods and other products that would likely be consumed by them.

Advertising Targets

Much food advertising is targeted at women, the main buyers of food in the household. As children are recognized as important persuaders in that process and as they may accompany their mothers to buy the family food, advertising is also targeted at them. Recent studies of food advertising in South Africa show the need of advertisers to monitor social changes because food advertising, like advertising in general, reflects social and cultural trends, values, and attitudes. Cultural differences are also reflected in advertising. Chinese television advertisements tend to signify family values, tradition, and technology, whereas themes in American advertisements tend to symbolize the importance of enjoyment, cost savings, and individualism. With the emergence of global culture, specific values such as global cosmopolitanism and modernity (often symbolized by the hamburger) will be spread around the world.

Food advertising reflects changing food tastes, diet, and dietary habits. The extent of the references to nutrition, health claims, and weight loss has altered in advertisements in recent decades. Research has indicated that in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s there was an increase in references to health and weight loss in advertisements for hot and cold cereals, bread and cake mixes, frozen and pre-prepared entrees, peanut butter, canned and instant dry soup, and carbonated beverages in a range of women’s magazines. There was a significant rise in health claims in the 1980s, higher than in the 1960s, and the percentage of diet claims that appeared in food advertisements in the 1980s was significantly higher than the percentage reported in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, between 1960 and 1980, there were substantial decreases in claims of quality, taste, status, and consumer satisfaction. These may have resulted from changes in women’s consumption and dieting behavior and the increased demand for food that is low in calories but high in nutrition. Concerns about increasing prevalence of obesity in the United States and campaigns against fast-food artificiality-both within the United States and beyond-will likely influence food advertising.

SOURCE http://www.answers.com

Brand Names

Central to the advertising of food is the promotion of brand names and trade names that distinguish between one manufacturer’s product and that of another. As the survival of these names depends on advertising, some brands and trade names have large advertising budgets allocated to them so that they can maintain their status as products and their place in the marketplace. Brands and trade names arose in the nineteenth century as a response to increased production and the need to efficiently and effectively market products. Brand names started to be promoted in the 1870s, after which their use spread quickly. Significant increases were especially noted in the early twentieth century. Even after they were rapidly adopted, the extent of their use varied geographically and throughout time. During World War II, when widespread restrictions caused materials and food shortages, brand names were abandoned in Europe and were replaced by utility products. They came into operation again once peacetime conditions were restored. In some cases this was not until well after all controls on food and other raw products were lifted. Especially developed in Western Europe, brand names were, however, prohibited in Eastern Europe.

Source http://www.answers.com

Impact on health and well being

 As we all know the effects of advertising on our lives but let’s focus on how much damage it has build in our lifestyle. Large amounts of money are spent in food advertising but as we buy them it all ends up in costing our money as well as our health. In uk obesity is rising in vast number, but there is one reason that is very important is over eating and eating unhealthy food such as junk food, processed food is creating more problem than any other reasons. We are so much brain washed by the advertisements that we spend lots of money just to satisfy our needs and wants.

 The childhood obesity is a serious public health problem .Food industry targets children and youth thus leading to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, depression, bullying and low self-esteem. Obese children has many chronic illnesses such as diabetes,asthma,cancer and other cardiovascular disease but there can be many other psychological and social distress as well but although advertisements do not control on how much we spend and how much we eat it is basically the foods are getting cheaper and more tastier.

Conclusion

Food advertisement is nor good or bad but how much it has influenced on our health and diet has raised concerns. Food product choice is overwhelming as well as TV commercials and print advertisements has been increased in unhealthier choices. Everything is advertised from food to other materials. As we are lured into buying the food products it has been very difficult to cope with the health problems .Children and women are the main targets because it is very convincing and exclusive.

It is not only important to realise that health can be deterioted by our personal choices but as giving ourselves a little bit of time and having a healthy lifestyle. We all seem to be aware about the consequences about the diseases but simple steps can change on how we choose to live our lives. physical activities, healthy food, social interaction ,comfortable shelter and good sleep are some examples that can change our health , therefore we should always control our stress level and try to maintain a healthier choices.