As I've mentioned before, I think schools need to step up their game, especially when it comes to educating students about food and money. I've touched on the money aspect before, so now it's time to discuss why food education is so important. I think it's easiest to break this into three sections - cooking classes, nutrition, and school meals.
For me, home ec was a requirement for everybody in middle school, and I took an optional cooking class in high school. All of these classes focused mainly on baking cookies, cakes, and other desserts and sweets. Sure, it was fun (and delicious!) but I can guarantee you that if I didn't already know how to cook, these classes wouldn't have helped at all. I understand it's hard to cook a meal from scratch in a short period of time, but I don't see why you can't find recipes that you can spread over a couple days. Spend one day chopping up veggies and meat, store in the fridge overnight. Next day, fry it up into a stir fry. Explore veggies and different ways to cook them. And not just potatoes. This was huge for me. I thought I hated brussels sprouts because I don't like how they taste (or smell) steamed. Roasted brussels sprouts, however, have become one of my favorite veggies.
I was lucky to have parents who valued home cooked meals. That isn't the case for everyone. Some kids' parents don't know how to cook, or just don't want to take the time to. While this is a separate problem, it makes it much harder for the kids to learn to cook and eat properly on their own. You end up with generation after generation of people eating out for every meal who consider making a boxed meal "cooking." While it's possible to make smart choices at restaurants, not everyone does. It ends up being bad for you health and bad for your wallets. With better planned cooking classes, schools could do their part to help break this cycle.
Then, nutrition. There are people out there who think that the giant frappuccino they get daily at Starbucks has no calories "because it's coffee." People get mad because they do a quick fad diet and lose weight, but then gain the weight back as soon as they quit the diet and go back to their usual eating habits. Now, I can understand having trouble determining what's "healthy" and what isn't. Human nutrition just isn't well understood, as evidenced by the constant flip-flops: Eggs are bad! No, eggs are good! Saturated fat is bad! No, trans fats are bad! So on and so forth.
To be honest, I couldn't even tell you where I've learned the bit I know about nutrition. Some of it was from health and science classes. We learned about the food pyramid back in elementary school, but I don't know if anyone recommends that anymore. Again, the lack of knowledge about nutrition is tough to fix because there's still so much we just don't know. But we should at least be teaching our kids to make smarter choices. Less processed food is better than super processed scary mush food. Vegetables are good. Whether you eat a high fat or low fat diet, fats are higher in calories than carbs and protein. Just because something is lower in calories doesn't mean it's the healthier choice. On that line, just because it's home cooked doesn't mean it's healthy. I once counted the calories in a buffalo chicken calzone I made and almost cried. Then I ate it. It was delicious.
Teach kids about BMR and TDEE. To gain weight, eat above your TDEE. To lose weight, eat below your TDEE. When you're at a weight you like, eat at your TDEE. If your weight and/or activity level changes, so will your TDEE. This doesn't seem like much, but when you feel like so much of your life is out of your control, just knowing you can control something as small as your weight can make a huge difference.
Last but not least, school lunches. This is a hotly debated issue, at least according to some TED talks I've seen. See the problem is, almost anyone can tell you that the stereotypical school lunch isn't that healthy. Lots of prepackaged, overly processed, fried foods. Schools will argue that it's all they can afford, and parents aren't willing to give schools more money, even if it's to feed their kids healthier food. But again, what do we consider healthy? Childhood obesity is skyrocketing, so we should make the lunches lower in calories, right? Sounds good, until you consider kids below the poverty line, where a school lunch is often the only meal they are guaranteed. Pump those school lunches full of nutrient dense, high calorie foods!
You can't just break kids into different lunch lines and say "you're too fat, here's a tiny lunch" and "you're too skinny/poor, here's a big lunch." A compromise hurts both extremes, but works out fine for the average student. But we want to help everyone, right? I don't know how to handle the school lunch situation, but one obvious solution is to just pack your own lunch. But this is also where nutrition education comes into play. Kids will trade their lunch for lunch money. Or just buy lunch as well and eat both lunches. When you get to high school and can go off campus for lunch, it doesn't matter how healthy the school lunch is when there's a McDonald's across the street...
Ultimately, it all comes down to choice. Teach kids to make smart choices. Not everyone will, and there's only so much you can do about that. It's hard to start cooking healthy meals from scratch when you grew up eating frozen meals everyday and that's all you know. But given a solid foundation in cooking and nutrition in school, it'll be a lot easier.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
The Science I Do and The Crazy Thoughts I Have
It's been a while since my last post! I was on vacation with my family for a week, and lab has been keeping my busy since I got back. This is my 9th consecutive day in lab now, and it's only Tuesday. I think. Turns out that, even though I only worked half days on Saturday and Sunday, not having any full days off makes it quite easy to lose track of time.
When I'm in lab for too long, I start thinking about weird stuff. Let me start by explaining a little about what I actually do in lab. I more or less do "metabolomics" which means I measure metabolites. Metabolites are small molecules that pretty much do everything in your body. They include things like sugars, amino acids, vitamins, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. There are literally thousands of them.
I measure these molecules with mass spectrometry. You may be familiar with the term from a chemistry class or your favorite forensic-type tv show. The mass spec ionizes everything in your sample, and separates things based on their mass/charge ratio (m/z). How the ions are separated depends entirely on the type of mass spec you're using, and it's not really relevant. The end result is a spectrum which tells you how much stuff there is in your sample at each m/z. Oh but wait, remember how there's thousands of chemicals floating around in your body? Turns out that the spectrum is too complex to get any useful information out of. Especially since lots of the metabolites can have the same m/z.
How do we solve this? By adding in an additional separation step. In this case, liquid chromatography. Have you ever taken a coffee filter, dotted some markers on it, and then stuck it in some water? As the water is drawn up the filter (capillary action), the colors in the marker separate and smear out, like so. That happens because the different chemicals that make up the marker inks have different levels of attraction to the water and the coffee filter. Chemicals that are more attracted to the paper don't want to move because they're happy on the paper, so they don't move very far. Chemicals that are more attracted to the water will just hang out with the water and they travel up the paper faster.
Take that same principle, but make it much more expensive, and you get liquid chromatography. You have a column packed with your stationary phase (i.e. the paper) and you flow your sample through with the mobile phase (i.e. the water). Compounds that is more attracted to the mobile phase travel through the column faster than the compounds which are more attracted to the stationary phase. After they finish going through the column, they enter the mass spec. So now you get a mass spectrum at many many time points, and each spectrum will have fewer compounds on it so it's easier to figure out what you have in your sample.
But wait! Given how many metabolites there are, it's still pretty likely that you can have multiple compounds with the same m/z that will elute from the column at the same time. How do we deal with this? After all, if I say that this is dopamine I'm measuring, it better actually be dopamine!
Answer here is to smash stuff up. Again, there are a few different ways to do this, but the point is that molecules will break up in specific ways, giving new ions with new m/z's. So if this thing that you think is dopamine elutes at the same time as dopamine, has the same initial mass as dopamine, and the same mass after smashing it up as dopamine, well now you can be pretty certain it actually is dopamine.
Ok, so a lot of the chemicals I specifically measure are neurotransmitters. People in my lab do work with cerebrospinal fluid, but most of my work has been with blood plasma or more recently, smashed up fruit flies. But the same methods I use can be applied to urine and saliva as well. Sometimes I get bored and think, hmm I could just spit in a tube and see what's actually going on in my saliva. If I did this every day, would I see a decrease in serotonin on the days when I'm sad? What if I don't get "runner's high" because I have low levels of epinephine (adrenaline)? I don't actually do this ever because I think there's some ethical issues somewhere in it. But it's crossed my mind more times than I can count.
Or when I'm making up solutions of these compounds. Would ingesting ATP give me more energy? Is the sucrose we have really identical to table sugar? Would amines taste like fish just because they smell fishy? What would HPLC grade (super pure) water taste like?
Maybe I need to get a hobby to get my mind off science all the time. I had a dream once that a labmate attacked me with histamine so I'd get allergy symptoms. That is not normal. But alas, I have more smashed up fruit flies to attend to.
When I'm in lab for too long, I start thinking about weird stuff. Let me start by explaining a little about what I actually do in lab. I more or less do "metabolomics" which means I measure metabolites. Metabolites are small molecules that pretty much do everything in your body. They include things like sugars, amino acids, vitamins, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. There are literally thousands of them.
I measure these molecules with mass spectrometry. You may be familiar with the term from a chemistry class or your favorite forensic-type tv show. The mass spec ionizes everything in your sample, and separates things based on their mass/charge ratio (m/z). How the ions are separated depends entirely on the type of mass spec you're using, and it's not really relevant. The end result is a spectrum which tells you how much stuff there is in your sample at each m/z. Oh but wait, remember how there's thousands of chemicals floating around in your body? Turns out that the spectrum is too complex to get any useful information out of. Especially since lots of the metabolites can have the same m/z.
How do we solve this? By adding in an additional separation step. In this case, liquid chromatography. Have you ever taken a coffee filter, dotted some markers on it, and then stuck it in some water? As the water is drawn up the filter (capillary action), the colors in the marker separate and smear out, like so. That happens because the different chemicals that make up the marker inks have different levels of attraction to the water and the coffee filter. Chemicals that are more attracted to the paper don't want to move because they're happy on the paper, so they don't move very far. Chemicals that are more attracted to the water will just hang out with the water and they travel up the paper faster.
Take that same principle, but make it much more expensive, and you get liquid chromatography. You have a column packed with your stationary phase (i.e. the paper) and you flow your sample through with the mobile phase (i.e. the water). Compounds that is more attracted to the mobile phase travel through the column faster than the compounds which are more attracted to the stationary phase. After they finish going through the column, they enter the mass spec. So now you get a mass spectrum at many many time points, and each spectrum will have fewer compounds on it so it's easier to figure out what you have in your sample.
But wait! Given how many metabolites there are, it's still pretty likely that you can have multiple compounds with the same m/z that will elute from the column at the same time. How do we deal with this? After all, if I say that this is dopamine I'm measuring, it better actually be dopamine!
Answer here is to smash stuff up. Again, there are a few different ways to do this, but the point is that molecules will break up in specific ways, giving new ions with new m/z's. So if this thing that you think is dopamine elutes at the same time as dopamine, has the same initial mass as dopamine, and the same mass after smashing it up as dopamine, well now you can be pretty certain it actually is dopamine.
Ok, so a lot of the chemicals I specifically measure are neurotransmitters. People in my lab do work with cerebrospinal fluid, but most of my work has been with blood plasma or more recently, smashed up fruit flies. But the same methods I use can be applied to urine and saliva as well. Sometimes I get bored and think, hmm I could just spit in a tube and see what's actually going on in my saliva. If I did this every day, would I see a decrease in serotonin on the days when I'm sad? What if I don't get "runner's high" because I have low levels of epinephine (adrenaline)? I don't actually do this ever because I think there's some ethical issues somewhere in it. But it's crossed my mind more times than I can count.
Or when I'm making up solutions of these compounds. Would ingesting ATP give me more energy? Is the sucrose we have really identical to table sugar? Would amines taste like fish just because they smell fishy? What would HPLC grade (super pure) water taste like?
Maybe I need to get a hobby to get my mind off science all the time. I had a dream once that a labmate attacked me with histamine so I'd get allergy symptoms. That is not normal. But alas, I have more smashed up fruit flies to attend to.
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