TeachWithMovies.com has found seven reasons that might convince teenagers to reduce or eliminate their consumption of fast food and resist the obesity epidemic. Different themes will work with different kids. Some will reject everything now but the seeds of change will be sown, hopefully to blossom later.

• As people who aren't yet adults, there's one thing you can control. It's what you eat; what you put into your body. (Teenagers often feel powerless. What they eat is something that they can control.)



• Convenience foods are loaded with fat, salt, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and chemical additives. They often don't contain the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and fiber that we need for optimal physical and mental development. Convenience foods are major contributors to the obesity epidemic which sickens and kills millions of people each year. (This is the health argument made in the movie and the student handout.)



• The executives from the convenience food companies are not trying to kill us, its just that our health often gets in the way of their companies' profits. ...



• The food that's sold is often not the kind of food that grows in the ground. (In order to reduce costs, improve color, or to enhance taste, the prepared food industry adds chemicals that change the nature of what we eat. They add chemical flavoring and color and change the chemical content of food to make fake foods like trans fat and high fructose corn syrup.)



• Advertisers can't be trusted to tell the truth and they've already got their hooks deep into all of us from when we were very young.



• And then there's compassion, an ethical value endorsed by the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions. (Each year millions of cows, pigs, turkeys, and sheep, and billions of chickens, are raised in factory farms in conditions of abject misery. Then they are transported to slaughter houses where they are brutally killed. The only way to reduce the suffering these animals endure is to reduce consumption of meat and poultry....)



• And last but not least, there is vanity. (Thinner and healthier people look better and are more desirable. Eating fast food is an excellent way to look fat and frumpy.)