Junior journalism: Learning how to make wise food choices is vital to enjoy a healthy life

Published in the January 6 – 19, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life

By Brooke Conragan

Brooke Conragan

For breakfast recently, my dad made a healthy vegetable scramble with sausage, spinach, onions, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, yellow peppers and lentils. I had a choice between that and a delicious, moist, sweet lemon poppyseed cake. Guess which one I chose. Obviously, the cake.

Although I knew the cake was unhealthy, I decided to take it because it tastes so much better than most of the ingredients in the scramble. My brain wanted something sweeter with a nice texture as opposed to the less appealing veggies in my dad’s scramble. (Although Brussels sprouts are pretty good if they’re mixed with bacon.)

Human beings need a good balance between healthy foods and tasty treats. It’s OK to eat sweets and snacks in small quantities every once in a while, but if eaten too often, it can cause health problems because it doesn’t always provide the nutrients our bodies need. We do need sugar because it’s a carbohydrate that gives us energy so we can move around. But if you have an excess of it, it can turn into layers of fat in your body that can slow you down.

How physically active you are in your daily life contributes to how much food you should eat. People who have jobs that require a lot of physical movement will need more calories than a person who works in an office all day and doesn’t move around much. Metabolism is how a person’s cells create chemical changes to release energy and sustain life in the organism. A person with a higher metabolism burns more calories throughout the day than someone with a lower metabolism. People who are more active have a higher metabolism than people who are sedentary. If you’re highly active, you will need more food because you burn through your food energy. If you’re not active, you will not burn as many calories, therefore you will not need as much food.

Although it’s OK to have cake for breakfast every once in a while, it’s important to make healthy food choices to balance out your body’s nutritional needs.

Brooke Conragan is an 11-year-old seventh-grader at Silicon Valley Flex Academy. After a Junior Journalism workshop with Publisher Marty Cheek, she wrote this column for Morgan Hill Life.