I never have really been into blogging. At first I thought it was just something useless that celebrities and teenage girls did. But through this process I did find it to be different then what I thought it was going to be. Blogging can be an important method to share academic findings and keep the community up to date on what you are discovering.

Blogging has helped with my research process by allowing me to write down what I am finding and how how I can connect it to what I am currently doing. I have been able to write out where I am and where I am going with my paper and plot out the end results. Keeping up with the evolution of my process has been easier due to the use blogging.

I did have to alter some of my original research intentions such as my inquiry question. My original topic was going to be how well does the FDA do at protecting the population from harmful substances we consume. But I found it hard to find information that was current. Many of the articles were published before 2000 and talked about the problems at the beginning when the organization was still young. So because I could not find any current information I had to change my topic to How does weight loss drugs affect your health and do they work? I have been able to find more information the the topic and different view and subjects. A lot of the information was surprising to me and I have grew in knowledge regarding my topic.

The audience I am writing to will be people who are taking, interested in taking, or just interested in general about weight loss pill. My topic is very current. If you watch tv Im sure you have seen commercials advertising these pills. Many stores we visit every day carry them. I picked this topic because I have friends that have talked and seriously considered taking them. I do not know if they have or not. But I am curious about the health risk that go along with these pills.

There are different viewpoints with my topic. Some people say that they have taken the pills and it has worked out great for them. The companies that make and manufacture them say they work great and will do little to no harm. But other sources have a completely different view point of weight loss drugs. They say the ingredients that are used can cause serious negative side effects and some of the chemicals used are not approved in the US.

Something that I found out that interested me was that some of the ingredients used in some of the smaller namebrand diet pills are not approved substances in the US. And some of them are just straight illegal.

I posted on Andrea Jones blog.

After looking into my topic some more I decided to change my question. My original question was; How safe and effective is the FDA's regulations on the food we eat? After doing my research I found that most of the information I could find on the FDA was out of date. Many of the current articles were government issued and I could not get access to the information they held. So do to the fact that I am having difficulty finding up to dat information on my subject I've decided to change my question. I now want to know how safe are weight loss drugs? And what exactly do they do?

While researching this new topic I have found some interesting information. I found this source on the internet while searching for information. It is The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast is a news report that is televised, put on the internet, and is also apart of Newsweek magazine.

The article I read entitled "Too Good to Be True: Why some over-the-counter diet diet pills aren't just a sham, they're downright dangerous". This article covered many topics about diet pills but the thing I found most interesting was something it stated about the FDA's involvement with the corporations that produce the drugs. They said that the FDA's ability to regulate the production of these drugs are limited. They are not able to require safety and efficacy test until the drugs are on the shelves. Once there they can require them to be tested and and if they find something wrong the FDA can have them recalled. But that really shocked me to find that the diet pills aren't really regulated until they are in your hands.

I want to know how safe or harmful the additives and FDA regulations are. This topic is interesting to me because we are eating things every day that we may know nothing about. The FDA has made many changes over the years from its development. I want to know how much safer they are making the things we eat, or if it's just fat cats getting richer. While conducting further research I expect to find that many reforms have been made but there is still many improvements that need to happen.

It is harder finding research than I thought it would be. A lot of the documentation on the subject is either government documents or stuff that was published prior to the 70's. Some articles are talking about the reforms that were made. I'm not finding a bunch about the other side, but I'm sure I will if i keep looking.