Brianna Palmer
DIG2282C – Time-based Media
Survival of the Fittest (Project 1 artist statement)
This project was inspired
by my difficulties in eating healthy in a world that values cheapness and
convenience over quality, where nutrition labels are biased towards tall,
young, active men, and where the health of our physique is measured my mathematically
and scientifically nonsensical scales. As a short woman, I struggle to glean
from nutrition labels what my individual needs are. With a BMI of 29.9, where
30 is considered clinically obese, I fail to see why scientists still use a
formula invented in the mid 1800s by a person who said it was not an accurate
measure of body fat to measure our body fat.
In this video, the food seems
to fight for dominance, but in reality, it is entirely our own doing. We choose
good tasting sugary foods with little nutritional value over foods that would
supply us with the nutrients we need. Somewhere along the way, time and
convenience became more important than health. Not enough people are well
educated about nutrition, and thought the “obesity epidemic” has been featured
in the news many times, very little is being done to fix it. Nutritional
knowledge in the population is muddled by bogus remedies, superstition, and
unhealthy fad diets authored by people who care more about making a buck than
actually helping people, or news programs that care more about sensationalizing
findings than making them clear and straightforward.
A serious change needs to
be made in the field of nutrition, in both areas of accessibility to common
people, and the scales by which specialist use to measure our health. No more
nonsensical sliding scales and no more biases. Real change needs to be made if
the health of the general populace is going to improve, and it needs to be
accessible to everyone.
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