Category Archives: Issues in Science

Why Should We Start to Drink Green Tea?

Posted on March 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Health issues are a topic that everybody is interested in. People find healthy foods because they have irregular eating habits and living habits. Organic foods, vegetables, less meat consumptions, fresh fruits, supplements like vitamin D are major substances that most people are pursuing.

Amongst those various health-related foods, one of the most I love to have is green tea because of its huge benefits other than anything.

source: nokchawon

Green tea is the most well-known and popular beverage in the world. Even people living in non- tea culture conturies enjoy green tea for its health benefits.  The origin of green tea started in China and it is widely accepted that the first green tea appeared in history was in 2723 BC. Then green tea spread to East Asia and Britain, and then to the rest of the world.

source: teasenz

Then why is green tea so loved? What makes it so beneficial to our health?

Green tea has a variety of antioxidants and nutrients. Catechin and caffeine are well-known among them. These antioxidants and nutrients work in multiple beneficial ways in our body.

Here are few benefits of drinking green tea

 

1) Protect the heart health:

Having green tea prevent many risk factors for heart disease such as stroke, lowering blood pressure, and reducing cholesterol levels. Even after suffering from heart disease, green tea helps the recovery of heart cells.

2) Protect vision:

One of major nutrients in green tea is called catechins; a type of antioxidants. Because catechins are strong antioxidatns, they help to protect the eyes  from oxidation stress and also vision loss. Therefore, it would benefit to people who are surrounded by electronic devices.

3) Improve bone health:

Because bone is a living tisuue, it has certain balance between formation and resorption. As humans get old, this balance gets weaker too. Regular consumption of green tea helps to increase bone formation (mineralization) and weaken the cells that resorb it, so the balance of formation and resorption is maintained in normal.

4) Improve brain function:

Regular consumption of green tea every day could help to improve memory. According to the reseach done by University of Newcastle, green tea inhibits certain enzymes in the brain which cause memory loss. In addition, it is shown that green tea is also effective to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Green tea inhibits the enzyme in the brain which breaks down neurotransmitter (it transmits signals across brain nerve cells).

5) Prevent cancers:

According to the research in the Nature, regular consumption of green tea help preven cancers in humans by inhibition of enzyme that causes growth of cancers; typically stomach, breast, and prostate cancer.

 

source: ochaandco

Too much dosage of any foods or drinks always induce troubles as well as green tea. However, moderate intake of green tea regularly will change our lifestyle and health in highly beneficial ways. This is not hassle as much as visiting physicians and not hard as much as doing exercise everyday. This simple living habits can greatly change our health.

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The Myth About Cloth Bags

Posted on March 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

My family and I have always preferred getting the plastic bags from the grocery store, rather than buying the cotton ones. This means that I often had to guiltily avoid eye contact with the cashier when they asked if I wanted to buy plastic bags.

Source: Flickr

What I discovered last week in my chemistry class was, however, that plastic bags are better for the environment than cotton bags are. A study assessing the life cycle of supermarket carrier bags found that in order to have the same environmental impact as a HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene) bag – which is basically the plastic grocery bag – a cotton bag had to be reused 131 times!

When I read this report, I couldn’t figure out how they got this value. I mean, plastic must be worse for the environment than cloth in landfills. With some more digging, however, I found that the production of cotton bags is worse for the environment than the production of plastic. The cotton bag life cycle analysis, which assesses the impact on the environment from a product’s production to end of life, has a larger impact on the environment. It needs to be extracted from non-renewable resources, made in factories, and transported to areas all over the world.

I felt better about using plastic bags after this article, but not completely at ease with my carrier bag decision. The report states that they think the reusable cloth bags are much better in the long run, if they are used more than 131 times. The problem of plastic waste still exists, even though the myth of cloth bags is debunked.

So what can be the solutions to this massive environmental problem?

In the podcast below, presented by Isabel Hardman, they discuss the public misconceptions about replacement of plastic materials. One I found interesting mentions using bioplastics, which are grown organically, to replace the starting material for carrier bags. If I just heard about this on the news, I would believe it is a good idea to use plant-based starting materials. In reality, however, as mentioned in the podcast, the land required to generate enough plastic would be equal to 1/10 the land used for agriculture today. Further, the plastic generated from this material will degrade in landfills to form methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide.

So, the solution to the plastic problem may not be organic sources. In the video below, Leyla Acaroglu, from TED youtube channel, states that the solution has to be in our society’s product designs. She states that the biggest way to stop waste from increasing and thus halt climate change, would be to redesign how our community waste systems and products work to minimize waste in landfills.

So, all in all, many things that we believe are correct for the environment may not be as great as we think. The best thing for us to do is to reuse as many things as we can while trying to control the number of things we throw away. Don’t displace the action on to someone else, start small in your own home.

-Pravnit Kooner

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A “Smart” Way of Eating

Posted on March 12, 2018 by | 4 comments

You may know that it is a good idea to eat fruits and vegetables to keep healthy; you may know that we can lose weight by controlling the calories input. But do you know that we can simply stay healthy and lose weight by having a “smart” eating pattern while not changing what we eat? What does the eating pattern mean in this case?

Different eating patterns including a regular way and a non-traditional way –TRF, which stands for time-restricted feeding. TRF simply means we restrict the total amount of time of food consumption every day. The time spread of the regular eating pattern is usually 16 hours. But if we eat the same amount of food but reduce the total time spread to less than 16 hours, we can easily stay healthy and even lose weight by maintaining a relatively stable heartbeat.

The figure below can better explain different eating patterns.

[source: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/47/16647/F3.large.jpg]

As the five figures are shown above: the blue area of the circle represents the daytime and the black area represents the night time. The regular eating pattern is shown as the pattern A. It includes three large meals plus snacks during a 16-hour period of wakefulness. Pattern B, C, and D illustrate the concept of TRF, which is what we recommend in this article. The common idea shared among the TRF eating patterns is the limited eating time — the total time spread of food consumption is less than 16 hours.

To be more specific, eliminating midnight snack and limiting eating to 12 hours is the “smart” eating pattern that we are encouraged to have. A research conducted by Tina Hesman Saef found that fruit flies with only 12-hour spread had steadier heartbeats in old age than flies with unrestricted eating time.

[source: www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/main/articles/ti_fly_feeding_graph.png]

The experiment was designed to have two groups of flies. One group ate a cornmeal diet anytime they want; another group had access to same food for 12 hours only. Both groups ate about the same amount of food and had similar amounts of activity. The result of the research shows that after 5 weeks, the group with TRF had the steadier heartbeat. Stable heartbeat can help maintain fat metabolism by adjusting the tolerance of glucose and adjusting blood pressure. Therefore, TRF helps weight loss due to its effect on the heartbeat and metabolism.

However, does this eating pattern mean we only need to consider the time sprints of food consumption without thinking about the frequency or time of food taken? The answer is no. If we do not stick to the same eating schedule every day, our body clock will be in a mess. This will cause unstable heartbeat and harm our immune system. In general, the recommended frequency of food intake should be three times a day. A research on female participants with different meal frequency supports this by analyzing the level of energy intake and expenditure.

Does this sound great? We can easily lose weight by limiting our meal time while eating the same things! Try to eat within 12 hours every day and don’t eat the midnight snack. Let’s see how easy and comfortable it is to live a healthy life!

by Qingyue Wang

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Posted in Biological Sciences, Issues in Science

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Washing your Clothes: Hygiene or Pollution?

Posted on March 12, 2018 by | 1 comment

Whether you roll out of bed and slap on whatever you can find laying around, or are a regular attendee of Shopaholics Anonymous, you at one point wear and wash your clothing. Did you know however, that washing your clothes is actually doing more harm than good?

Early Electric Washing Machines
Published under the Creative Commons License; photo courtesy of a Wikimedia User

The Problem

For centuries, people have been washing their clothes to rid them of the foul odours and bacteria build up; with the invention of the electric washing machine in the early twentieth century, washing clothes has since become a common household chore.  However, what the masses neglect to realize with every load of laundry they do, is the fact that millions of tiny fibres, known as microplastics, are released into the water ways, which, eventually find their way to the ocean.

Many recent studies have been targeted at investigating the exact amounts of microplastics released each time a load of laundry is washed. One such study showed that an average 13-pound load of laundry can release five-hundred thousand fibres from polyester and close to one million from acrylic-based clothing.  The numbers are shocking.

Ocean Plastic Pollution Published under the Creative Commons License; photo courtesy of Wikimedia User Kevin Krejci

In fact, one of the worst culprits in polluting the World’s Oceans is the water-repellent raincoat. Chances are, most people have at least one rain jacket hanging in their closet. These jackets are made up of special microplastics known as Perfluorinated Chemicals, or PFCs. They give the raincoat its waterproofing properties but are shed when washed. Once in the oceans, they do not break down. These fibres, which are not visible to the human eye, pose massive threats to, and have adverse effects on marine life. Studies have shown that fish are particularly prone to the effects of microplastics. When they ingest microplastics, it is not passed out as waste. Therefore, they accumulate. Consequently, their digestion is affected, and many organisms do not survive to the age where they can reproduce, destroying entire ecosystems.

The video below shows the the rising threat of such a problem and highlights that immediate action needs to be taken.

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Video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHCgA-n5wRw

What can we do to help?

A practical solution that we can implement in our own lives is making changes to our shopping and washing habits. For instance, instead of buying many cheap basics loaded with synthetic fibres with the expectation that they last a year and then are dumped away, it is better to buy a few quality items that are not composed of as many synthetic fibres. Furthermore, as oppose to washing clothes on a daily basis or in high frequency, it is better to wash them less regularly. Lastly, we can take it upon ourselves to hand wash out clothes and then instead of throwing the water down the drain, where it will end up in the oceans, perhaps use the waste water to water the garden or other agriculture. Simple solutions like this can prevent the shedding of massive amounts of synthetic fibres into the ocean, and reduce the risks faced by marine life.

By: Wesley Louie

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