Process

In making this project, I knew from the start that I wanted to make sweets seem healthier than fruits. There are three techniques I used to create such a lie. The first two I've already mentioned:

1) I didn't convey enough information to truly communicate the nutritional values of the foods included

2) I omitted data that would have made my lie less clear

If you've been paying close attention to my graph, you may have noticed how vague it is with respect to what each bar represents exactly. That is, what amount of food am I considering here? Are the proportions realistic?

The answers to these questions bring me to my third technique:

3) There is no standard amount of food used to present my data

I tried to use 1 serving size for each food (as determined by the USDA), but for some foods (such as the apple), there was no value for "1 serving," only for "1 large apple" and "1 cup slices" (my graph uses the former). Thus the data shows different amounts of each food considered.

Even if I had been able to show one serving size per food, would this give a better picture of the data? Not really, because I don't think people really eat one serving size. For example, one serving size of Snickers (according to the USDA) is 1/3 a King Size bar. I don't think most people, when given a King Size candy bar, eat only a third of it and then stop. 

Once I found the data I needed, I simply put it into the example code and viewed the results. At that point I could omit any data that ruined my lie.

One of the design choices I made was to make the fruit bars blue and the sweets bars purple. I chose to do this so that at a glance you could easily see that there is a difference between these two groups of foods.