 When I started thinking about a lab that would help us think about our nutrition choices, I was thinking about something that would really focus on taking care of our health. We get so many bombarded with messages about calories and losing weight and how important that seems to be on the sort of glamour side of things, but really what does my body need? And I thought about proteins. There's a lot of talk about getting the proper amount of proteins in a day because that's a nutritious choice, a way of providing my body with the nutrition it needs as opposed to checking every label to make sure I can keep up the body image that I'm hoping for. So I wanted to write a lab, and I wrote this with some colleagues, about really looking at what does my body need. Before I did this, I don't even know how many proteins my body should have. I can tell you how many calories are in the things that I eat in a day, but not really what is necessary to nourish my body. So we started looking at proteins. When you're working in this lab, the very first part is to document all of your nutrition intake for three days. That will be in three columns. List what you eat. List all of your nutrition choices, including beverages. If you feel like this is too personal, it's okay if you think about what you might eat or what your neighbor eats or a cartoon character would eat, but to be meaningful for you, it's best if you write down your own personal nutrition choices. In each of these columns, you will look up, or you might already know, how many proteins are in each. Sometimes it's on a package container. Sometimes you look it up on the website, but write down how many proteins in each of the choices, your nutrition choices, and then how much did it cost you? We're going to look at three parts of this lab. How much did it cost you out of your pocketbook? What did it cost you? What was the impact on your body? How many saturated fats in exchange for giving your body the nutrients it needs? And then in part two of this lab, we're going to look at how does it impact the environment? So three kind of ideas. What's the impact on the cost to you personally? What is the impact on your body and what is the impact on the environment? So after you've done a three-day log, there are pretty clear questions about finding how many proteins your body needs. We're measuring in grams and kilograms, and the unit called grams per kilogram per day. These are things that you will need to describe in your lab rather than sentence explaining what these units of measure mean. Not units of measure we probably run into. We operate in pounds and tablespoons and units that these might not be as familiar to you. So be sure you familiarize yourself with the units. Another question is to find out, even if I knew how many grams of protein I take in, what's the context of that? Is that too many? Is it not enough? But if I'm five grams over, well, is five grams a lot? I don't know because I don't know the context of it. So when we get to this question, number five, the question is that a big number is a question about percent. Be sure that when you find the percent difference that you are using the recommended daily intake for your body as the base or the denominator. We then have some questions about how much, how many saturated fats are in your protein choices. And this again is just to have an awareness of your nutrition choices. In exchange for what you're eating, how much did you have to pay and also how many saturated fats did you take in? And finally, what was the impact on the environment? And there's a website that you can link to which has an infographic. And that infographic tells us how many miles driven per four ounces of protein. And I want you to stop and think about as you're looking at that infographic. What does this unit of measure mean? Miles driven per four ounces of protein. If say almonds is the protein choice or maybe salmon or maybe yogurt, it doesn't mean I'm going to put almonds or yogurt into my gas tank. It doesn't mean how many miles were driven to get the almonds to my house. It's about the carbon imprint or the carbon footprint for the processing of that particular protein, the energy used. So try to use a sentence in your own words that will describe that infographic. And then finally, really think about after you finish this lab how satisfied are you with your protein choices? The nice thing about this lab is there's not a right answer here. I have a lot of students who work through this lab and say, hey, I know these are poor choices from my body or my planet. I'm good with that. That's fine. This is a lab about awareness. How satisfied are you now that you've really taken a look at the choices, the food choices that go into your body? I hope you get something out of this lab.