Tag Archives: Health and Nutrition

Soylent is for People!

Have you ever been too busy to eat? Have you been too lazy to cook and just ordered fast food instead? Well Soylent may have a solution for you.

Soylent is an unassuming, off-white meal replacement drink that claims to be “nutritionally-complete”. While many people may recognize the name from the 1970’s dystopian film “Soylent Green”, this version, however, fortunately isn’t made from people.

Soylent Green

Source: Flickr Creative Commons

Soylent proudly markets its use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in its aim to feed people nutritiously, affordably, and sustainably.  It also claims to not be designed for dieting, but to be a better alternative to eating junk food in busy situations. Sounds pretty good, but ever since its release in 2014, its reception has been fairly controversial.

Soylent products have received criticism from the science community. Nutritionist Fiona Lawson says that a processed, manufactured drink can’t possibly replace the “thousands of health-boosting vitamins” and nutrients from natural foods. Another nutritionist, Stacey Lockyer, argues that meal replacements should only be used occasionally for limited periods of time. Moreover, the drink was actually banned in Canada in 2017. It wasn’t recalled because it doesn’t pose any immediate health risks, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) stated that Soylent did not meet the requirements of a meal replacement.

Source: Soylent.com

So who is actually drinking Soylent? The drink is hugely popular in the Silicon Valley, tech, and gaming sectors. Soylent can be frequently spotted as a sponsor for busy gaming livestreamers and hackathons, which are events where people program projects for 24+ hours. In these cases, the drink provides people with a healthier alternative to fast food and starvation. Furthermore, British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine representative, Daniel O’Shaughnessy, describes Soylent as preferable to drinks such as Slimfast, because of Slimfast’s high amounts of sugar.

Little is known on the effects of consuming Soylent exclusively long-term. One 10-day study showed that participants who exclusively consumed Soylent had increased levels of good gut bacteria that reduce the risk of obesity. While promising, longer more comprehensive studies would be more useful.

Given the opportunity, would you try Soylent?

 

Katrina

So, What’s the Deal with Vitamin D?

With spring approaching, I’m sure we’re all excited about getting a little more sunshine. As most of us know, the sun provides us with vitamin D, but have you ever wondered how it works exactly?

Let’s first start by explaining what vitamin D is. Vitamin D is a vitamin that is present in foods such as salmon, canned tuna, beef liver, egg yolks, and fortified dairy products. However, you would need to be eating them almost every day in order to get a sufficient amount of vitamin D. So instead, most of us get the rest of our vitamin D through the sun. When the sun’s ultraviolet B (UVB) rays make contact with your skin, the rays provide enough energy for the cholesterol in your skin cells to undergo vitamin D synthesis.

An image of a woman outside enjoying the sun. Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash

This sunshine vitamin has many benefits and is essential for maintaining optimal health. Its most important role is to promote the body’s absorption of calcium and phosphorus, two minerals that are key for maintaining strong healthy bones, especially in children and the elderly. In addition to bone health, vitamin D is also crucial for keeping your immune system healthy so it can fight against bacterial, viral, and fungal infections. Studies have also linked healthy levels of vitamin D to slowing down or decreasing the chances of getting colon cancer and prostate cancer.

A black and white image of a man looking upset. Photo by Brut Carniollus on Unsplash

On the other hand, vitamin D deficiency can lead to rickets in children, a painful condition due to misshapen bones. In elderly individuals, it can cause osteomalacia, a condition where the bones soften, leading to bone pain and muscle weakness. New research has also shown that not getting enough vitamin D can even lead to cognitive disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

Does learning all this make you want to run into the sunshine yet? The optimal amount of midday sunlight exposure you should aim for for healthy vitamin D levels is 10-30 minutes several times a week, but a bit longer if you have darker skin. Also, just as an FYI, most glass windows end up blocking the UVB wavelength, so on your next study break, maybe opt for a quick walk outside to ensure you reap the vitamin D health benefits.

– Kristy Ip

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Trying to lose weight? Avoid the Tapeworm Diet!

 

Humans may use half of their imagination for weight loss. To be slim, all kinds of brain-opening methods of weight loss are endless, such as taking ribs, freezing diet, cutting stomach, swallowing cotton balls, vomiting… Among the strange weight-loss methods, the Tapeworm Diet is the most dangerous.

However, the mite diet is so simple and rude that it always attracts people who want to take shortcuts. Just take a piece of mites, no need for diet and exercise, and wait for the eggs to hatch in the body. These parasites will start their mission to help the body absorb the hateful nutrients. This completely hits the pain point of human beings who want to lie down and get thin.

So, is it feasible to use mites to lose weight? First, let’s understand how terrible aphids are.

Among all parasites, aphids are a heterogeneous species. As an intestinal parasite, they are mainly known as “big” and longer than the human body. However, they can hide in your body for a few years, but you cannot feel their existence. You will not be told by doctors that there are alien invasions until your headache is unbearable, and you are tortured by nausea, vomiting, and convulsions.

Taenia saginata (beef tapeworm) and Taenia solium (pork tapeworm) are mostly used for weight loss. Eggs or gravid proglottids are passed with feces. Thus, Cattle and pigs became infected by ingesting vegetation contaminated with eggs or gravid proglottids.

life-cycle of pig tapeworms and cattle tapeworms ( courtesy of DPDx)

 

Take the pigs (T. solium) as an example. When the mites enter the pig stomach, the stomach acid protease will digest the outer shell. After the egg shell breaks, the aphid larvae will escape. At this stage, the larvae have six hooks. Therefore, they can easily pass through the stomach wall and reach other parts of the body. In general, the destination of them is striated muscle. But some of them will reach other parts of the body, including the brain, liver, eyes and subcutaneous tissues. Once these mites settle down, it grows into a capsule thatprotects them from the immune system. In this stage, they are called cysticercosis.

If people do not fully heat pork before eating them, these capsules will enter the human body alive. They will be encapsulated by digestive juice and transform into adults that have head segments to adsorb on the human intestinal wall. Aphids use fluff to absorb the gut nutrition for their own needs.

However, what happens next is creepy. Aphids’ neck segments will continue to split and produce more body segments which will gradually mature. Adult tapeworms can shed ten segments one day, and each body section contains tens of thousands of eggs. After growing into sic hooks, these mites will enter various tissues and organs. As a result, the host people will have cysticercosis.

If they invade our skin, it is skin cysticercosis.

It can be said that the cysticercosis that normal humans try to avoid, the extreme dieters are open to this. The locusts are not only consuming calories but also consumes the host himself or herself.

 

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Stop cheating yourself! Probiotics can’t treat your stomach flu

Imagine your cousin is terribly exhausted by a stomach flu that he accidentally got during the weekend, and he pukes everywhere. Which treatment would you choose? One pill full of probiotics so that they can fight away the ‘bad germ’ that roams your cousin’s gut? Or just a simple hot water bag and a bowl of thin soup? Which treatment do you think will help you get rid of the terrible puking faster? I bet most of you would choose to take the probiotics, since from what we learnt on the internet, probiotics are effective in fighting away the ‘bad germs’ that lies inside your gut. They can adjust your gut microbes, make your skin looks better, help you digest food more efficiently, and finally build a well-regulated and healthy gut environment. More importantly, they are not as merciless as the antibiotics, which will kill whatever left in the gut and leave a gut free of both good and bad germs behind. At least, that was what most videos on Youtube say about the benefits of probiotics.

However, is it true? Is it possible for just a small pill of probiotics to have the ability to save your gut? How good are these small, almost invisible to naked eyes creatures? The answer,unfortunately, is no. In the case of a gut inflammation caused by virus or bacteria, the probiotics can do nothing better than simple placebos. According to two recent big studies in the U.S., probiotics are inefficient in preventing the development of moderate-to-severe gut inflammation, and symptoms of the researched subject shows no difference against the placebo group.

One of the research mainly focused on Lactobacillus rhamnosus and L. helveticus, both are commonly used probiotics. Participants of this research are 3 to 48 months old children that has been diagnosed as gastroenteritis, commonly known as the gut flu or the stomach flu. In this study, participants were randomly selected and separate into two groups, one receives the probiotics while the other group receive the placebo for two weeks. At the end of the study, the outcome of the participants were evaluated to determine if the probiotics or the placebo had treated their illness.  Among all the participants who received the probiotics, 26.1% of them developed into a moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis, while 24.7% of the placebo group developed a moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis. This means that the probiotics is of no use in preventing the development of moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis.

cartoon shows how probiotics help us to regulate a healthy life

So what exactly should we do when we are facing a gastroenteritis? And is it true that probiotics are all useless? Researchers have not given a clear answer yet. What is true is that next time when a stomach flu strikes, do not panic, before purchasing the expensive probiotics, keep asking yourself do you really need it.