The Dilemma of the Dangerous Meat loaf

Introduction: Your family may or may not eat meat loaf. Many people love this traditional dish, but others have been known to hate it! Whether you like a certain food or not, it is wise to check on whether it is healthy for you. It would be terrible if something you liked and ate often wasn't good for you. But on the other hand if you don't like it, then maybe you wouldn't have to eat it if it wasn't healthy...

Your job will be to determine whether meat loaf is a healthy food or a dangerous food that could make you ill unless you eat it only occasionally or start making it differently. You will use health research and science, and some math to make your case. If you are more interested in another food, check with your teacher – it will probably be OK to research this food instead.

Important: Each student must complete everything on this page for credit! Please read the entire page carefully!

Activity:

Step 1: To find out whether meat loaf is healthy or not, what would be the first step? Maybe knowing what it is made out of will help! Find a meat loaf recipe, and have it available at the next class period. You can bring a recipe from home, or from a friend or relative, or find one on the Internet (extra points for finding it on the Internet! See the Tips section for hints). Each of the ingredients will have to be checked to make sure it is healthy. If they are all healthy, then when you mix them they probably would be healthy together, right?

Step 2: Now that you have a recipe, think about where you could find information on whether the ingredients are healthy? Break up into your teams of four (assigned by the teacher) and talk about how to do this. Each team should try to find three different ways to find out about the ingredients in their meat loaf recipes. Hints: ask a health expert (be specific about what kind of expert). Are there any organizations that might have this information? Could you find one of these organizations on the Internet (see the Tips section)?

Take 30 minutes to do this step. When you are done, your team should have a short (1/2 - 1 page) document that describes where you think you might find the information and why you chose those sources. You will be graded as a TEAM for this document, up to 10 points per student. Save this document for the next class period. To see an example document click here.

In your teams, each person will have a specific role to perform:

One person should record ideas in a word processor or on paper (recorder),
another person will keep track of the time and keep discussion on topic (time manager),
Switch roles halfway through your time so everyone gets to either record or time-manage.

Step 3: You will have one 45 minute period to complete this step. Now that you have some good ideas where to look for information, ON YOUR OWN locate three pieces of information about the healthfulness of the items in the recipe. Your teacher will supply ONE of these sources to you, somewhere on the list of health links. He or she will show you how it was located. You should try to use a similar method to locate at least two other pieces of information.

Report where the information was found by saving the URL in a bookmark file, then copying it to a word processor. If it comes from some other source, report the author name or organization, date of publishing, and publication. When you are done, you should have a short (1/2 - 1 page) document that describes what information was found and where. Your explanation should include what you did to check the authenticity and reliability of the information. You will receive up to 10 points for this part. Save this document for the next class period. To see an example document click here.

Step 4: Now that you have the information, read it carefully to determine how healthy the meat loaf recipe is. You may run into problems somewhat like the following: The Food and Drug Administration says that it is healthy to eat 200 mg of sodium (salt) per day or less, but the meat loaf has 1 Teaspoon of salt! How many mg of sodium is in a Teaspoon of salt? What if you don't eat the whole meat loaf? How much salt will a serving of the meat loaf have? This is a problem in conversions and conversion factors. Your teacher will demonstrate how to do a conversion. Write down three calculations you will need to solve calculate the answers. You have one 45-minute period for this step, and turn in your work for up to 10 points.

Step 5: Now you know what is healthy, and you know what the meat loaf has in it. Break into groups and have “Meat loaf Court”. Pick a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, a judge and a jury (one person). The prosecutor will try to prove the meat loaf is dangerous and should be outlawed, while the defense must show the opposite. Use your information and your calculations as evidence. The judge will make sure the evidence was collected properly and is authentic and truthful, and the jury will decide the verdict. Then break apart again and write a one page summary of the trial, what the major evidence was, how it was found, and what the verdict was. Use the template to write your summary. You have one 45-minute class period for this step, and turn in your work for up to 10 points.

Extend your knowledge: Back to top

Pick one of the following to prepare a short (3-5 minute) in-class presentation (between 2 and 4 powerpoint/kidpix slides)
You have one 45-minute class period to complete this activity, and you will receive up to ten points.
1) How could you change the meat loaf recipe to make it healthier? Use the research you already have, or do a little extra on new ingredient ideas.
2) What other foods have similar ingredients to meat loaf that should be eaten or avoided?
3) How does the FDA determine the healthy levels of various ingredients? What makes you believe that the published information about healthy foods is correct or incorrect? What could be done to fix any problems with the information?
4) Teach the class to convert meters to feet, miles to kilometers, kilograms to pounds, or three other conversion problems of your choice. Make sure to give real life examples, such as "A pine tree is 18 meters tall. How many feet tall is the tree?."

Evaluate and Assess: Back to top

In a word processor, fill out the evaluation template discussing what you learned. Each answer should be at least one paragraph in length. Email the document to your teacher as an attachment. This should take 30 minutes and will count up to 10 points toward your score.

Credit for Infotechtives! This Case will count as one of your Infotechtive steps to promotion if you achieve a score of at least 40 points out of 50, or 80%. Good Luck! Click here to return to the case room.

Conversion Factors: Back to Activity Back to Top

Here's a quick introduction to measurement conversion, also referred to as dimensional analysis. When you have different units of a quantity, like feet or inches to measure a length (the dimension), often you may need to convert from one to the other. Suppose you had a metric tape measure marked in meters or fractions of a meter, and someone asked you "How tall is that pine tree in feet?" You could measure the tree with the tape measure and then convert the length in meters to a length in feet. To do this you multiply or divide by a conversion factor. Here's how:

Pine tree height in meters = 18 m
conversion factor: .3048 meters = 1 foot OR .3048 meters per foot
Calculation: Pine tree height in feet = Pine tree height in meters X 1 foot / .3048 meters = 18 X 1 / .3048 = 59.05 feet

When doing this type of conversion, notice how the dimensions you are converting from get canceled out by the conversion factor, leaving the dimensions you are converting to as shown below:

                       feet
    meters X _________    = feet
                      meter

Click the links below to get conversion factors for cooking measurements.

Cooking Measurement Equivalents

rec.food.cooking FAQ and conversion file

Tips Section: Back to Activity

How to find a recipe on the internet.

Use a search engine.
Click the search button on your browser. Then, on the search page select the Excite or Google search engine.

+"meat loaf" +recipe

Hit Enter, and scroll through the results page reading the document summaries until you see one that looks like it might have a meatloaf recipe. (Hint: the words "meatloaf" and "recipe" should probably be in the summary!)
Click summaries that look likely, and skim the page to see if it has a meatloaf recipe.
Only spend about 1 minute looking for the recipe on any given page. If you don't find one right away click the

PS, this technique will help you find a lot of other information, too! Could you something similar to find health information about meat loaf ingredients on the Web?

How to find nutritional information or nutritional organizations on the internet:

Use a search engine.
Click the search button on your browser. Then, on the search page select the Excite or Google search engine.
In the search box, enter your keywords. (Hint: for this exercise, the example below should work great! Why?)

+"nutritional information" +organization

Hit Enter, and scroll through the results page reading the document summaries until you see one that looks like it might have a meatloaf recipe. (Hint: the words "nutritional" and "information" or "organization" should probably be in the summary!)
Click summaries that look likely, and skim the page to see if it has information about your ingredients.
Only spend about 1 minute looking for the information on any given page. If you don't find one right away click the

PS, this technique will help you find a lot of other information, too!
What other keywords would be found in documents about food nutrition? Here are some, see if you can add to the list! Food, vitamin, fat, calories, fiber, sodium, cholesterol, health, diet. Try some of these in a search!

More searching tips:

Seven Steps Toward Better Searching

Examples:

Example 1: Word document for team activity step 2. Back to step 2

You should have at least 1/2 to 1 page similar to the following:

We are each going to ask a dietician from the Mayo clinic to give us information about the meat in meatloaf. We will send email to the "ask a dietician" address. We will ask about the amount of fat in the meat, and whether that fat is healthy or not. We decided to do this because the Mayo clinic has professional doctors and people that study food and health.

We are also going to get information on the salt in the meatloaf. We think there might be too much for a healthy diet. We will find out how much salt is healthy by researching the National Nutrition Laboratory site. This site is maintained by the U.S. Department of Health. This is a government agency responsible for research into Healthy food.

The Library has books on health. We are going to look up the ingredients in the book "Eating Right for Health and Fitness", by Dr. Richard Diet. He is a doctor and nutrition expert. He recommends a vegetarian diet with plenty of grains and fiber.

Etc.

Example 2: Word document for activity step 3. Back to step 3

You should have at least 1/2 to 1 page similar to the following:

Information found: Fat content of ground beef, lean, cooked (baked). From: National Nutrition Laboratory Website, URL=http://www.nnl.usda.org/data/meats/beef/002134.htm. Meat prepared in this way contains 240 g of fat per 1000 g of edible product. The fat is 30% cholesterol, 10% monosaturated. This information comes from a national agency chartered by the government to promote public health and good nutrition.

Etc.