Interview Reflection - Jarrett and Zhenyu

Interview with Soowon Kim
Prepared by Zhenyu Zhong
My partner, Jarrett Pace, and I interviewed Soowon Kim, the program manager of the Health Improvement Program at Stanford University. We interviewed her at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto in the morning during spring break on April 5th which was during Easter vacation. Soowon Kim has extensive knowledge in food and nutrition, earning her bachelors and masters degrees in food and nutrition while earning a PhD in Nutrition Epidemiology. She has had years of experience researching dietary trends and diseases related to diets which was very related to our project in that we are also looking at the health implications of being drawn into a habit of eating fast food from an early age and the effect that it can have on later life. We also felt that working as a researcher in a Stanford program, she would have a great amount of knowledge and credibility which was proven to be true. We found out how even though McDonald’s may offer healthy choices most people already go there with a predisposition of wanting to get a burger so the amount of salads and other healthier choices are ignored. We also found that when people are choosing food to eat they often will look for the instant gratification and look for the choices that seem delicious at the time rather than thinking about how this can negatively affect the individual.
We were received well and Soowon Kim was very welcoming. Being interviewed was also a new experience for her so it was both great experiences for both of us. We were treated well and it was an enjoyable experience that was would prove to be useful for us later in the working world, when Jarrett and I need to get an interview for a job or something else
We expected to learn about some reasons why people may still choose to take the unhealthy choice of fast food even though they may already know about the health problems that it can cause. We also wanted to know what actually chemically changes in the body as a result of these large amounts of fast food consumption. We also expected to learn about some ideas about how to reverse this trend of wanting to eat unhealthy foods over healthy ones, and why corporations will market so extensively to children. We found out that people may still eat much fast food and other unhealthy things because people tend to prefer instant gratification over thinking in the long term, and will ignore these warnings even if they realize that this food is unhealthy and potentially life threatening later. One way of trying to reverse the trend of eating unhealthy foods over healthy ones was to make healthy foods more apparent in the menus. Instead of giving the burgers and French fries the larger pictures and earlier in the menu, put the salads first and make more advertisements for them.
One thing that surprised me that we learned about was the extreme amounts of sodium and sugar will actually trigger chemical reactions in the brain that are the same as when people use drugs and other substances. With so much sodium in these foods, it can trigger dopamine levels to rise and cause an addiction to foods with high sodium and sugar. This is the same dopamine that is stimulated when people use drugs. Eating fast food can very much cause people to become addicted to this fast food which is why people are drawn to eat it so much and that to get them off that addiction it may be necessary to have some food rehabilitation much like drug rehabilitation. It may not only be self control that people are unable to control themselves, but because they have eaten too much of this food and have actually become addicted to it
The interview was an enjoyable experience, and it was very interesting for both parties because it was the first time we had done something like this and this experience will be useful for me and my partner when we go into the working world. It was also to learn about some insights that professionals on the topic can offer us and introduced us to many new interesting ideas. This impacted me thinking about my topic because I found out about things that I would not have thought about such as the level of chemical changes that can go on in your body as a result of this fast food. It would have never occurred to me that eating foods with so much sodium and other unhealthy ingredients can actually activate the same dopamine that are also part of drug addictions which means that it is much more than simply self control. A connection that she made with the concept of justice was that corporations are basically taking advantage of the human impulse to indulge in instant gratification and use this to their advantage to market their goods, as well as to market them to children who are very easily persuaded to be bought into the fast food culture.