Introduction of our topic

Hi. I'll introduce you our topic, "healthy diets."

The controversial issue we have chosen is the relationship between the food we eat and how we gain weight, and the right ways to lose weight. I am interested in this topic because many Japanese people are on diets in order to get skinny like models. However, I am sure not all of them are taking the right ways to lose their weight. Also, many Japanese people do not have right knowledge in diets, and are sacrificing their health in order to reach their dieting goals. I think diet is not about just losing weight but to get rid of unneeded fat in the body, and of course, stay healthy, and I would like to find out more on the effects the food gives on our bodies by hearing opinions of others as well.

Some people believe that eating vegetable mainly and avoiding carbohydrates and fats are the right ways to lose weight while others insisting that skipping dinner is the fastest method. There might be people who say, do some exercise and slowly improve the level of a basal metabolism are the best. Since there are lots of information going around about diets, there should be as much as opinions on the relationship between foods and our diets.

Useful websites on diets

Hello, I will introduce you some websites which might help.

As the resources, we used Library Spot(http://www.libraryspot.com/) and refdesk.com.(http://www.refdesk.com/fastfact.html) Library Spot was more helpful with finding the medical related references.

On yahoogroups.com, we have found groups encouraged being on raw food diet(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rawfood/), water cleansing diet(http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/cleansingdiets/), which is to drink water a lot and flush away toxins in the body, and cut-down carbohydrates diet(http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Graduate-lowcarblifestyle/). There are many kinds of groups and each of them is encouraged being all kinds of diets, however, it seems like raw food diet is the most popular method. They are the ones below just to show as the examples...

In one of the scholarly articles we have found, it complains about the danger of cutting the carbohydrates in diets. It explains that carbohydrates contain glucides which burns into energy instantly comparing to other nutritive factors such as proteins and fats, so if we cut down carbohydrates, it takes time to make up energy, and gives lots of pressure to the body. Also, lacking of glucides disturbs the function of brains. The other article claims the danger of raw food diets. Since raw food diets take the method of eating uncooked foods, it cools down the body and that would lower the level of digestive functions. When looking in the long term, raw food diet could possible leads to the serious malnutrition, which means lack of nutrition.