Author Archives: Jarrod T Skole

Study Food

As I was sitting in class today starving because I did not have enough time to eat before class I started to wonder how that affects me. I know you are always suppose to eat before classes and test but are there a certain foods you should eat? If there was a food that could increase the learning ability of students, that would be a great discovery to for students across the country.

As I was searching this topic I found an article that shows how saturated fats in foods are decreasing the ability to students to learn. The saturated fats make students drowsy due the sudden intake of sugar. The body takes in the glucose from the saturated fats and then distributes it through the body. Once all the glucose is used it up the body feels tired and crashes. This same study shows that the ability to remember and focus in class is affected when eating these foods.

To combat the high fatty foods, there is an alternative that will make you remember better and have energy throughout the day. This article shows how omega 3 fatty acid foods are beneficial to your learning capability. Most people think of salmon as an omega 3 fatty acid foods, which could be hard to eat before class but there are snacks that have the same fatty acid. Walnuts and kiwis are great swebmd_rf_photo_of_omega_3_foodsources of omega 3 fatty acids and could be eaten walking to class in the morning. This article states that the molecules in the food affect the part of the brain that is responsible for memory.

There was a study done in Australia where 396 kids were given a drink containing omega 3 fatty acids everyday before school. Then there was a control group that did not take any supplements before school. These students ranged from age 6 to 12 and were monitored on how well they did on test and remembering subjects. After only 6 months, the students who drank the omega 3 fatty acids were shown to have improved in memory and test scores while the other students did not. You could reason that there might have been confounding third variables such as poverty levels of the students or work ethics, but the study still shows an increase in learning ability for the kids who took the omega 3 supplements.

To conclude, there are certain foods you should stay away from before you take a class or test, such as French fries and chicken nuggets since they are high in saturated fats. On the other hand, there are specific foods such as salmon and walnuts that you should try to eat before every class since it will help your memory. You may not see results of better memory from eating these foods immediately, but once you give it time you should be able to find yourself remember information better.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/scientists-learn-how-food-affects-52668

http://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/how-diet-and-nutrition-impact-a-childs-learning-ability

http://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-omega-3-health-benefits

Bees Death

I keep reading online how there are millions of bees dying around the world and no one is really batting an eye about it. First of all, if there are millions of animals dying around the same time there must be something wrong. Secondly, the animals that are dying are one of the major role players in putting food on our table. Bees are a pollinating species and without them plants will start to die. Have you ever seen Bee Movie?

As I was looking up information about how the bees are dying I came across an article  in the Washington Post about it. The scientists behind the investigation of the bee’s sudden death are not quite sure what is killing them. They think it is due to the Varroa mite, which prey on honeybees. These mites are mainly found in honeycomb, which is why they are so commonly found on bees. The mites kill the bees by attaching to them and sucking their blood. Once a mite has infected a bee, the mite gives off a virus, which affects a bees DNA.

Since scientist are still not sure if these mites are the reason for the sudden increase of bee’s death, they do not have a cure to save them. The scientist and researchers must hurry up because the bees are not dying at an alarming rate. In this article it is said that in just one month alone, 37 million bees died in Canada. In another instance, close to 25,000 bees were found dead in an Oregon bee farm. If these bees keep dying off, our world coanthidium_february_2008-1uld be in serious danger.

If you are asking how bee’s dying will affect your life then you must have forgotten they are a main pollinator in our world. Bees are one of the best pollinators that nature has given us. This article explains how bees spend most of their life collecting pollen from flowers because they use pollen to feed their young. They collect the pollen through an electrostatic force their legs give off. When they land on a male flower the pollen is attracted and dead-almond-treesattached to the bee’s legs. Then when the bee lands on another flower some of the pollen falls off.

Bees tend to only go after one specific flower when they are collecting pollen. This way they will spread a single species of flowers male pollen around to all the female flowers of that species.

Without bees pollenating our land, a lot of flowers and tress would start to die off and affect our ecosystem and us. As stated in this article, almost every bite of vegetarian food you eat has been pollenated by a bee. If all the bees in the world were to die off then we would have to find a new way of pollinating our food, and do it quickly. The Bee Movie might have a comical storyline to it, but it still shows the affect of bees not pollinating our world.

There was a study done by Harvard University where they tested out one of their hypothesis for the death of bees. They studied 18 colonies of bees and gave 12 of the colonies a pesticide that is considered to be non lethal. The 6 colonies that were left untreated stayed the same, but of the 12 colonies that were treated with pesticides 6 of them were killed entirely. This could be an answer to how the bees are dying around the world, but there is still the question to why only 6 of the colonies died when treated the other 6 did not. Could this be due to chance or a third variable? The scientists are still trying to figure this out now.

There could be a solution to stopping the decline of bees death could be making a sanctuary for them. These bees would not be used to gather honey from but simply to pollinate our land. We could monitor them to make sure there are no deaths occurring and if there are we can quarantine the hive that had the dead bee so whatever killed it will not kills others. These bees would also not be around any pesticides incase that is the mechanism hat is killing them. It would be tricky since we still cannot pinpoint a reason for the deaths, but we have to try and save the bees somehow.

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/the-surprisingly-simple-reason-millions-of-bees-are-dying/

https://csglobe.com/harvard-study-proves-why-the-bees-are-all-disappearing/

http://nativeplants.msu.edu/pollination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-world-without-honeybees-2013-6

Cell Phone Usage

As Andrew always tells us in class, cell phones can be detrimental to a student’s grade, but how do cell phones affect students in other ways? With all this new technology, I feel like people are losing the art of communicating and destroying relationships with friends. What I mean by this is that people are starting to not be able to talk to a person without looking at their phone. We can txt and call people with our phones but people are starting to become bad at real time talking face to face.

As I was researching this topic, I cam across an article on Time.com saying how cell phones are starting to affect peoples relationships. This article talked about a study done by Psychology of Popular Media Culture were they asked couples how they felt about their partners cell phone use. They found out that the more a person was dependent on their phone, the less their partner felt that the relationship would work out. So now we are starting to see how phones are affecting us out of the classroom.

Now when it comes to talking to people, I think everyone is guilty of looking at their phone at least one time while having a conversation. As it turns out, that is extremely detrimental to your conversation and relationship with the person you are talking to. A studyimgres-2 was done at Virginia Tech where they picked 100 people to have conversations with random people. The people would talk for ten minutes each, but half of the people had to talk about a boring a tree while the other half had to talk about a momentous moment in their life. Then the researchers studied how many times people looked their phone.

As you could have guessed, the people with the tree conversation looked at their phone more than the other group. The researchers asked the person who did not go on their phone how they felt about their partner being on their phone and they said that they felt disconnected. These people did not feel that their other partner was interested in their conversation and was said to feel that their partner did not care what they were talking about. You may think that only going on you phone for a few seconds during a conversation isn’t hurtful, but this study shows how wrong you would be.

The creation of cell phones was a momentous step for technology and has created a lot of good in the world. You can now talk to people across the world, find out news from anywhere, and so much more. There are so many pros to having a cell phone that many people forget the cons. Cells phone have made us too dependent on them and are affecting our everyday lives. Kids stop learning to spell and just use spellcheck on their phone, they distract us in class and even on dates, and simply just take up too much of our attention that we could be spending on other things. In my opinion, we value our phones too much and should cut back our usage on them.

Phones are a great invention and have helped so many people since they were invented, but we are starting to overuse them. We are using them in classes, which affect our learning ability, and we are also affecting our personal skills and relationships when we over use our phones. All you have to do is put your phone down and enjoy the time you are spending with a person or in class.

Side note… A Samsung phone exploded in one of my friend’s classes the other day and disrupted the class while also sending the student to the hospital. Watch out!

 

 

http://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/

http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/science-explains-exactly-how-your-phone-is-ruining-your-relationships.html

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/reply_to_a_cell_phone_story_complaint/

Stressing out

How many times have you been stressed this week, let alone this semester? Almost all college students will have that moment where they feel like their world is crumbling and they can’t do anything to stop it. This could be caused by having multiple exams on one day, forgetting about an assignment, or not knowing what to write your eight-page research paper about. I have three test on Monday so of course I am feeling stressed now, but that got me wondering how stress is going to affect me and my grades.

Stress can be a very detrimental feeling to a person, especially a college student. It can keep them up at night worry, make them lose their appetite, and not sleep. These factors make me believe that stressimages can affect a student’s grade and overall GPA.

There was a study done by the University of Minnesota where they looked at close to 10,000 students over 14 different schools and monitored their stress, amount they drank, and smoked. After they collected their data, they separated the students who were just stressed compared to other students who were stressed and drank or smoked. About 70% of the surveyed students reported to being stressed during the school year, and close to half of them said that stress was affecting their academics.

Out of all the students, students who were stressed out more than eight times in a semester seems to do significantly worse than students who were not stressed or as stressed as them. The students who became stressed ended up having a 2.72 average GPA compared to the non-stressed students who averaged a 3.3 GPA. That is a .6 difference, and as we all know in school, that is a huge amount.

There was another study done where a lecturer from the School of Education followed five students throughout a school year to see how they acted in school. What she found ouimgres-1t was that students become stressed due to grades, parents, or another variable and that leads them to cheat. They do not care about the topic they are learning as much as the grade they will receive. This study was done in high school where the consequence of cheating is not as harsh as college. Never the less, this study showed that when people are stressed they tend to cheat and college is somewhere that everyone becomes stressed at one point. Cheating in college can lead to major consequences and even expulsion.

My last thought on how stress affects us is how it affects our brain. Stress is about as common as anger, but for some reason stress seems to have more of an emotional and physical strain on us. According to the Harvard Medical School, the main part of our brain of our brain that deals with emotions, the amygdala sends a signal to the part of the brain that communicates with our body, the hypothalamus. Once the hypothalamus is contacted it starts to send adrenaline through our body. This makes our lungs open up more so our brain can get as much air as you need, which is why you might breathe more heavily when you are stressed. The adrenaline also makes your heart beat faster; which could be why you feel like your chest is about to explode when you are stressed.

These are all good things for when you are in a situation that needs you to take action quickly, but when it comes to school…. it doesn’t help as much. Our body sees stress as something more of a fight or flight situation, which doesn’t really help when you are overwhelmed with schoolwork. By relieving your stress as soon as you start to get it makes your body relaxed more and gets it back into its normal state. Once you are back to normal, you will be able to accomplish your work more efficiently than when your body is flowing with adrenaline.

Stress is a very harmful thing and has been found to damage students and their grades. There are various ways to overcome stress so that you can do well in school, and even avoid cheating. This website shows different ways on how to get rid or lessen your stress.

 

http://www.healthnews.com/en/news/How-Stress-Affects-Academic-Performance/2wJiMoIl1ErOCym8JC9lWD/

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/february23/cheat-022305.htmlhttp://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/145855.php

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217583

 

Fast Food Colors

Have you ever wondered why almost all the fast food chains use the same color scheme for all their logos? McDonalds, Wendy’s, Chic Fila, and many more all use the color red and yellow in their logos. Could this just be by chance, or is there a correlation between them.

While researching this topic, I found that there are certain colors that make people un-interested in eating, such as blue and purple. You may wonder why a blueberry doesn’t look as appetizing as a strawberry does and you can blame your ancestors for that. In this article , it is said then when our ancient ancestors were searching for food, they would avoid the colors blue, black, and purple because they associated those colors with mold and being spoiled. For example, when Burger Kings came out with its Halloween themed burger which consisted of black buns, my first thought was that it looks disgusting. Maybe that is because I am used to golden brown buns on burgers, but it could also be related to our primitive instincts to stay away from those colors. This could be a reason why most fast food companies tend to stay away from those colors when advertising their food.

In this same article, they explain why so many fast food companies use the combination of red and yellow for their advertisement. From what Rohm and Haas Paint Quality Institute stated, the color red seems to increase our heart rate, which then makes us feel more energized and passionate. It’s a no wonder why the color red raises you heart rate, sine that color is associated with evil in many places. They also found that the color yellow imgresmakes people feel happier. So you can only imagine why food companies would choose these two colors, one makes you happy and the other makes you passionate.

I started to wonder why only fast food companies use these certain colors but companies like Starbucks and Dunkin Doughnuts don’t. Psychologist  explained that the colors orange and pink (Dunkin Doughnuts) are associated with enthusiasm and love. While the color green (Starbucks) makes people think more about the earth and serenity. It is weird that companies who serve basically the same product use such different colors, but still tend to do just as well as each other. That got me thinking that maybe color does more than just affect your mood, maybe it could affect your taste as well.

It turns out that your brain is actually affected by color when tasting something. This article tells us that there is a condition in our body, which is called synaesthesia which to put in simple terms, makes us assume a taste or feeling before we actually eat or touch it. For example, if you were given a drink red drink, you would assume it is fruit punch before you even taste it. This can affect the way taste things based off prior experience. There is a study where a teacher made her student put 3 different colors in water bottles, and then give taste test to other students to see what “flavor” they enjoyed more. All the water was the same and had no other flavoring, yet students still seemed to pick the blue colored drink. They said that they enjoyed the blueberry-flavored water the best.

This study perfectly shows how people will assume a taste just because of the color it has. The interesting thing about this study is that blue was the favorite flavor, even though as I just stated, blue is a color associated with mold and people tend to stay away from that color when eating.

To conclude, there seems to be a correlation between the colors fast food companies mcdonalds-90s-logo-svgused and the popularity of their store. The more yellow and red a company seems to use, the more popular it is. The darker colors seems to dis-interested people from eating, but in some cases such as Starbucks, it actually attracts you to drink their product. So if you want to open a restaurant, think about using red or yellow lettering and stay away from colors such as blue.

 

 

http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-the-body/how-color-affects-taste-and-smell

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/how-color-affects-your-appetite.html

http://www.colorpsychology.org/pink/

http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Wendy’s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s

I have been drinking soda all my life and never once thought about it is affecting my body. Its just a common thing in life to drink coke or pepsi when you go out to eat or watching a football game, but is there a harmful side effect to this?

 

First off we can just look at the amount of sugar that is in soda. Most sodas have about 39 grams of sugar per 12 ounce can or bottle. That is more than a slice of chocolate cake, which is closer to 30 grams. To think that one can of soda is just as bad as eating a slice of cake is insane, and that isn’t even considering the sodas that are more sugary than that. As many of us have learned in basic biology, sugar is used as energy in our body, which is a good thing right? But if you eat or drink too much such it can have very harmful side effects.

 

One of the major problems that sugar can cause you is tooth decay.This article states that the more sugar you have in your mouth, the more food you give the bacteria that resides in your mouth to eat it. This would slowly eat away at your teeth without you even realizing until it is too late. There is also the factor of the acidic properties of soda has.

 

Soda is on the acidic level when it comes to the pH scale, which is also something to worry about when drinking it. I already talked about how the sugar in soda affects

your teeth, but now there is proof that the acid in soda does as well. On the Wisconsin Dental Associations website, they say that the acid in diet sodas especially, since they are sugar free, is very detrimental to your teeth. It eats away at your enamel, which for teenagers, isn’t fully developed. Tooth enamel doesn’t grow back so when you lose it, you lose it.

 

So what I learned from looking up these facts is that if you like your teeth, try to avoid soda whenever you can.

 

http://www.livescience.com/36188-sugar-bad.html

Stock Photo by Sean Locke www.digitalplanetdesign.com

Stock Photo by Sean Locke
www.digitalplanetdesign.com

Sip All Day, Get Decay

Freshman 15

As I was walking behind two freshmen the other day, I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation about gaining the freshman fifteen. That got me to start thinking about why we gain weight our freshman year of college compared to every other year of school we have ever done.

 

You always hear parents saying that you gain the weight because you don’t have home cooked meals, but could that actually be the reason why? There is always an ample amount of quick fast food to pick up when you are late to class, but that could be the main cause of the weight gain. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, most people do not know how much calories are in the fast food products they eat. Most of these products are fried or use preservatives, which is very unhealthy for humans. This fact could help explain a lot about the sudden weight gain of freshman, since we know your body can only burn off so many calories before they start to turn to fat.

 

There was another fact that shocked me when I was reading this website abut how to beat the freshman fifteen, do not skip breakfast. The spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, said that skipping breakfast affects our metabolism and will make us eat more during the day compared to if you ate breakfast. I found this shocking because I am not a morning person so I am usually not hungry when I wake up and will go to class without eating. After reading that fact though, eating breakfast will become a new routine of my day.

freshman15bodyguy1-51

The real killer when it comes to weight gain, in my eyes, is the amount of alcohol you drink. Alcohol is usually forgotten that it is filled with empty calories and carbs. You may not think that one glass of wine will do much to you, but drinking that wine has as much calories as a slice of cake does. Another misconception is that beer has more calories than vodka so students will just drink vodka. A light beer has about 103 calories in while most vodka has about 100 calories in, so there really isn’t much of a difference. There’s also the fact that when you are stumbling home at two in the morning and see food, there is a good chance you will buy some. This leads me back to my first point of eating badly and gaining weight.

 

Lastly, many students in high school, including myself, played a sport, which gave them exercise almost everyday and kept them in shape. But now coming to college, these students may not be playing a sport and excising which would lead to weight gain, especially if they are eating badly and drinking a lot.

 

All in all, if you are a freshman and afraid of gaining the famous “freshman fifteen”, then all you really have to do is just watch what you are eating, be careful how much you drink, and exercise when you can. These easy steps could help you defeat the odds of gaining weight.

 

 

 

 

http://www.eatright.org/resource/health/weight-loss/eating-out/8-ways-to-beat-the-freshman-15

 

http://www.healthline.com/health/fast-food-effects-on-body

 

 

Class is too big

As many of you have found out in the past two weeks, Penn State has some enormous classes that make you feel overwhelmed at some points. After a while going to a class with three hundred people feels normal and when your friends tell you their largest class at their school is fifty, you are in shock. I am completely used to going to the Forum building and seeing countless faces that I never saw before since I am a Sophomore but for others, this could be stressful and affect how they learn. There have been many studies to see how class size affects the learning capability of students, and the outcomes are very shocking.

big-class

A study was once done with third graders over a four-year period where they had two class sizes, one above average the other was not. These two classes would take the same standardized test and compare their grades with each other after. Over those four years, on average the smaller class size did five percent better than the bigger ones with both reading and math. Of course these are third graders so it is hard to compare them to college students, but there is still fact that those smaller classes do better on test than the larger classes.

 

There is also an abundance of reasons why studies like this show smaller classes doing better than large ones. In a small class you are able to get ample one on one time with the teacher if you do not understand something. You can also become closer with your class and get help from them with work and other topics you do not understand. As I said before, larger classes could be overwhelming for some students so a smaller class would make them feel more comfortable and they could concentrate better.

There is also the factor of social Anxiety, which forty million people suffer from and seventy fiver percent of them have their first attack by twenty-two according to Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Interacting with people is one of the causes of social anxiety and when you are in a class of 300 you are going to be surrounded by people asking you questions and talking. Another cause for anxiety is asking questions, which can be stressful enough to do in a small class let alone a lecture hall. Once a person gets an anxiety attack they will have symptoms such as nausea and light-headedness, which would make it almost impossible to concentrate on the class going on.

I feel that there should be a new plan implemented to have smaller classes, even if that means only cutting down a class by fifty students. Studied are showing us that smaller classes are getting better test grades than large classes, and isn’t school all about getting the best education you can. Well if studied are showing that small classes help you learn the best, shouldn’t we be having smaller classes then?

https://www.adaa.org/finding-help/helping-others/college-students/facts

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/does-class-size-matter-research-reveals-surprises/

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=giant+class&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=613&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjejMSls_nOAhUFOCYKHbd8BmAQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=giant+classroom&imgrc=7fXYn66EvO4mAM%3A

Sup Guys

My name is Jarrod and I am a sophomore and a Health Policy and Administration major. During my last semester when I was applying for classes I was put on weight list for Accounting and thought I would make it in the class soon and that would make me get to my 12 credits mark. Well… I was wrong. I had to go to my advisor and ask her for help on what class I should take to at least get to 12 credits. She told me that I had to take another natural science and showed me all of the possible classes I could take. It came down between BiSci 3 and this course. After reading more about this class, I decided to choose this because I thought it sounded more up my alley and could teach me new interesting things.

I am not a science major because I have always wanted to be in a field where I could help someone by interacting with them. Whenever I think of science majors I think of people who are behind a desk in labs doing weird experiments, which just isn’t for me. I know that science majors do help people, mostly with the drugs they create to cure sicknesses, but I just wanted to be able to see the persons face when I was helping them.

 

Lightning looks dope here.

 

 

 

 

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/860/088/b4b.jpg