By Sidney Murillo

Food fuels the body. Make eating good food a habit, and eventually you will begin to feel healthy and happy with yourself.
Eat nothing but McDonald’s, on the other hand, and you will end up feeling as groggy and gross as the heavily processed fries you eat.
The same goes with what people put in their minds.
Some people believe any kind of reading is important, but I disagree. Reading just anything shouldn’t be the goal. Filtering the good stuff from the bad stuff can make a big difference between a healthy mind and a not so healthy mind.
Go to any grocery store and you will see People, InTouch, OK!, The National Enquirer and Us Weekly in the most prominent places in the check out lines. These magazines are all guilty of peddling celebrity gossip and news to the hungry but homely minds of so many people.
The cover story of Us Weekly for January is about Bethenny’s issues with her divorce and fight for her apartment.
I’m sorry, I’m still trying to figure out who Bethenny is and why the hell her business matters to me.
Sadly, according to Stateofthemedia.org, in 2011, Time magazine national circulation dropped 0.5 percent while Cosmopolitan rose a healthy 4.6 percent.
I’m not saying that everyone should become dry-bran-eating-politics-debating old men, but giving in to the celebrity gossip isn’t going to feed your mind what it needs.
Thanks to the growth of technology, there are now different mediums to not only write, but also receive news five times faster than 20 years ago, and it’s still growing. This actually levels the playing field for aspiring writers to get their stuff out there, which is kind of nice.
Being able to read a mother’s blog about her experiences with going back to school after seeing her son off to Harvard law is just as inspiring and brain food worthy as a feature on marine life in the science section of Time online.
Recently, I was reading a Vogue magazine while I was at a salon getting my hair cut. The article was about a woman named Arwa Damon who was so inspired to pursue journalism that she traveled all the way to post-9/11 Iraq to report for CNN.
Her friends told her she was insane for pursuing her dreams in a disastrous front. Her hunger for truth and genuine journalism was greater than her fear.  This has got to be a reason to be optimistic about the future for magazines.
While it is the responsibility of a writer or journalist to provide unbiased and accurate news and good storytelling to the public, it’s also the responsibility of the public to look for the good stuff. So put down your gossip magazines and read some real news.