It is extremely important for today's youth and their families to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices. In investigating food chains, author Michael Pollan discovered that one plant has infiltrated our diets: corn. If you trace back a processed meal, it always ends up at corn. Everywhere you turn, all the ingredients you cannot pronounce -- those are all made from corn. There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the beef we eat; corn is refined into the high fructose corn syrup that sweetens soda; corn is shaped into cereal or distilled into any of the hundreds of food additives in our processed food.

There are several reasons why it's not a good idea to base your whole diet around a single food species: First, we are omnivores designed by evolution to consume a wide variety of nutrients. The need for a diverse diet is built into our biology, and there are all sorts of important nutrients we simply can't get from a single item. To turn a bushel of corn into so many different foods involves a lot of processing, and processing diminishes the nutritional value of any food. People who eat an exclusively fast-food diet (highly processed corn-based food), not only get fat but are actually malnourished because they're not getting the essential micronutrients present in fruits and vegetables.

Growing all that corn is also disastrous for the environment. Corn is, as farmers say, a greedy plant requiring more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. It also requires more pesticides, thus polluting the environment. Feeding livestock corn on feedlots produces huge amounts of pollution, too, not to mention misery in animals, as cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn; they are designed by evolution to eat grass. Just as it is not healthy for cattle to eat corn, it is not healthy for us to eat corn-fed cattle.

So how do we change the food industry? By voting with our fork. Choose organic products, shop and buy food from your local farmers' market, and take the time to cook. Cooking at home is one of the best ways to take control of your meals.

Resources
For more information, check out "The Omnivore's Dilemma for Kids: The Secrets Behind What You Eat," by Michael Pollan, and watch "The Botany of Desire" documentary, premiering October 28 on PBS.