PAIRED READING TEXT COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Free Paired Text with Compare and Contrast Writing Prompt! Pairing reading passages provide students

opportunities to compare and contrast how two texts treat a similar themes, ideas, author's points of view or topic. Advanced compare and contrast essays may require students to compare and contrast authors implied inferences and or conclusions based on explicit and implied information.

Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the themes in the paired articles, "Earth-Friendly Diet" and "The Sugar Diet: America’s Addiction to sugar". Remember to use specific text evidence and details to support your ideas. Extensions: Differentiate between fact and opinion, explicit and implied themes and or author’s points of view, voice, style, message. 

Earth-Friendly Diet

There are many ways in which you can follow an earth friendly diet. Eat an organic vegetarian diet consisting of unprocessed natural foods. Farmer’s market, Cage-free eggs, non-genetically modified foods (GMO-Free) and locally grown organic produce have become a part of our diet and is a result of the sustainable food movement which is spreading around the world. We should be consuming local foods rather than import costly foods in terms of environmental costs.

1. On the next shopping trips try to carry a reusable jute bag or any other bags and this is how you are helping the planet to stay clean and safe. The United States uses 100 billion polyethylene grocery bags annually, which requires the use of 12 million barrels of oil for production and only 1% of the polyethylene grocery bags are recycled. Then what happens to the rest of the polyethylene grocery bags? They are either dumped into oceans, rivers or landfills and we all know that polyethylene grocery bags are non-biodegradable and many aquatic animals, which are endemic animals, die of starvation after they consume them. Try to avoid paper bags as they involve cutting down about 14 million trees annually.
2. We should always try to use the least amount of packaging for any of the products because most of the time we see that the packaging materials that are used are mainly made up of Styrofoam, which is a carcinogen, creates hazardous wastes and produces greenhouse gasses during production. These are unsustainable products and finally, end up in landfills, rivers and oceans.
3. Plastic bottles should also be avoided. Reusable water bottles should be used to drink water and this can lessen the amount of waste by a large percentage. Try to consume local tap water and you can even use filters to help purify it. If each citizen in the United States switched to reusable water bottles, we would keep 50 billion plastic bottles out of our landfills and oceans.
4. We should always try to eat foods that are grown locally. The food will be fresher and they contain more nutrients and vitamins than the foods that are shipped from hundreds of miles away or imported from other countries. Processed or preserved foods are not very healthy.
5. Eating more plant based produce than any other category of food will make a great positive impact for the earth. Producing one pound of wheat takes 25 gallons of water, one pound of beef uses 5,000 gallons of water. That is enough to float a battle ship!
6. The organic foods that are grown and processed through farming contribute to the biodiversity of our earth. They are used without using any of the chemical fertilizers and only green or organic manure are used for the production. The chemical fertilizers often seep into the soil and sterilize and kill all of the micro-organisms. The death of these useful micro-organisms creates soil that is anaerobic and lacking organic nutrients. Moreover, these fertilizers can pollute the water of rivers and oceans due to surface run-off. Additionally, the fertilizers can be harmful to us when we consume them.
7. Many healthy vegetables can be consumed raw and do not need to be cooked or boiled at all. This will save the power that would have been used for cooking. In China, food is first chopped into small pieces for quick preparation. This allows them to cook just as much food while using less energy.
8. Eating seasonal vegetables and fruits is beneficial for our health and our environment. You should look for foods that grow locally near you.
9. Another way to benefit the environment and our health is to grow our own food. Many community gardens are available where you will get your own area to grow vegetables and fruits that will be fresh, organic and healthy.
10. Happy healthy drug-free ice cream! Visions of happy cows eating grass in green pastures are a fantasy is the US. Milk production in the US can be a cruel and unhealthy process. Many of you may not know that dairy cows are injected with antibiotics and other artificial hormones to boost their milk production. These can be harmful to both human beings and cows. Also, they have major impacts on the environment. Moreover, dairy production on an industrial basis may at times transmit antibiotics and growth hormones that can be harmful. So we should always make our preference for the antibiotic-free and hormone-free products. Drug-free cows and free-range livestock are good for the environment and the kind and humane way to produce dairy foods.

The Sugar Diet: America’s Addiction to sugar

It is said that America has an addiction with sugar and high fructose corn sweeteners. In spite of the fact that sweeteners are in most of the products we eat, California was the first state to enact a tax on sugary drinks to curb America’s addiction.

• 17 percent of children and more than one-third of the people in America are obese.
• In the last thirty years, the diagnoses of type 2 diabetes has increased 10 times its initial value.
• Over $190 billion is spent annually by Americans on the treatment of diseases that are directly or indirectly related to obesity.

According to health professionals and health advocates, the main culprit is sugar. Though a number of other factors have contributed to obesity in the United States. Sugar is still the main ingredient that has caused major health issues.

Recently Berkley, California became the first US city in which the tax on sugary drinks has come into effect. Similar measures are also being debated in large cities like San Francisco and New York City. However, Americans do not like government putting restrictions on their diet as many are now addicted to the sugar. America’s addiction to sugar is associated with significant amounts of money for companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle.

America’s rate of consumption of carbonated beverages is greater than any other country. The super-sized beverages that are served to and consumed by Americans contribute largely to the increasing number of children with early onset diabetes. Elementary school children spend an average of 28 hours per week watching Television or playing video games on a Television.

Many products besides carbonated beverages have also led to the increased consumption of sugar. For example:

• Roughly 120lbs of sugar are consumed by a typical American per year according to the journal from Clinical Nutrition. The consumption has increased by 50% since 1950.
• The “war on fat” movement that Americans had waged in the 1970s was meant to curb the fat content of the food, but they failed on the part when they sprinkled some sugar in it.
• More than 80% of canned or processed foods that Americans consume contains sugar from soy milk to whole wheat bread, and any of the food items that come in between them.

Britain is not too far behind….

• Teens in Britain consume three times the recommended amount of sugar. That mainly accounts for 15.6% of their part of one day’s source of energy
• One in four Brits are considered overweight or obese, which is almost two thirds of the population. Iceland and Malta are among the western European countries with the most obese individuals.
• Among children aged 4-5 years, one out of five are overweight and one out of three children age 10-12 are obese.

Sugar is not a pocket-friendly product for the commoners:

• Approximately $190 million are spent by Americans annually on the treatment of diseases that are linked to excessive weight gain, which is more than the net domestic product of New Zealand.
• The American rate of obesity has doubled for adults and tripled for children since 1980.
• Seven percent of Americans have type 2 diabetes.

From canned peaches to ketchups everything that the Americans consume contains sugar. Just as the people crave fat and salt, they crave sugar and it’s not an astonishing fact from a business perspective. According to a recent survey:

• Milk chocolates like Hershey syrups and bars contain 23 grams of sugar
• Jam Doughnut contains 8grams of sugar
• Coca-Cola contains 35grams of sugar
• Ice cream (vanilla) / Cornetto contains 22grams of sugar.

In spite of such staggering statistics people are not thinking about lowering their sugar consumption.