letter

Hatch end high school
Headstone lane
Harrow
Middlesex
HA3 6NR
29th September 2014
Dear Fiona Marcae,
I am writing to show you my disgust with the article you have written about teens and the food that they consume. The way you talk about teens in this article appalled me, how are you able to say that “teenage girls’ junk food diet leaves them starved of vitamins!” after reading just the title I could tell that you were going to make all teens look bad; do you think it is fair to put this much pressure on the poor girls? A lot of girls already have to try to look their best because they are always getting judged by people, then to put this pressure on top of that…As woman thought that you would have understood the problems that teenage girls go through; yet throughout the whole article you repeatedly attack them.

“A ticking time bomb;” do you really believe that the problem of unhealthy eating deserves a title that suggests a crisis such as a bombing? By using this title you are worrying parents by making it seem like there is a problem among teens that is going to break out of control. Where is the proof of this? During the article you throw around statistics and figures, but only once do you actually provide proof of your facts. A lot of the facts that you don’t even seem to be accurate such as “they found teenagers of both sexes were among the biggest guzzlers of salt, alcohol and sugar-laden soft drinks.” This fact has no proof of where it has come from and is most likely not true as a lot of teens don’t actually drink. By using this fact it makes me think that any other facts or figures that you have used during the article are also incorrect.

The second point I have picked up on is the picture that you have used; does the person in the picture look unhealthy in any way? I think the picture that you have chosen is a picture that definitely doesn’t help prove your point about teens and if I was to push it, that disproves your point. Another point I picked up on is that the caption that you have chosen is again picking on poor girls, but due to this article being posted on Daily Mail which means that a larger amount of parents will read this than teens. This leads me to think that you are trying to scare the parents into buying vitamins to help their children; this is proved by the caption “teenage girls’ junk food diets are harmful.” This caption suggest that all teenage girls eat the same and consume that same amount of unhealthy foods, this will lead parent to cut down on unhealthy foods and they would probably use the money that they have saved to buy vitamins for their children to ensure their health, which are quite not right, vitamins for children? No way, their body needs more natural vitamins rather than the supplements since their body is designed to produce the needs of the body with the help of what they eat. You eventually confirm where some of your facts have come from; “a nutritionist at Manchester metropolitan university, crunched together the result of 38 students into diets and their consequences for health.” So after all of these facts of which some are incorrect you are telling us that your broad statements assume that all the teens eat unhealthy foods and are “starved of vitamins” come from the study of 38 people from the same area. How are people supposed to listen to the fact that after you admit your judgement of teens is from 38 teens that we have knowledge about? How do we know that they don’t go out drinking every night or only eat junk food? If this is the case, then how you are able to say that out of billions of teens are “low in key vitamins and minerals” just because a few teens that you tested were.

The final point that disgusted me is that “the analysis was funded by the health supplements information service.” This point was a shock to me as I didn’t think that you would publish an article that is quite clearly created to scare parents into buying vitamins from them. This article has made me think very lowly of the business that funded it as many parent might not have read the whole article and might be extremely scared for their children’s health.

Finally I am horrified by the article that you have written because you are targeting teen girls who already have enough stuff to focus on without their parents bothering them about what they eat. But the point that bothers me most is how you were willing to create this article knowing that the point if it was to force parents into buying vitamins for their children, especially when some of the points you have used are false and the rest have been based on 38 teens of out over 1 billion. In conclusion to this I feel that it is extremely disrespectful of you to post something like this because you are trying to scam parents into buying vitamins for their children that they might not even need.

Yours sincerely