Science & Health

Print-friendly Page

Eat More Beef?

Have students go to the Cool 2B Real site (cool-2b-real.com) and look at the home page. Ask them to figure out who sponsors this site. Once they figure it out, have them click on the links to the sponsors (the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association) and browse the Web site for a few minutes to see what these organizations do and support.

By looking at the Cool 2B Real home page, students have probably recognized that this site is aimed at teenage and pre-teen girls; the site tells girls to "strive to be the best you can be" and claims that "Real girls are 'keepin' it real' by building strong bodies and strong minds... and they're feeling great about themselves." Ask students why they think the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association would sponsor a Web site on health and nutrition aimed at teenage girls. Discuss their ideas.

Have students browse through the sections of the Cool 2B Real site. Ask them to list the health and nutrition "tips" provided on this site, particularly those that mention specific things to eat.

Discuss what students have found. They probably noticed that the site promotes a number of beef foods (e.g. nacho beef dip, cheeseburger mac). Do these foods sound healthy? What might a vegetarian teenager say about these nutritional ideas? Why would this particular Web site mention so many beef snacks and foods?

Explain that this Web site was developed in response to a study finding that one in four teenagers consider it "cool" to be a vegetarian, even if they're not vegetarians themselves.

Ask students to read the information on one or both of these Web pages:

Is it Healthy to be Vegetarian?

http://foodstandards.gov.uk/healthiereating/ (sponsored by the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency, "an independent food safety watchdog set up by an Act of Parliament in 2000 to protect the public's health and consumer interests in relation to food")

Sports Nutrition for High School Athletes: Vegetarian Diets: http://lebanon.k12.nh.us/ (this page is on the Lebanon, New Hampshire school district Web server)

Pose these questions to the class. Students may need to return to the Web pages to answer the second one.

* How do the authors of these pages feel about teenagers being vegetarians? Do they claim that vegetarianism is necessarily unhealthy for teens?
* Who sponsors the pages you just read? Do they seem like they'd be credible sources of information? Why or why not?
* What do you think the National Cattlemen's Beef Association would have to say about the information you've just read?

As an option, have students read this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer to learn more about the Cattlemen initiative:

As more teens go vegetarian, cattlemen saddle up
philly.com/mld/philly/living/food/5124932.htm

Have students do one of these follow-up activities:

* Write reviews of the Cool 2B Real Web site. The reviews should explain the site's source and sponsor, describe its content, explain its strengths and weaknesses, and provide an overall assessment as to whether it's a balanced and credible source of information.
* Write letters to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, explaining their impressions of the Web site and suggesting improvements.
* Look at these additional Web sites, figure out which companies or industry groups sponsor each one (if it's not obvious), describe the reasons why these groups would have created these sites, and assess their level of credibility. Please be sure to work closely with students to make sure they understand that the information provided here is biased toward the representative companies or industries and should therefore be taken with a "grain of salt."

Armor All: Maintenance Guide
armorall.com/maint/index.html

Hands On Plastics
teachingplastics.org/hands_on_plastics

Honey Games
honey.com/kids/games.html

Ronald.com
ronald.com

Phony science

Have students go to the "Feline Reactions to Bearded Men" page improbable.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html. Ask them to read this "study" and explain their first impressions. What evidence do they find to make them think this is a real scientific study? What evidence do they find to make them think it's phony?

Discuss the fact that it's easy to create a Web page; virtually anyone can publish on the Web. Knowing this, how can students know which sites to trust? Discuss the importance of figuring out the sponsor of a Web site and of corroborating the information at a variety of sources.

If you have time, have students create their own bogus "scientific" Web pages to see how easy it can be.

Verifying scientific claims

Have students locate news articles about recent scientific research. Ask them to choose an article and list the factual claims the study makes. Then have them list the steps they could take to find out whether these claims are true. They might consider looking for the evidence in a few different places, asking an expert on the Internet, or (in some special cases) testing the experiments themselves.

Tobacco Advertising

Link to The Media Awareness Network
media-awareness.ca/eng/med/class/teamedia/tobacads.htm#ideas
for activities on this topic.

Greenwashing Activity

media-awareness.ca/eng/med/class/teamedia/tobacads.htm#ideas
for activities on this topic.

Ask each student to go to the grocery store and find two or three products whose labels claim that the contents are in some way environmentally-friendly. These might include "biodegradable" trash bags, products stored in "recyclable" plastic containers, "dolphin-safe" tuna, or a number of other products.

While at the store, students should record each product's brand name, the corporation that owns the brand, and the environmental claim that its label makes. They should also write a brief description of how the label and packaging promote the product as environmentally-friendly. Does the tuna label have a picture of a dolphin? Does the trash bag box have a nature-oriented picture?

Back in the classroom, discuss what students have found. Which products do they think are the most likely to live up to the environmentally-friendly claims made on the packaging? Which are they most skeptical of? Why?

media-awareness.ca/eng/med/class/teamedia/tobacads.htm#ideas
for activities on this topic.

Have students read the Federal Trade Commission's article "Sorting Out 'Green' Advertising Claims" ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/general/sortgrn.htm. After reading this article, have them list questions that they'd like to have answered regarding the products they've found at the store. For example, they might inquire about whether it's generally possible to recycle the type of container that's labeled "recyclable" or how long it will take a "biodegradable" product to disintegrate in a landfill.

Have students conduct Internet research to find out the answers to some of their questions. Discuss their findings, and ask them to write brief reports answering the questions "How much do you trust corporations' claims of their products to be environmentally-friendly? How can you tell if a corporation deserves to make this claim for its product?"