Author Archives: andrea olaizola

If you feel stressed by school: drink coffee!

Posted on October 29, 2017 | 4 comments

Source: Flickr

As a student, getting close to the end of the semester can be quite stressful. Assignment deadlines and exams are building up in all the courses so you get overwhelmed and feel extra tired all the time. Then, this stress evolves into anxiety and feeling so down that the motivation to get good grades is lost. You reach a point just want to get over with the semester alive. Does this sound familiar? I bet you’ve felt like this at least once in your life, I know I have! Well, an easy solution to help you feel better is drinking coffee. I know, we usually think of coffee only as a source to keep us awake. Even some of us might have grown up with the idea that drinking coffee is bad for your health, but turns out it is actually beneficial to our mental health.

Coffee has been shown to help decrease depression and stress by boosting your mood and sense of well being. Consuming coffee, inhibits the adenosine hormone in the brain, which is the one responsible for making you feel sleepy and down. This inhibition leads to a state of alertness and it is related to increased dopamine, which is a stimulant in the brain that is responsible for making you feel good. Moreover, that feeling of enhanced alertness is what helps to keep us awake and feel more energized. This also has been proven to increase memory, attention spam and cognitive functions. Drinking coffee can improve our mood and feel help us feel more energized, thus, it reduces stress which helps us be more productive to excel in our courses.

However, everything in excess is bad for your health. Taking excessive amounts of coffee can be detrimental to your well-being. Caffeine is considered a drug, meaning that we can create an addiction to it and if not taken in moderation. If this happens, a day without coffee can actually make us feel worse by producing withdrawal symptoms, which ultimately makes us feel more stressed. Essentially your body gets used to the benefits coffee gives you and stops moderating these hormones naturally since caffeine does it for our organism instead. To avoid this, parameters of the amount of caffeine that can be safely consumed daily have been stablished. For healthy adults the recommended amount is no more than 400g of caffeine per day, which is about 240 ml or three 8oz cups of coffee per day.

As we know, student life can be very stressful and so we need to take care of our mental health if we want to be productive, have good grades, and be happy. Drinking coffee can help make us feel better and also keep us energized and focused in school. But, as everything in life, moderation is key to get all the benefits and avoid the disadvantages.

Andrea Olaizola.

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Vitamin supplementation can actually be harmful for your health.

Posted on October 17, 2017 | 4 comments

Vitamin Supplements Source: Flickr

I bet you have taken vitamin supplementation at some point in your life. Why not? It can only be good for you, since all we hear about is how taking vitamins is good for your health, right? Wrong. Turns out there is a big misconception and that overdosing your body with vitamin intake can actually have detrimental effects for your body, even to the point to even increase the risk of getting cancer.

There is such thing as vitamin overdose which is toxic for your body. You might think that the more the better, right? Turns out excess of certain types of vitamins are not simply excreted by your body as one might think, but they rather build up in your organism and negatively affect your health. Specifically, the vitamins that negatively impact your health in excess are vitamins A, D, E and B. 

Different vitamin excess causes different symptoms. For vitamin A, some symptoms include: headaches, irritability, abdominal pain, nausea, renal stones, anorexia, etc. for vitamin D, they include: anorexia, constipation, depression, hypertension, seizures, etc. For vitamin E: fatigue, weakness, hemorrhage, affected inmune system, etc. Lastly symptoms for vitamin B include: paralysis, convulsions, fatigue, light sensibility, liver damage, insomnia, skin lesions, etc. And this are just a few out of a longer list of the symptoms for each type of vitamin.

This excess is rarely due to overconsumption of vitamins through food, since vitamin content in fruits and vegetables is not as high as in supplements. Vitamin intake through a healthy and balanced diet is usually enough to be good for our health without having the risk exceeding and get to toxic levels. These excess are mainly due to vitamin supplement intake. Furthermore, there are several studies that indicate that taking vitamin supplementation for a long period of time might increase the risk of cancer. For example, long term use of vitamin A and vitamin E supplementation have been linked with incidence of lung cancer.

This is not say vitamin supplementation is always bad for your health. There are many studies about all the positive effects of vitamins. We need vitamins for our body to function optimally. However, dietitians suggest to take vitamin supplementation in specific cases were intake of certain vitamins is crucial, for example vitamin B9 during pregnancy. If not required for a specific medical reason, people should aim to obtain vitamins from food sources rather than by supplements to avoid toxic levels that can affect your health negatively. Sometimes more does not necessarily means better, but rather the oposite.

-Andrea Olaizola.

 

 

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Can electric cars be actually worse for the environment?

Posted on September 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

Electric cars are not as green as people think according to several scientific studies. Although they are popularly known as being eco-friendlier than using gas fuel, in the long run it might contribute even more to global warming. However, this new technology is still under development so it is early for scientist to be certain about the long term effect.

There are several aspects to take into account when determining why electric batteries might generate more contamination than gas motors. While using the car might not emit any greenhouse gas: making their batteries, recycling its chemicals, and the source of electricity that powers the car contribute in such extent that in the overall it might be more harmful to the environment than gas fueled cars if not assessed.

Most electric car batteries, as in Tesla, are lithium and cobalt based which require much more energy for their production than a conventional car motor. The energy required for mining these compounds is higher than to extract oil. Additionally, chemical compounds used for their manufacturing release greenhouse gases that contribute equally as CO2 to global warming. However, the emission caused by extracting these metals is substantially lower than the CO2 emitted by cars. Still it accounts for the fact that manufacturing electrical cars contribute to global warming.

Moreover, chemicals used for electrical batteries are very toxic for the environment if not properly recycled. While this may not affect us today because regular cars have not been completely replaced by electric cars, in the future it may be a problem when the amount of worn batteries are substantially higher. When this replacement happens, there would be a greater amount of people with cars since the cost of electricity to charge a car is not as high as gas, making it more affordable for people to own one. At the beginning of the transition this does not pose a major threat, but it should be taken into account for the future when the amount of worn batteries needed for handling as toxic waste or recycle is much greater.

Most importantly, the greatest concern for environmental impact of electrical cars is the source of energy that powers them. If the country you live in derives its energy from burning oil and coal, the CO2 emission it produces is significantly greater than that of a regular car during its lifetime, posing a greater threat for global warming. As the transition towards electrical cars takes place, there would be greater energy production demand, so much more needs to be generated. If this energy is not from an ecological source, the pollution generated to supply this amount of energy is significantly higher, making electric cars actually much more contaminant than using gas-powered cars.

In the overall, electric cars appear to be better for the environment than regular cars but that does not mean that they don’t contribute to global warming. Moreover, if is not well assessed it can actually be more harmful for the environment in the long run.

Andrea Olaizola

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