Week 4, Chapters 3 & 4 -- Starting Assumptions Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | MasteringBiology® | Honor Code | FAQs | HELP!

Instructions:

Part 1:

Read through the questions below. Write a paragraph, 150 words minimum, in response to one or more of the questions below that interest you. Use D2L's spell checker or your word processor software to spell check your paragraph. (The latter will give you a word count as well.) Proofread it yourself too, because spell checkers don't catch everything. When you are satisfied, post your completed paragraph in the Starting Assumptions forum for this week at the D2L discussion board.

Part 2:

Respond to the Starting Assumptions posts of at least two other students. (If you are the first or second person to post, you will have to check back later to complete this part of the assignment).

• Just as you spell checked and proofread your original post, you should do the same for your responses.
• Please respond to posts with 0 responses first; once every post has at least one response, you are free to choose any post to respond to.
• When you respond, please use the name of the student you are responding to. That is, say "Hi Jessica" or "Hi Paul" so that you can get used to the names of the people in class. (You can find a list of "real" names and preferred names posted on D2L).
• What constitutes a substantive response? This means that you have read and thought about the original post, and that after some reflection, you are extending one or more of the thoughts in the original post or offering an additional perspective as you might in a good conversation. It is not enough to say simply "nice job," "I liked that," "I think you're right about XXXX," "I disagree," etc. It is OK to disagree or agree, but the goal is to thoughtfully add something else interesting and new related to the content of the original post. At a minimum this should be at least 50 words, and 50-100 is preferable. Check out this page for more on the topic of good and bad responses.

After you have posted your paragraph and responded to two other students, go to Desire2Learn and complete the Gradebook Declaration for this week's Starting Assumptions assignment. (Do not declare that you have completed these assignments until AFTER you have made your posts. Your Gradebook Declaration is subject to the Honor Code.)

Here are the questions to get you started:

• Do you assume that dietary supplements sold at a health food store are probably good for you, or at least harmless?
• Do you pop any pills or consume any other types of supplements that your doctor has not prescribed?
• Do you pay attention to the difference between so-called "processed" and "whole" foods? Which do you prefer?
• Have you ever tried to follow a specific diet to lose weight (e.g. Atkins, Dukan, etc.)? Were you successful?
• Should "super-sized" sodas be banned from fast food restaurants? Why or why not?
• Have you ever tried to keep track of everything you eat?
• Have you ever calculated your body mass index (BMI)? Why?
• Do you try to follow the USDA dietary guidelines when you eat?
• Are you now (or have you ever been) vegetarian or vegan? If so, do you make sure you get all essential amino acids in your diet?
• Are there any foods that you NEVER eat for health reasons (not because you just don't like it)?
• Have you read any books by Michael Pollan (e.g., The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, or Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)? If so, what do you remember from them or what behaviors did you change due to what you read?
• Where does food come from?
• What messages about body weight (for males and females) do you get as you read or watch TV?
• Do you think genes or willpower plays a bigger role in America’s current obesity epidemic? How would you design an experiment to tease out the roles of genetics and environment in producing obesity?
• Why is it so hard to determine if, say, caffeine or aspirin or cauliflower is good for you or bad for you? How would you design an experiment to test for a correlation between human diet and long-term health? Is your experiment practical?
• Do you use the nutrition labels on food packages? Why or why not?
• If you developed Alzheimer’s disease and weren’t able to give informed consent, does it bother you to imagine someone enrolling you in a study to test the effect of a dietary supplement on Alzheimer's? Why or why not?
• Do you know what is in the foods that you eat? Do you look at the USDA nutritional information labels on packaged foods?
• Do you know if you are getting the Daily Requirements for essential vitamins and minerals in the foods that you eat?
• Do you take a multivitamin? Why or why not?

Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM