Author Archives: bpa5044

Can food be so good that it is addictive?

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Do you ever feel like you can’t stop eating? Like you have to eat that next chip or cookie? Well recent studies show that may be because our bodies are addicted to them, kind of like being addicted to certain drugs. Imagine if eating Oreos could have the same affects on the human body as taking dangerous drugs like cocaine. 

In a study done in Connecticut College they used Oreo cookies and rats to see if unhealthy foods were considered addictive to humans. In the study, researchers used mice to try and see if they were addicted to America’s favorite cookies. In the study they associated one side of a maze with Oreos and the other side of the maze (control) with a type of food that was relatively neutral. What they found was that the mice were acting the same way as a different study they had recently done. The study was similar to the the study with Oreos, however it was done with highly addictive drugs on one side and saline on the other side. This lead the researches to believe that unhealthy foods, specifically Oreos, might have addictive properties.
This research could have huge impacts on everyday foods like Oreos if scientists are able to find more solid evidence linking human addictiveness to fatty foods. It could affect how foods are made, and maybe even outlaw some foods (purely me thinking the worse here). However, I don’t think that at this point this research has enough proof to sway me out of eating my cookies. 
To me I think that there might be some room in the research to find some debate. Maybe there isn’t a link between the cookie and which side the mice picks because the cookies are addictive. It could be purely because of taste, and nothing to do with being addicted to it. Even if the actions of the rats in the two studies are similar, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the mouse was addicted. It could have been going back to the Oreo side for many reasons. Another reason why I wouldn’t go ahead and throw away all of my Oreos is because it doesn’t mean that humans are the same way as rats.

Are we all born equal? (part 2)

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This is my continuation of an earlier blog post. 

In my previous blog I said that there are two possible causes of why a person is smart, it was either due to nature, or it was due to nurture. There I stated that it was either one or the other. Since I wrote that blog post I have done a little more researching and found out that it is not one of those things, but both. It works like this, every single baby is born with a certain limit it can reach which is determined by its genes. However not every single baby is going to reach that level due to how they are raised.
Dr. Martha Burnes (http://www.scilearn.com/blog/are-smart-kids-born-smart.php) describes it as a child having an an extraordinarily malleable brain, which means that a child can learn a lot more that you and I could due to the stage of development where their brains are at compared to ours. She says when a parents nurtures their child they are setting the stage to what their kids can learn and the kid learns the rest on their own. 
Basically what this is means is that every baby is born with a different set of mental capabilities, and whether they’ll reach the limit of all of their capabilities is up to how they are raised. So essentially a child that was born “smarter” than another child could not be as smart as someone who was born less “smarter” because of the way their parents raised them, which I think is pretty cool because a parent can have such a big impact on their kids, and hopefully its the right way.
All of this leads back to the ageless debate of nature versus nurture. It’s reasons like this that fuels the debate. There are certain people in this world that have such opinionated views, not necessarily the wrong view, that they become blind to what else it could be. In this case it just shows that both sides of the argument are right, and combining them both would make the right answer, both nature and nurture affect how smart a person becomes.

Are we all born equal? (Part 1)

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One of the biggest debates in the world is the debate of nature vs. nurture. If you have ever taken any type of psychology class and anything like it you might know a little bit about it. I learned about this debate in my high school AP Psychology class and I found it to be extremely intriguing and which side of the debate I should favor divided me. If you look at the whole topic as a whole it might be hard to decide which side is really the truth. So I decided to pick a smaller topic and see if I could come a conclusion. I decided to look into whether or not every single person is born with the same mental capability.

Obviously there are people in this world that are smarter than others. However, I’m not here to spot them out, I’m here to ask the question about whether or not they were brought up to be smart or it was simply in their genes to be smarter. If it were nature then it would be completely out of that person’s control to be smart. If it were nurture then the person’s parents could have influenced their intelligence.

There are examples of both sides of the debate that make each of them seem like the right answer. We’ve all seen or heard of a baby that was just smart. Was it because the mother played Beethoven to her baby when it was in the womb, or was it because that mother was a genius and passed it along to the child through genes.

I will be dividing this post into two so that I can dive deeper into each of these topics with more information to back up each side to give everyone a better chance to overcome that inner battle with themselves about nature or nurture.

Here’s an interesting website  to get your minds working.



Eat Dinner, Get Drunk

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So today my roommate told me about a medical condition where a guy ate dinner and blew a .37 in a breathalyzer without taking a sip of alcohol. Sure, my roommate may have been exaggerating or lying, so i decided to check this out. Sure enough, i came across this article about getting drunk from eating. This is a real thing. However, it may not be to the extent to having a blood alcohol level of a .37. 

The University of Washington in Seattle has a Toxicology laboratory that looked into this because it could possibly impair a driver’s ability to drive a car, aka drunk driving.Here’s the article they wrote about the subject. 
Being that you’re all college students or have been in college, I’m sure you guys know that alcohol is made using something called yeast. That is basically what happens in a persons stomach that has “auto-brewery syndrome”. Whenever they eat a lot of starch, it would start the fermenting process in their stomachs making a type of alcohol which would in the end, get in their blood making them drunk. Who needs a home brewery when you can have a stomach brewery, am I right? imagine a world with no more Natty Light. Wild stuff.

          This is like moonshine in ones stomach…

What if we Never actually touch anything?

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When I was in 9th grade one of my friends proposed an idea to me that has been in my mind ever since, the idea that we may never be touching anything… never. Sounds bizarre right? But after listening to his reasoning it really did seem possible, not saying that I believe it. What if there was always a tiny layer of air between what we think were touching and our fingers or whatever part of your body is touching something.  So I decided to dig into this topic and find out if there is any truth to this madness.

 

There is a type of physics, called quantum physics, which claims that we are never actually touching anything. It claims that there is a layer of atoms between our body parts and anything we touch that causes us to think we’re touching something. This article does a nice job of explaining what’s really going on with an article and a video because it really is a concept that is hard to understand. I recommend reading that article because obviously, I am not a scientist and I will let the scientist explain what is really going on.

 

I think that its believable to a certain extent. The theory itself seems totally possible like I said before, however I refuse to believe that I’m not touching this keyboard I’m using to type this blog post. Or that I’m not actually touching my comfortable pajama pants. Or even that I’m not “technically” sitting in this chair. 

Are People Drinking and Eating Themselves to Death?

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The other day I stumbled upon a Wall Street Journal Article about fatty liver disease and I was intrigued by what researches have noticed, so I decided to look into it. According to the article, fatty liver disease is becoming more and more prevalent. One thing that’s suggested to cause this is fructose, which is found in a lot of sugary foods and drinks. After searching the internet to find out how many foods and drinks really contain fructose I found out that there is a ridiculous amount of drinks and foods that have a crazy amount of fructose in them.

I found a great website that has an extensive list of items that contain fructose. Here is a top 50 list that I found really interesting. One food on there I found really interesting was number 6, honey. Im a person that loves honey more than anything in the world (I know it’s kind of weird) so this isn’t the most pleasant news to me. 
In the WSJ article it explains that this leads to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and if it isn’t treated, it could possibly turn into cirrhosis which could in the end cause the liver to stop working and require a liver transplant. 
A way to help prevent this is to watch what you eat, try to limit yourself to how much fructose you eat. Also, exercising could help too, and it’ll make you look good.
Here’s a great picture showing how liver disease progresses from the Wall Street Journal Article .

“Insert Boring Introduction Title Here”

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Hello class, my name is Brennan Azevedo and I am writing this blog for the second time due to my stupidity. A little about myself, I am a 20 year old Sophomore studying Finance in the Smeal College of Business. I came to Penn State from a town outside of Philly (like most of you in this class) called Richboroo and I went to Council Rock High School South. I like to think that I have a very rich history, but I don’t actually know how “rich” my life actually is, because after all is my life. I was born and lived in a place for 8 years of my life where most of you will never go. Brazil. Yes, this is when you say “woah your life is rich” but wait, that’s not all! I also have an identical twin brother. So if you see two brazilian clones, its most likely us.

Now for the interesting part, why am I taking this class? During my freshmen year I took two very boring and dry science classes that didn’t interest me at all (CHEM 101 and EGEE 101). I heard from people that have taken this course that any person would find it interesting, hence why I’m here writing this blog for the second time… The reason why I’m not a science major is actually quite simple. In high school math and science were both my best subjects and when I came Penn State I had a question to answer, should I pursue a major with numbers or science? After my semester I knew the answer after all of my science-major friends told me how hard CHEM 110 was. My answer was become a Finance major. Either way, no matter what I picked I would have considered it a win-win. 

 I think my pictures on Instagram are… cool? You be the judge and let me know. There’s a picture of and my twin. Yes, we do have twin telepathy.