Chocolate Milk after working out

In response to Briana’s comment, I decided to look into chocolate milk.  It was a lot harder to find any articles that talked negatively about chocolate milk.  This might be because of the amount of coaches and fitness magazines that promote chocolate milk.  I found articles from WebMD, chocolatemilk.com, a Healthy Lifestyle blog, and Fitness magazine.  They all suggested pretty much the same thing: chocolate milk is a great way to restore fatigued muscles. 

Apparently, Michael Phelps was seen drinking chocolate milk after his Olympic swims.  So it must be good for you if Michael Phelps drinks it.  Another drink that he uses is called Pure Sport, created at the University of Texas.  It has the “right” ratio of carbohydrates to whey protein (2.67).  But guess what? 1% chocolate milk has that same carb to whey protein ratio. 

When compared with other sports drinks and water, chocolate milk has less sugar and artificial colorings and more vitamins and nutrients.  The only bad things I could find on chocolate milk is that it has more calories than most energy drinks.  For athletes like Michael Phelps, a large amount of calories are needed, however for those people who are working out to lose weight, chocolate milk might not be the best option.  Also, you need to be careful about what chocolate milk you choose.  Some milk has antibiotics or hormones added, as seen in my last post. 

So from what I have gathered, choose a pre-made organic chocolate milk or just make your own mix from your milk at home.  I was not able to find anything on brands of chocolate milk so you will have to look at the labels for yourself.  I hope this helps. 

Since there are so many other athletes out there, has anyone else had a suggestion from a doctor or coach to drink or not drink chocolate milk?  I have never played anything competitively enough to get that advice I guess.

got milk?

I love milk. My family went through about 4 gallons a week before we all went off to college.  But when I got to college, I realized that not everyone loved it as much as we did. I am the only one of my roommates that keeps milk in our refrigerator.  I have heard claims that it isn’t good for you; this breaks my heart and so this post was a little difficult for me to write. 

I found 2 articles on the subject: Milk: Good or Bad? and Does Milk Really Do a Body Good?.  There have been large efforts by doctors and industry to campaign for people to drink more milk.  The "got milk?" campaign was a huge media effort that everyone has seen.

The first article suggests that raw, organic milk from grass-fed cows is good milk.  Because of the business and economic demands, the milk industry has become more unhealthy.  First, as everyone has probably heard, rBGH (Bovine Growth Hormone) is given to many cows to make them produce more milk than they normally would.  This seems unhealthy but there have been studies that show that there is not effect on humans.  Believe what you want.

Second, pasteurization is said to destroy the good (probiotics) and bad bacteria in the milk.  It also destroys the key enzymes that help us digest milk properly.  It changes the calcium quantity and solubility.  The body is thought to absorb less calcium when processed milk is consumed.

Next, homogenization is the process that breaks fats up into smaller sizes so that it does not collect at the top of the milk.  This is thought to allow the enzyme xanthine oxidase to pass into the blood stream intact.  It causes buildup of cholesterol in the arteries.

Grain-fed cows (as opposed to grass-fed) have an imbalance in fat and fatty acid ratios.  Grass-fed cows have much more omega-3, which is good for your health.

The second article references Cornell University’s study that shows that high animal calcium and animal protein intake is the primary cause of degenerative disease!!  This seems exactly opposite from what we have been hearing all along from our doctors and the media. 

I’m not sure how I feel about this topic yet.  I haven’t found any good articles that are pro-milk that address all these concerns.  However, I have found several sources that tell different reasons for not believing milk is healthy.  This stirs me up a little bit.  Let me know if any of you have heard these anti-milk (if you will) arguments before or if I have just been in my own little world full of milk.

Trans Fats

Did the title scare you?  Did your arteries tense up a little?  Or did you imagine a delicious fried chicken meal? 

The media has done a good job at creating a fear of trans fats.  Every label on vending machine chips has “zero trans fat” on it.  So that must be really bad stuff if it takes up so much space on the front of the bag.  But is that all the public knows about it?  That it’s bad?  And what about the other fats?

There are several types of fats including monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, saturated, and trans.  These names are given based on their chemical structure.  The two unsaturated fats are considered to be the “good” fats.  These are found in fish, nuts, etc.  They don’t have a hydrogen atom to fill every carbon atom.  This allows the carbon to form a double bond, which creates a kink in the structure.  

Saturated fats are molecules in which the carbon atoms all are saturated with hydrogen atoms.  Trans fats are “hydrogenated”, artificially made fats that are similar to saturated fats; the difference is in the orientation of the hydrogen atoms in the middle of the molecule.  

Trans fats are found in fried food and also in foods like piecrusts that have a long shelf life (the reason trans fats are added).  The saturated fats are nice and full of hydrogen atoms and happy.  They easily stack and pack together.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature while unsaturated fats are like liquid oils.  This is because of the chemical structure.  Think of paper.  Regular sheets (saturated and flat molecules) are easy to stack together.  When the paper is kinked or crumpled (molecules of unsaturated fats), you can fit a lot less into a certain space.  Solids are more ordered structures than liquids.  The disorder in the mono and polyunsaturated fats make them the “good” fats because they can’t stack up (like the saturated and trans fats) in your arteries to form clots and block blood flow. 

So saturated fats are bad; trans fats are worse.  They have similar structure to the saturated fats but the main difference is that they are artificially made.  Our bodies don’t need them.  Our bodies know how to break down and “deal with” small amounts of saturated fats.  Trans fats interrupt the absorption of essential hormones, vitamins and nutrients.  They lower our “good” cholesterol and raise our bad.  They interrupt bodily chemical reactions.

The FDA has begun taking steps to reduce the trans fat in food.  Companies are required to put it on the labels, but if it is less than .5 grams per serving, they can say there is zero trans fat.  There are a lot of people that think the FDA needs to protect the public from very harmful ingredients like trans fats.  The following video is from a website called Ban Trans Fats.   

After watching this 2 min video, do you believe the FDA is slacking in helping keep our country safe from ingesting harmful foods?

Self Evaluation

I couldn’t find anything that said what this needed to include.  I remember you said you wanted us to tell you about all our activity.

As you can easily find, I have posted 6 articles so far.  The first one was my welcome article; my second one was my first subject related post on money and happiness.  My third post that I wrote, but didn’t post until later, was the reading reflection.  I talked about how the reading would help me to write better posts in the future.  Then came my self-interview that we did in class.  My fifth post was about our daily commute.  I tried to frame this article to our class of seniors that are about to graduate (I’m assuming).  I wanted to give them a little heads up that commuting can really reflect how your day starts and ends.  My final post for this period was about the brain.  At one point in my college career I became really interested in the brain.  I did a few projects on it and so I hope to continue to post articles pertaining to the brain’s relation to health and happiness. 

As for the commenting that I’ve done.  So far I have really liked the following blogs and I have tried to comment on them when applicable: ScanMein, Gene Cuisine, and Culinary Chemistry.  This week was the first time I have commented on Technology Complicated and Its not just fun and Games but I plan to follow those more in the future too. 

I have posted about 10 comments, mostly on these that are my favorite so far.  I have also responded to comments on my own blog when needed.  I have begun to look for other blogs that have similar topics, specifically the ones that were suggested to me by our prof.  I am becoming more familiar with what they post and I hope to start commenting on them as well.

Please see my self-interview to get my views on how I think I am doing and what I am working towards in my future blogs.  

Train your brain

I wanted to post these two videos because it is easy to see that there is a distinct difference in the way it is framed for the audience that it is addressed to.  The first one that features Sam Wang is a 3-minute talk about the resilience of the brain; or how fast the brain can get back to a normal happiness state after a tragic event.  It is a talk that is very easy to understand and doesn’t get too in depth about how’s or why’s of the topic, just a little bit to spark the interest of the audience (something discussed in section 4.1 of the book!!).  

The movie would not import into my blog directly so here is the link.

Sam Wang on Happiness and the Brain

The second video features Richard Davidson.  He is apparently very well known in the neuroscience community because when I typed in ‘neuroscience and happiness’ into Google, he came up on most of the articles and videos.  His talk is framed very differently, it is directed to an audience with a much higher level of education because it was harder for him to keep my attention for this significantly longer video.  I would suggest just watching the first 30 seconds or 1 minute of his talk to see that although he uses a lot of higher-level jargon, he is very animated and makes you want to understand what he is talking about.  I want to look more into the “social and emotional education” that he is talking about and do a post about it later.  I also thought it was cool that he starts off by mentioning the brain’s ‘plasticity’ (aka resilience) just like Sam Wang.

The Daily Commute

 “The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.”  Although most of us don’t ever drive more than 10 minutes everyday to campus, almost all of us probably have had the pleasure of commuting much longer distances to work over the summers.  The article Commuting from Science Blogs takes a look at how much unhappiness driving causes.  

More than 3.5 million Americans drive over 3 hours everyday to work!!  The daily commute is greatly underestimated when people are choosing a location to live.  Many will choose a larger suburban house with an hour drive vs. a smaller house with a 10-minute drive.  Is that extra 1.5 hours in the car everyday really worth the extra square footage?  This is definitely something to think about for all of us who will be house hunting within the next few months to a year.

Another similar article was written in 2008 for the LA Times.  Psychologists are hearing more and more complaints about traffic.  We live in an age of instant text messages and 4G phones, but we have to wait for hours in traffic.  This is not what we are used to dealing with.

This article suggests that the best way to limit the psychic toll that road rage takes is to think about sitting in traffic differently.  Listen to an audio book or just put on some music that helps you relax.  This is the buffer time between work and home.  Both can be crazy in their own respects so an hour to relax and listen to your favorite talk show could be just what you need.

2/2 Reflection on readings

My last post was a summary of a study that was published in Science.  From the readings, I am beginning to gain a better understanding of how to create a more ‘informal’ setting of learning, as explained by Sarah Davies in section 2.2 of Investigating Science Communication in the Information Age.  The traditional ‘formal’ dialogue is defined to be politically driven in a sense.  My last post isn’t necessarily formal, but it does almost fall into the ‘deficit’ model of SC.  I summarized the study, and it ended up being a long post still.  In my future posts, I plan to try and write shorter posts, ask some open-ended questions, especially for the more controversial topics, to try and engage the audience more.

Blog Self Interview

I have 2 blog posts that are still a work in progress so I will assess myself based on the only two that are actually posted.

My first main goal is to make my posts shorter. I will talk about how and why I will do this in my next post (my reflection on the readings post). I realized that my Money CAN buy happiness article was too long while I was writing it but I couldn’t stop myself or make it shorter.

The purpose of this blog is to fulfill an assignment (obviously); however my personal purpose while completing this assignment is to find interesting little tid-bits of information that most people will never research but will hopefully remember in the future. For our first assignment, we had to find an interesting blog and recommend it to CommForge. The one I liked, Dean’s Corner, was written by a PhD educator and academic scholar that used to work in the pharmaceutical industry. He writes several short and interesting articles everyday to just give people a little bit of news on science topics. My goal was to format my blog a little like his but with a slightly smaller focus of the topic.