Nutrition: My Opinion

Nutrition is defined as “the process of obtaining the food necessary for health and growth” (Google). This is a very general definition, however, for me nutrition is not only what we eat, but also how we live and our attitude towards food.

Source: Aria Ziai

Nutrition and diet are a part of my daily life, as I am an athlete, student and person who is very active. I don’t always eat very healthy snacks or meals, but at least one meal a day has vegetables, meat and other foods with nutritious value. My family makes meals daily, however, like every family, we have moderation. I have grown up to believe that diet and nutrition are important, but having an unhealthy snack or meal is not a bad thing and teaches moderation. As a kid, nutrition was an important part of my life as I was growing and I believe this emphasis has helped me try to be healthier in my decisions as a teenager with more choices and freedom with what I eat.

Source: Wikimedia

During high school and college, nutrition and the attention towards diet diminish. Nutrition should not only be something we are conscious of as kids or parents, but as teens and young adults as well. If we eat a generally balanced diet with homemade meals and healthy foods, then we will be more physically fit and it will help us in the long run. Nutrition at a young age is more important than most people think it is and I believe more awareness and efforts need to be made for a healthier lifestyle for all.

Source: User beeki on pixabay

Nutrition, experiences and the decisions to put something in our body are purely personal and unique to every individual. My experiences make me appreciate nutrition and being healthy, so I hope I can continue to make nutrition an important part of my daily life. I’m not qualified to tell somebody what to do, however I believe that eating right can improve not only your physical appearance, but how you feel and your attitude towards situations.

Source: Wikimedia

Here are some links to outside sources that have more information on nutrition in general:

Nutrition.gov

What is nutrition?

 

I hope you enjoyed reading my opinion on nutrition and health, make sure to comment and check out some of my other posts!

Heart Disease in Women: A Healthy Solution

Hello again! Today I will be talking about what other members of my Sports Med and myself did to increase awareness of heart disease and help prevent heart disease!

 

We used the Design Thinking Model to create our product, which is this website. There are five steps: Empathize, Design, Ideate, Prototype and Test. I will describe briefly what we did for each step to create our website to help lower the rate of heart disease in women!

Design Model Thinking Process

We initially began our project learning about heart disease in women, who’s affected, what the causes are, what the symptoms are and other statistics on how many women are killed each year and more. We empathized with those with heart disease, learning what they are going through, why and how there is no real cure to heart disease, only ways to manage it. Women that have heart disease, we realized, are usually older, in less physical form than they should be and often genetics play a role. However, because heart disease is so prevalent and widespread, there is no real definition for women who have heart disease, any women can get it, which is the scary part. Check out this video, a PSA I helped create, for some more quick facts on heart disease.

We learned that heart disease in women is usually caused by other factors in one’s health, which lead us to believe that if the initial health of a women can be kept on track, the number of women with heart disease could be lowered. If a women has previous health issues, her likelihood of developing heart disease increases. Health issues are caused by poor diet, lack of exercise and lack of healthy habits. Overall health, specifically diet and exercise, I believe, is what I defined as the main problem that could, and should, be addressed.

To address this problem, my group members and I brainstormed and came up with various ideas. Because of the limited amount of time we had to work together, we concluded that a virtual product would be best so we could collaborate on our own time and in our own homes. We wanted to make a product that could be seen by many people and could offer a simple solution to a complex problem. We determined that diet and exercise are key, controllable factors that we could inform, give ideas on and motivate people to live healthier lifestyle. We brainstormed solutions that were virtual, and could address health, and we could have done an app, a Facebook group or page, or various other virtual products. However, we decided to create a completely new website.

 

The prototype that we decided to create is a website, helpforhearts.wordpress.com, that gives information on heart disease, as a background, places to donate and volunteer, but mainly it lists healthy recipes and workouts for people to refer to so they can improve on a certain portion of their diet or daily exercise. Many people don’t know that healthy can taste good, and so the goal of the website is to create a location where people at risk or that have heart disease can go on, search a recipe for dinner and have a multitude of healthy options that will help improve their health and heart disease.

The home page of our website

The website is only recently published so we cannot say whether it has made an impact or not yet, however there have been a couple of visitors, which is a positive sign. There are multiple tabs, drop down menus and features that make the website, in my opinion, visually appealing. We have asked some people, and they said that they enjoyed the website, finding it helpful with tips on being healthy for diet and exercise. We hope to gain more feedback on what we should improve and how we can bring even more awareness to this disease and how to prevent it. I cannot determine whether impact on heart disease itself has been made, however, I hope that this website gives people more ideas and creative ways to stay healthy and fit, while enjoying themselves!

 

Researching women and heart disease, coming up with solutions and creating this website was a great experience that I learned a lot from. It is a horrible disease that needs more awareness and solutions and I hope the website and tips help the goal of more awareness and more prevention.

 

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and remember to check out our website to see how you can help!

 

 

Sources Used:

Women’s Heart Foundation

CDC

The Heart Foundation

American Heart Association

Mayo Clinic

 

Introduction to the diets of Dolphins

Hello! This is my first blog post and I’d like to talk about my research I did this summer and how it got me excited for AP biology.

So this summer I was part of an internship at the UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab in the Mehta Lab. This internship allowed me to research and look at the diets of marine mammals in the family Delphinidae.

 

The research was conducted to gain more insight into what Delphinidae eat, because eventually the data will contribute to a marine mammal database that has information on diet and all other components of marine mammals’ lives. My mentor had done diet analysis for phocids, and decided that I could undertake the task for other marine mammals, and I chose to do Delphinidae.

 

I was the main researcher on this project, but I was mentored and guided by Sarah Kienle, and Rita Mehta, Chris Law and Vikram Baliga all gave me advice and helped me when needed.

Before I even started looking at diet information, I familiarized myself with Delphinidae and found that not just dolphins are in the family, but also whales such as Killer Whales, Pilot Whales and Right Whale Dolphins. Once I did this, I mined through databases and other works of literature to find all possible diet information on the 39 species of dolphins.

Picture found here

I took the data I found in literature and in papers and calculated the overall diet composition for each dolphin species using an equation. I am not sure if I am allowed to share this data publicly yet, so I’m not going to provide the exact results. However, I will give some basic information on my results. I found that overall, within Delphinidae, the major prey species is Actinopterygii, or ray-finned fishes. Cephalopoda, or squids, are also a large portion of dolphins’ diet. Each specific delphinid species has a different major prey species, however that would be a lot of information and detail for this brief overview.

Picture found here

I’m not going to go into more detail about the results, however, the results are complete and can lead to future studies relating to dietary data. The results will eventually be put up, on a database I believe, however I am not sure how soon or exactly where it will be.

 

The data collected from this project is valuable because it provides insight into what exactly Delphinidae are eating, that means we know what to feed them if they are in captivity and how fluctuations in fish and squid numbers will affect dolphins. Also, by knowing what they eat, we can also look at the morphology of Delphinidae and see how diet and morphology correlate. Finally, by learning what fish Delphinidae eat, scientists can see if the fish being consumed have high levels of mercury or other toxins and eventually see the chain reaction in the food chain. To learn more about dolphin diet and mercury, watch the video below!

 

 

I’m very happy that I got the opportunity to do this research and it really showed me what I’m interested in and what researching involves. I’m looking forward to more research opportunities and chances to work with marine mammals!

 

Pictures from:

The group picture I have permission from Chris Law to use