NUN MEETINGS ESRA ALBAYRAK

NUN MEETINGS ESRA ALBAYRAK

The first NUN Meetings of the 2022-2023 academic year were held by Dr. Esra ALBAYRAK, Chair of NUN Foundation for Education and Culture.  At the meeting for our 7th and 8th graders and high school students, Ms. Albayrak made a presentation on addictions, the fight against tobacco and tobacco marketing of multinational companies, and students were informed.

 In this presentation titled “We Lose While They Win”, Esra Albayrak talked about our annual loss of 50 billion dollars in national income as a result of research, and mentioned the efforts to fight tobacco.  Every individual who values their own freedom and wants to make their own free choices should be aware of the marketing efforts of multinational companies. Being respectful to nature, environmentalist, anti-imperialist, patriotic, against the colonial order can be achieved by fighting against tobacco. It is known that addiction affects the brain development in adolescence. Tobacco companies keep children and young people in their target audience by adding flavors and making design studies in order to make their products attractive.

She mentioned that after the introduction of cigarettes until the 1950s with false information that cigarettes were not harmful but beneficial to health, providing weight balance and facilitating digestion, diseases that were not very common until that day emerged. Albayrak stated that the primary factor in the prevention of diseases today is not to consume cigarettes/tobacco products.

Esra Albayrak, who also talked about examples such as thirst, garbage, pollution of beaches, methane gas emission, and deterioration of the ecosystem, expressed that 20 million hungry people could be fed if food products were grown instead of tobacco in the world today. In the program, students listened to impressive information and numerical data with great interest, sought answers to their questions by asking Esra Albayrak at the end of the presentation.