Bio Term Paper

What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 1 What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? Princess Jackson Concordia University Texas Principles of Biology Professor Nelson Due Date: November 19,2021 What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 2 What does it mean to be healthy? To me, being healthy requires taking care of myself in the best way possible. It requires making sure that my physical and mental health are on the right track. Some people don’t think about or include mental health when trying to be healthy, but I think it is crucial when trying to maintain a balance. Mental health and physical health are connected and one cannot function without taking care of the other. According to a chronological study conducted on the Japanese elederly, as these people’s physical health declined as they got older, so did their mental health. “A total of 7,683 individuals aged between 65 and 84 years were analyzed. The three-year prior and current physical health significantly affected social health as well as mental health, and this effect appeared to be stronger in males compared to females. Maintenance of physical health may be crucial to support mental and social health among elderly individuals.” Mental Health and physical health are connected and must both be in order for one and the other to work. In the abstract of this article, it is also stated that “The World Health Organization defines health as a state of physical, mental and social well being. This study was conducted to explore chronological relationships between physical, mental and social factors.” Thinking about my family’s habits regarding their health, and my own as well, I realize that they are not very effective in having positive results health wise. For example, my mom tries to go to the gym almost everyday and on the most part, she accomplishes this goal. However, whenever she comes back from the gym she will always head for a bag of chips or chocolate bars. She would try to say that she could still lose weight because the type of chips and bars she eats are healthier than the ones that most people buy from well-known brands. Even though this is true, I still would try to tell her that eating after working out at the gym would still affect her What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 3 weight loss. When she would eat, it wouldn’t just be one handful of chips or one bar, but more than she needed if she wanted to see a change in her weight. Another habit my mother had was not eating enough sometimes. It is very rare if I see my mother eating breakfast. She usually skips it because she would be too busy in the morning to fix it for herself or get it from a restaurant. She would also only eat trail mix or veggie chips throughout the day as her meals. Even though these snacks are healthy and better alternatives for M&Ms and Lay’s Potato Chips, they would not give her enough energy because they weren’t actual meals. My mother needed protein and food like chicken or rice and beans. She would not be fueled up enough most days because she wasn’t making sure that she was eating enough foods from the food pyramid. A bad habit that my brother has for maintaining his health would be that he would drink a lot of energy drinks and eat takeout almost every day. My brother works a lot and has two kids, so he doesn’t get that much sleep very often. To try to help with this, he would drink multiple energy drinks every day. He didn’t really pay attention to the side effects of what this could do to your body, he was just thinking about how these drinks could help him temporarily stay up during the day. Also, since he was busy all day with work and errands, he didn’t have much time to cook. Even when he did have time to cook, he didn’t feel like it and would try to opt for an easier option. Sometimes he would eat McDonalds, Chinese takeout, and Burger King all in one day. My mother tried to warn him that if he kept eating like this that there would be consequences, but my brother didn’t really listen. Unlike my mother, my brother would not workout at home or go to the gym, so he wasn’t really being healthy in any way. He did end up with diabetes and now wishes that he watched his health more, or at least tried. What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 4 A bad health habit that I have is that I tend to eat really late at night. I wouldn’t really complete my food diary journals until around 11:00 p.m. sometimes because I wouldn’t be done eating until very late at night. I would try to eat my three main meals for the day, and then I would start craving a snack. Also, when I’m staying up late to do homework or study for an exam the next day, my favorite snacks will help me to continue with my work. This is a terrible habit though, considering the fact that sometimes I would go through two to three snacks before I was finished doing my homework. Not only is eating two to three snacks in a row unhealthy, but so is eating after a certain period of time in the day. According to the article titled Will Eating at Night Really Make You Gain Weight? from U.S. News, eating unhealthy foods at night can have negative effects on your body. “Binging on high-sugar, high-fat foods causes you to go to bed with elevated blood sugar levels. At any time of day, these set the body up for subsequent sugar crashes and weight gain, with the body quickly storing excess sugar as fat, says Lori Zanini, a California-based registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator with HealthCare Partners medical group. But, since your body uses less sugar as fuel when you’re lying in bed as opposed to running around, potentially more sugar winds up in your fat cells when you eat those foods late at night.” It is very odd to see me eating a salad, or some other healthy option as a late night snack because sugar encourages me to get my work done for some reason. So when I am eating these snacks late at night, they do contain high-sugars and high fats. It not only matters that the food you are eating very late at night is unhealthy, but it also matters that you are eating unhealthy food so late into the day. According to the same article, your body has a certain cycle or rhythm regarding eating times, and late night eating can mess up this rhythm and cause unhealthy changes in your body. “Animal research from Northwestern University suggests that What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 5 eating at night can lead to weight gain – even if you don’t eat excess calories. Researchers claim this is because eating at night can interfere with the body’s circadian rhythms. For instance, insulin – the hormone responsible for getting the sugar in your blood to your body’s cells for fuel – runs along with your circadian clock. So at night (when your body thinks you should be asleep and fasting), your body’s cells become more resistant to the hormone, according to a 2013 animal study in Current Biology.” Some ways that I could improve my health would be to eat foods that contain less fats and sugars. Most of the time when I eat, I don’t pay attention to the nutrition facts. This is due to the fact that I think I am still being healthy by trying to exercise at least two to three times out of a week. I need to start balancing the good health that I am trying to achieve by eating foods that will benefit my body. Something that I could do would be to eat at least three healthy meals a week. It is not very much, but it would be a start. If I don’t at least start trying to eat meals that have less fat and sugar, I could be prone to diseases like the one that affected my brother. According to Sugar consumption, metabolic disease and obesity: The state of the controversy from the National Library of Medicine, eating too much food that contains a lot of sugar can have an effect on your weight and can help assist in developing diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “There are plausible mechanisms and research evidence that supports the suggestion that consumption of excess sugar promotes the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes (T2DM) both directly and indirectly. The direct pathway involves the unregulated hepatic uptake and metabolism of fructose, leading to liver lipid accumulation, What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 6 dyslipidemia, decreased insulin sensitivity and increased uric acid levels. The epidemiological data suggest that these direct effects of fructose are pertinent to the consumption of the fructose-containing sugars, sucrose and high fructose corn syrup…Consumption of excess sugar may also promote the development of CVD and T2DM indirectly by causing increased body weight and fat gain..” Another way I could improve my health would be to start going asleep at an earlier time. Even when I finish my homework early around times like 8:00 p.m., I would still stay up late because I wouldn’t feel tired. Even though I knew my body was tired and needed rest, I would still not get in bed until late because I didn’t really feel the tiredness myself. This could be due to the fact that my sleep schedule has been messed up ever since middle school, and that somehow I just got use to the lack of sleep I’ve never really gotten. Not getting enough sleep though has side effects on me though, including ones that affect my mental health. There will be days where I’m present in the classroom physically, but not mentally because all I can concentrate on is not falling asleep. Sometimes I will get very frustrated the day after not getting enough rest because I would want to take naps, but I couldn’t since I still had more classes to go to or more homework to finish. Other times I will choose sleep over homework, which will affect my performances in my classes. As much as I try to ignore it, having a really good, or at least decent sleep schedule can benefit me so much and help me get through the day successfully. One good idea would be for me to start planning out what I’m going to do throughout the day and estimating how long each of my tasks will take me; making sure that I have enough time to go to sleep at the time that would be required for me to get enough hours of rest. I could also start to put my phone away What Does It Mean To Be Healthy? 7 and turn off the T.V. when it starts to get too late. This way I won’t be tempted to stay up late with entertainment. In conclusion, I think that being healthy requires having at least adequate mental health, so that you can have good physical health. It’s important to maintain both and be very organized with managing them. Having bad health habits can easily be fixed if you can take time out of your day to monitor the things you eat, make sure that you’re taking care of yourself mentally, and getting enough rest.