Is Dark Chocolate Actually good for you?

We’ve all bee preview to the idea that dark chocolate is not only better for you than milk chocolate, but we’ve heard that dark chocolate is actually good for you, whether it be your heart, your cholesterol your respiratory system and more. Well I have good and bad news on the topic of dark chocolate and how good it is for you. According to medical news chocolate has strong ties and correlation with life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, too much calorie intake, and more. These conditions are actually life threatening and would really throw some people off from eating chocolate.

There are, however potential health benefits to eating chocolate. Chocolate can help lower cholesterol, it provides great antioxidants, prevent cognitive decline, and is actually good for your heart. Chocolate and dark chocolate specifically has recently been credited with a vast number of health benefits. One of these huge benefits is the chance that chocolate actually helps with the walking ability for peripheral artery disease. Peripheral artery disease, or PAD is a form of heart disease that restricts blood flow to the arms and the legs, therefore leaving them unusable. There are some cocoa extracts that can even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Chocolate really has a large number of health benefits, and if you brush your teeth and maintain a healthy diet otherwise, chocolate is definitely not the last diet cheat that you should be thinking about. Please enjoy this video on the benefits of chocolate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-3yXokTuEw&feature=youtu.be

https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/wp-admin/post-new.php

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/279166.php

Why are women more emotional than men?

All of my life, I have experienced my friends who are girls becoming emotional wrecks after a break up or tragic event. I never understood why they become this way, considering after a break up I tend to be fine with the condolence of my friends. I always wondered why women get so emotional.

It is actually due to the wiring in a female’s brain. A group of neurons in a women’s brain processes events that contain aggressive acts and fearful ones. Women and men experience this in different ways. “For men, the cluster “talks with” brain regions that help them respond to sensors for what’s going on outside the body, such as the visual cortex and an area that coordinates motor actions. For women, the cluster communicates with brain regions that help them respond to sensors inside the body, such as the insular cortex and hypothalamus. These areas tune in to and regulate women’s hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and respiration.” This might not seem like a big deal, but in the long run it really does make a difference in how people react.

http://www.livescience.com/4085-emotional-wiring-men-women.html

University of Basel conducted a study that neurologically showed why women are more emotional than men. “Using fMRI data from 696 test subjects, the researchers were also able to show that stronger appraisal of negative emotional image content by the female participants is linked to increased brain activity in motoric regions.” Dr Klara Spalek, who was the lead author in the study, explain how this shows that women are actually neurologically more emotional than men. This experimental study properly used the generation of images to trigger different emotional responses from different subject.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2919083/Male-female-brains-really-wired-differently-Study-finds-women-far-affected-emotional-images.html

Next time you see your girl friend crying, or upset about something, remember that they are wired differently than males and it is not their fault for getting so emotional.

Is It Possible to be Scared to Death?

We have all heard the saying, “you scared me to death” and have all experienced those gut-wrenching moments when you are scared. But is it really possible to die from a traumatic event? Can a scary moment actually KILL you?

In extremely rare instances, you can be scared so bad, that it will actually cause your death. ASAP Science states, “When a person is frightened by something, his body’s fight or flight response kicks in. Adrenaline is released, which makes the heart beat more quickly, sending more blood to the muscles.” How our body reacts to this is what is interesting. The person who is now frightened gets “super strength” and “super speed” so to call. They will also experience the psychological term we refer to as “fight or flight” which has side effects such as dilation of your pupils, reduced speed of your digestion, along with other symptoms.

Neurologist Martin A. Samuels told Scientific American in 2009 states, “All of this increases the chances of succeeding in a fight or running away from, say, an aggressive jaguar. This process certainly would be of help to primitive humans, but the problem, of course, is that in the modern world there is very limited advantage of the fight-or-flight response. There is a downside to revving up your nervous system like this.”

Usually in this fight or flight, your reactions and change in your body are only for a duration of time, not forever. When someone is continually scared, though, and the strain on your heart from a fight or flight response, this can turn into a situation that will be toxic towards your heart. When you are scared you experience a rush of adrenaline, which inhibits the relaxation of your muscles. If you experience an excessive amount of these symptoms, you can actually die. You can see more in depth information on the topic here. Also check out this youtube video on the exact same topic.

So when you hear the saying, “you scared me to death” next time, remember that this is possible, and if this person is elderly or experiencing it in excessive amounts, make sure you take it easy on them.

How Bad is Stress?

We all know, especially as college students how stressful everyday life can be. In each scenario a bit of stress goes into every decision we make, but with all this stress out there in the world I wonder how stress effects your body physically and mentally in the long run, can stressing out really be detrimental to your health, or is it just an emotion that goes into motivating us to do the next task in life?

According to merckengage.com, stress can be caused by external factors like major life changes, work or school demand, relationship difficulties, and more. All of these external factors result in side effects that cause physical pain and damage to one’s body. All these factors cause problems like frequent headaches, dizziness, panic attacks, sweating, feeling overwhelmed, etc. Some of the effects of stress can seriously hurt you in the long run. Stress can even cause more serious issues like high blood pressure diabetes, asthma, sleep deprivation and insomnia, and more life altering conditions. There is an entire list of things that stress affects that our body deals with regularly, and some things that aren’t dealt with so easily.

While it is clear that stress is not something to be fond of, through my research I learned that my original idea of stress being only bad for your body is still argued, even by two different websites. WebMd says “The human body is designed to experience stress and react to it”, this information was found here.

As I sit by and type one of 6 blog posts I realize that there has to be a way of dealing with this stress, instead of just talking about it. So I went further into my research and started looking for ways to decrease stress in a human being, just so I was able to provide light on the topic that we all want to see the light from. A psychologist would be the best option if someone was severely suffering from stress at an abnormally high frequency, however there are less severe options to handling stress than going straight to there. If you are suffering from increased amounts of stress due to any circumstances I advise you to seek help, look at this link for answers, and also please enjoy this picture of a puppy in addition to the other help resources.

We can get through the battle together and end stress one puppy picture at a time.

A Kickstart in the Wrong Direction

It is said to be common knowledge that the average energy drink is not good for the average human being, and personally, I love energy drinks, however lately I started to feel different after I drank my favorite energy drinks. Naturally, I got nervous, and even though I’m currently fine and writing this blog, I decided that I would do a little research to educate the masses on how much energy is too much energy. The first step in finding my answers was figuring out that caffeine can literally cause an overdose, much like an overuse of drugs. Caffeine is also a neurotoxin which means that it could actually make an individual have slower and less efficient brain performance. There are other factors in how much caffeine one can consume in a day other than what they do normally. For example, for those prescribed ADHD medication, any extra caffeine could be life threatening.

If you’re reading this blog, I had hoped by now you’d be scared to pickup another life threatening energy drink. However, as I sit by and enjoy my Rockstar fruit punch flavored energy drink, I have some great news. It is actually extremely difficult to straight up overdose on caffeine. While it is still very possible to overdose, one study from medical daily says that the average 125 pound person would have to consume a total of 107 standard sized cans of Red Bull in order to overdose. This study however does not take into account at what point you would most likely have a heart attack, but to straight overdose and die from energy drinks solely it would take over 100 energy drinks. According to the same study, 200 to 300 mg’s of caffeine is safe for one day. The drink I am drinking right now is 240 milligrams. If only 200 to 300 milligrams are safe why are companies allowed to sell single drinks that fall into that category? In addition to this fact, should the government put a regulation on how old a person should be to buy energy drinks? After all if its safe for an adult to consume 200 to 300 mg’s it cannot be safe for a child to be consuming 240 in one sitting. A child is way more vulnerable to a caffeine induced heart attack. According to caffeine informer out of close to 4,000 calls to poison control regarding energy drinks, 51% of them involved children.

Caffeine is very addictive. In fact, after drinking a lot of caffeine for an extend period of time, caffeine becomes hard to quit and an individual will start to go through withdrawal and lack of functioning without an ample amount of caffeine. Caffeine also causes a number of other health defects like high blood pressure, an increased amount of stress, paranoia, vomiting, and other reactions.

From my own personal studies, I consume too much caffeine a day to keep going at the rate I am now. Now that I have answers and know how much is naturally handleable, I feel safer, but not better. I will be cutting down on my caffeine use and trying to kickstart my life without caffeine.

Adderall Abuse and College Students 

As students ourselves, we all know how stressful college life can be, especially when we have that little bit of extra work to do before tomorrow. So, as students, we obviously work to find the most efficient way to get our work done. For some, that means going straight to the library for a quiet solitude study session, for others it means heading right back to lock yourself in your dorm for what seems like the rest of time. Most of us see Adderall as a prescription drug that some people just need to function in today’s world; however,  a staggering number of students in college take this drug in random doses without prescription. In 2012, a K-State alcohol and drug education survey found that 12 percent of the students in the survey used this drug unprescribed. That number is up from just one percent six years earlier. This study can be found here.

Adderall is a highly addictive drug that could cause serious harm to the mental functions of the abuser, when prescribed however, it can actually be helpful to someone. After long hours of research on the topic, it is apparent that the problem of using adderall unprescribed is way bigger than I had even thought of. Out of the 31% of college students that take some form of ADHD medication, only 5.3% of them are actually prescribed. After seeing these results I wanted to find for myself just how accurate this study is, specifically for students at Penn State, so I interviewed 15 people, 10 males, and 5 females, out of those 3 of the females associated closely with each other, and 7 of the males do. I went out of my way to find random students to ask if they were prescribed vs. if they have used adderall this semester, or intend to use adderall for finals. These are my results:

Out of the 15 people I surveyed, only 2 were prescribed adderall (13%), 9 admitted to using some form of ADHD drug during the semester (60%), 11 admitted they had thought about, or had intentions to take a drug to help them study in the future (73.3%), and one person said maybe (6.7%). While these numbers did not totally match up with the larger survey mentioned above, these results were more surprising than just reading the survey. Conducting my own survey really hit home on the topic because most of those surveyed are people I know and wouldn’t have previously expected to take stimulants.

In my opinion, study drugs give the abuser an unfair advantage on the rest of us, and especially in a class graded on a curve, one could imagine how that really puts a damper on a non users grades. that brings up the idea of these drugs being included in academic dishonesty and more. What do you think? Is this a problem that needs to be dealt with more severely and more carefully, or should we just keep up how we are going and continue to let people abuse these drugs to gain that slight advantage? 

The question on every serious college student’s mind is how much sleep can we potentially skip out on to do some extra work, or to study a little bit more. We all care about our grades whether they are good grades or grades that are improving, and with finals coming up I felt the need to bring up the question about the risk or reward of taking that “all nighter” to study for your SCIOW exam. A lack of sleep can actually be detrimental to not only your studying and performance on exams and in the classroom, but it can also contribute to serious health problems and even death. While this sounds rather rash, and in most cases can be affected by some sort of confounding third variable, it is true that sleep deprivation can indeed cause premature aging, increased amounts of stress, heart attacks, strokes and more. All this according to an article on inc.com.

There are many flaws that could have occurred during this study. First off, there is no way of telling how many people this correlational study was carried out on. Not only that, it doesn’t even say if there was an experiment, it just lists a bunch of “facts” about sleep deprivation. However, in a study carried out by two PHD’s at UPENN, this same study gets done the “right” way. According to the professors at UPENN, namely Jeffrey S. Durmer, and David F. Dinges, in a study lasting over 5 years, randomly sampling 1007 adults ages 21 to 30 years of age, “The average sleep during the weekdays was 6.7 hours and on weekends was 7.4 hours.” Not only can sleep deprivation cause a vast number of Medical illnesses, it can also have an increased affect on physically hurting you. According to the same study form the University of Pennsylvania,

Accidents related to sleep deprivation have been estimated to have an annual economic impact of $43 to $56 billion.

– UPENN study

The point of the study that was very accurately carried out unlike the first study mentioned, was to show that sleep deprivation is detrimental for operating in your every day life.

All this being taken into consideration, sleep deprivation is obviously not good for the human body. However, the question I want to elaborate on is how does sleep deprivation directly effect your test taking performance and ability to retain information. We’ve all been in the position before of being so tired in one class or another after a long night and just slowly struggling to keep our eyes open and eventually dozing off, missing any important information. This exact instance happened to me the other day while listening to one of Andrew’s very compelling and interesting lectures.

The area of the brain that needs to be examined to figure out the effect of sleep deprivation on studying would have to be the hippocampus. This is the area of the brain that is responsible for memory. Studies show that sleep deprivation has a direct impact on the hippocampus in an individuals brain. This results in a loss of memory and of course a loss of all the materials that you studied prior. Too little sleep can actually make your grades a lot worse, and can impact your health to a great extent. The hippocampus being affected by sleep deprivation could have an adverse effect on a persons cognitive thinking and processing skills. The ability to solve everyday problems and retain information become increasingly difficult the less sleep you have. Many studies show that the hippocampus is greatly affected by sleep deprivation, this negative effect makes it so a human being cannot function to their average potential. 

How much sleep loss is considered sleep deprivation for the average human being? Could it be that missing only that one study night of sleep isn’t enough to have lasting effects on you? That statement would happen to be false. In reality, one all nighter could take as many as 4 days for your body to catch back up, until then one’s functioning is decreased greatly which could result on a poor grade of the test that you decided to study for all night, and future assessments that one has in that 4 day span. The bottom line is, the more sleep you miss, the worse you will do within reason. Staying up all night is not a good choice for a test, and you could only be hurting yourself in the long run.

What is the Most Athletic Sport?

Wherever you are in the world, sports seem to be widely celebrated, every sport differently, and for what reason? Why are some sports more popular than others? As an athlete myself, I have had countless arguments over which sport is the most athletic. An athlete, is “a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.” according to dictionary.com. The topic of what sport is requires the most athleticism is a conversation that has gone on for generations. Some people say the most athletic sport is soccer because of the amount you run, others say it’s football because of the skill and size you must posses to be good at football, some even say it is baseball because of it’s difficulty. So what really is the most athletic sport?

Many people say the most athletic sport is soccer. To be able to control a ball without touching it with your hands is truly a talent. People like Christiano Ronaldo, who can jump higher than the average NBA player, make it look easy, but in reality what these professionals do is very hard. The average soccer field is 100 yards long and 60 yards wide (sportsknowhow). That means that any soccer player has the potential to have to run the length of a full football field end zone to end zone at any time. The average soccer player runs six miles in one game, which means he was at an average pace of four miles per hour (active.com). That doesn’t really seem like as much as one would think a player would run. So why do some people think it’s the most athletic sport? Nearly 70 percent of the entire planet watches soccer; it is the most popular sport in the world (postgame.com), its a low scoring, high pace game that makes people go absolutely nuts. Soccer is celebrated way more than any other sport on the planet, however are soccer players more athletic than those of other sports such as basketball, football, or baseball?

In today’s age, basketball is definitely more popular than it has ever been before, and it is easy to see why. People like LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, and more all look like super heroes compared to the average every day Joe. Standing well over six feet tall, weight exceeding two hundred pounds, jumping over three feet into the air these monsters dominate the court with others like them. These men are what seem to be the perfect athletic specimens, so why is basketball not celebrated as much globally as soccer? One could spend their entire life searching for this answer, but in reality, it may just not have happened yet.

The main question here is whether or not popularity of the sport could show whether it is more athletic than another. Are some sports more athletic than others, or is every sport just full of athletic human beings? This fact could be a third variable when looking for the most athletic sport. Throughout the course of this blog period, I will be analyzing more sports in depth, to ultimately make a decision on which sport is the most athletic.

Can marijuana save America? This question has been the subject of a lot of controversy in the past couple years. The legality of Marijuana is at a high right now, with twenty-three states currently having laws that give marijuana some form of legality. Why then, is marijuana still federally illegal? In order to make a decision yourself, it is important to know what effects marijuana has on the body.

  You can find this photo here

Marijuana affects the same area as other drugs such as alcohol, cocaine, even heroin. This pleasure center in your brain produces large amounts of dopamine, which gives off the feeling of euphoria commonly associated with these drugs. Why than, if this drug is so seemingly harmless is it illegal? The federal government defines marijuana as a schedule 1 narcotic right next to drugs like heroine and ecstasy however, does it belong there? Some scientists are proposing that the medical benefits of marijuana far outweigh the reasons that the government has to outlaw the substance.

Marijuana has a vast number of health benefits. Some include reducing the number of seizures an epileptic person has, other effects include slowing the spread of cancer and reducing the effects cigarettes have on your lungs. If you would like to see more on the health benefits of marijuana please visit this website.

Not only can marijuana literally help save people’s lives, but it also could help save the United States economy. There are only a few examples in the U.S that can show us how much legalizing and taxing marijuana can help the economy. One great and fairly famous example of this effect would be Colorado. The state of Colorado was one of the first to legalize marijuana for recreational use. According to drugpolicy.org as of last October marijuana taxes brought Colorado more than $40 million, and that is just on the taxes from state regulated dispensaries. Think about what this kind of money could do on a national level if made federally legal? The change in the economy would be staggering, maybe even enough to pull us completely out of this seemingly endless “recession”.

Photo from here

What do you think? Does America even need saving? Could the legalization of marijuana for recreational use be an answer? I think so.

Why Love?

What is love? Webster defines love as a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person. This definition however, did not satisfy me. There is so much trouble in the world caused that come from a result of love. Why is it, that almost half of the couples that get married in the United States, end up getting divorced? Is it because people are marrying for reasons other than true love, or do people just stop loving each other? This is a question asked by many scientists around the world. This question brings up another point. What about love is so appealing, what in the brain makes love as addictive as some illegal drugs, and can it really diminish?

According to livescience.com, love is separated into three sections; lust, attraction, and attachment. These three phases all have different effects on the brain. Lust makes a human being hormones produce feelings different than usual, usually resembling those of nervousness and adrenaline. The attachment aspect of love is the fault of evolution. Humans are very defensive animals when it comes to their territory, and when choosing a mate, a human develops the same attachment that it would to anything else that it owns. Attraction is more associated with lower levels of serotonin, and higher levels of dopamine and norepinephrine. (dana.org) These high levels of dopamine are similar to those experienced when taking stimulating drugs, which is what could make love “addictive” and so appealing. However, eventually these levels of dopamine return back to what they were, the causing the effect of the love to wear off.

There is not enough evidence to see wether this is the reason for divorce, mostly because there could be a number of other reasons and factors that could go into deciding what causes divorce. “Even though these facts could be correlated, we can not infer causation from this one factor alone.” – Andrew Read on the topic of if wormy kids are stupid.

Whats the point? Well using this information we can see more of what causes love and divorce, the effect of love on the brain, and this information can later help us fin out how to lower the rates of divorce, and maybe even show us who we really love.

What do you think? Leave a comment suggesting what we can do about divorce, or what you think love really does to people.

Picture from http://dreamatico.com/love.html