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Chicago Tribune
29-05-2025
- Health
- Chicago Tribune
Oak Lawn high school students eye downside of energy drinks, processed food
Energy drinks became a thing for Maha Jaghama and her friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they dove in looking for a buzz to distract them from dreary days and isolation. A couple of years afterward, they decided to find out how those kinds of beverages were affecting them and their peers through an interactive project at Oak Lawn Community High School. And in the process, Jaghama and her classmate Bridget Berkery discovered the caffeine and sugar-packed drinks are almost like a drug that can do more harm than good. They were among the English Honors 2 students who read Eric Schlosser's 'Fast Food Nation' to learn about how what we eat impacts our health and culture, and then took their project outside the classroom to students and teachers at the school, as well as businesses in the Oak Lawn area. They did interviews, taste tests with peers, surveys and research before presenting it to their peers as the school year drew to a close. Among their discoveries was that up to 70% of energy drinkers are teens, according to studies, and the beverages are marketed to teens based on packaging, design, taste, color and other elements. They also learned the American Academy of Pediatrics advises children and teens avoid energy drinks because of their high caffeine content. 'The recommended caffeine is 100 mg daily,' Jaghama said. 'A single can has 160 mg.' During their research, the two asked students which energy drinks they liked best — Celcius, Red Bull and Monster were favorites. The two interviewed nearby gas stations and store owners to see how many teens bought the drinks there. The results: many. They also looked at the ingredients in the drinks for unhealthy additives. 'We learned about how much society tries to hide what's in them,' Berkery said. 'We want to share that with other teens … we want to change their perception. They don't know what is going into their bodies.' Beyond warning them away from potentially harmful beverages, the project had a side benefit of getting the students outside of the school, brushing up on their interview skills and developing a sense of the world outside of the classroom. 'Doing the project helped us be social with the public,' Berkery said. Jeff Vazzana, their English teacher, said the assignment was a capstone project that could help prepare them for next year's AP Language course. 'It was a cool way for kids to show their mastery of what they're learning and apply it to the real world,' he said. The project, titled 'How can Oak Lawn build a healthier, more sustainable food culture?' sparked student interest, the teacher said. 'I had them think about issues they cared about,' Vazzana said. 'They all have a buy-in — everyone eats. And it's timeless, there are always issues with food.' Fellow students Laith Abbasi, Gabriel Fudala and Dylan Jones were part of a group that looked into the dangers of processed foods. 'We're all athletes, so looked at what we're putting into our bodies,' Abbasi said. They scoured ingredients and decided if they couldn't pronounce the first few, the food was most likely processed. Health teacher Scottie Miller told them high fructose corn syrup and artificial coloring also are red flags. 'I think it was more highlighting just how bad processed foods are for your body and why people use them so much,' Abbasi said. 'It's appealing, convenient and saves time … most of the processed foods are efficient in how you eat them.' They also said processed food seemed more prevalent than in the past, causing more health concerns. 'In the past couple of years, the rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease are really soaring,' said Gabriel Fudala, linking the high salt and sugar content to health problems. The group did taste tests of fries at various fast-food restaurants to see what made the popular side dish more appealing. 'It can have an emotional connection to people,' Zain Mousa said about the draw of unhealthy fast food. 'There's aggressive marketing, catchy slogans and it's targeted to (certain) populations.' The students said during their presentation reading labels and cooking at home with fresh ingredients would help. Many of the students showed a concern for how the food was affecting other people including younger generations. 'I'm concerned about how this would affect people across the globe in the long-term,' Abbasi said.
New York Times
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Cutting Ties Is the Best Thing a Child Can Do
It was sometime during the bottomless scroll of quarantine that I started seeing the phrase 'no contact' — not referring to social-distance measures but a drastic way to end relationships with nettlesome exes or even one's parents. I found it even more chilling than the now canonical term 'ghosting.' With ghosts at least there's a faint outline, perhaps a Casperish friendliness, the humorous possibility that they might reappear with a 'Boo!' or get busted by a proton pack. But 'no contact'? Ever again? It seemed so punitive, so final, so cold. And yet maybe the healthiest thing you could do for yourself, urges Eamon Dolan in his persuasive new book, 'The Power of Parting.' This byline piqued my interest immediately. Dolan is not your typical self-help author, a clinician or celebrity — other than in the hothouse world of Manhattan publishing, where he has edited big best sellers including 'Fast Food Nation' and Mary L. Trump's tell-all about her Uncle Donald. Indeed, he looked for professional writers to take on this subject before deciding with trepidation to do it himself, consulting psychologists, the thin research on estrangement (most of which focuses on reconciliation) and fellow survivors of ghastly upbringings. Dolan's childhood in the Bronx was Dickensian. His father, the eldest of 11, worked long hours at the phone company and was hardly around. He died at 63, 'from cigarettes and, I now realize, sadness,' Dolan writes. His mother, Teresa, emerges as a classic villain. 'You only have one mother,' she'd tell him, and he'd mutter, 'Thank God!' She regularly pummeled Eamon and his two siblings with a long-handled wooden spoon, sometimes announcing with delight that these 'beating sticks' were on sale at Key Food. She actually fed them cold gruel. After 9-year-old Eamon pleaded to get XLerator racing cars for Christmas, she gave him an accordion cruelly housed in an XLerator-sized box, then shamed him for not being grateful and demanded he learn to play the instrument for visitors. Heat and hot water were strictly rationed in the Dolan home; in adulthood, a proper shower is among the six pleasures he's able to name after his therapist requests a list of 10. Dolan grew up to be hypervigilant; when good things happen to him, he gets a kind of vertigo. Seeing a 'You've got this!' sign when running in the park, he thinks, endearingly: 'Whatever 'this' is, I haven't got it.' When he decided to major in English literature at his top-choice college, his mother scoffed that it was useless: 'What are you going to do with that? Open an English store'; now he thinks, 'Yeah, bitch. That's exactly what I did.' (Making a living publishing books is absolutely a triumph, and yet I was surprised to find this deeply literate man relying so heavily on jargon du jour like 'toxic,' 'gaslight,' 'boundaries' and 'late capitalism.') Dolan's beloved brother and ally, Tommy, made scapegoat of the family, died in a car crash in 1999. After Teresa succumbed to Covid in 2020, his sister, Gerry, proclaimed, 'Ding, dong, the witch is dead!' and they laughed. But the matriarch had been disappeared from his life long before that, after violating his carefully set-out rules for engagement. The liberation he felt after cutting her off was — what's the opposite of intoxicating? Purifying. Dolan is a dad and husband himself. But he argues that Christianity has glorified the nuclear family to an unhealthy extent, given how many tormentors, statistically, are close relations, and implores for community safeguards. 'None of us should be imprisoned by the cosmic lottery that placed us in an abusive home,' he writes. He points out that 'the only legal form of assault in any American state is' — incredibly — 'hitting your child.' Gen Xers with their latchkeys and rusty bicycles mock today's trend of 'gentle parenting' but 'The Power of Parting' reminds that the norms of yesteryear were harsh to the point of harm, ignored by institutions and normalized in pop culture. Archie Bunker nicknamed his son-in-law Meathead; the Dolan kids were regularly called Amadan — 'Irish for 'fool.'' In the absence of sufficient atonement for such trespasses, Dolan suggests, forgiveness is overrated and in some cases 'see ya wouldn't want to be ya' is exactly what the doctor should order. One adult child, visiting her brain-dead father after 15 years of not talking to him, resumed contact with a bang. 'I punched him in the arm!' she tells Dolan. 'I dug my fingers into his skin at one point.' 'The Power of Parting' is an intellectually rigorous manifesto, a green light for reasonable limits that sometimes, with gleeful blunt force, flares red.
