Smart Money

We recently were given an article on how people with higher grades in high school and college end up making more money than people who get low grades in college and high school. The article uses a graph showing the average yearly earnings of a number of people based on their gpa throughout college and high school. The graph makes the valid point on its own that people with higher GPAs make more money. The article then goes on to explain how this is more than likely because of how people with higher GPAs have better work ethic, a greater motivation to get more work done (leading to promotions/raises), and may have better social skills. I can see why this would be the case. The better work ethic would come from taking hard classes and pulling through them with the best grade possible and through this learning that in order to do well one must fully understand what is asked of them and how to efficiently achieve the objective. The greater motivation would come from their achievement of those grades in those hard classes and how they were rewarded for getting those grades by being put in an even better position to succeed in school and in the working world. Then there’s the social skills. Now, several people would argue that nerds/people with high GPAs are usually anti-social, outcast, timid, etc. However, even with the extensively social nerds, who’s to say that they aren’t applying their learning technique that they get through school to social lives and events, analyzing what jokes get the best response, what topics spark interest, and what just flat out doesn’t create conversation and then practicing in private (considering it’s no closely guarded secret that good social skills will get you far in this world).

Sugary Accusations

In a recent article we were given in class there was talk about how added sugars had the potential to increase the risk of death from heart disease in people. The article later explained that by added sugars it meant all non-natural sugars, such as high-fructose corn syrup and not natural sugars like those in fruit and dairy products. The high intake of these added sugars leads to several other health problems as well, such as obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and even stroke, heart attacks, hypertension, and heart failure. To find this, a researcher by the name of Quanhe Yang and his colleagues conducted a study on 31, 000 people who participated in a health survey that examined dietary habits based on in-person interviews. Now, most would think that this would be undeniable evidence, however the American Beverage Association (or the association you didn’t know existed until just now) has claimed that the study does not show that cardiovascular heart disease is caused by drinking sugar-sweetened beverages. Multiple people would probably be enraged, saying this is just another way of protecting big corporations like Pepsi or Coca-Cola to not go bankrupt and, while it might be just that, there’s really no way of knowing since the article says nothing in depth about the experiment other than Yang and his colleagues studied an old survey and drew conclusions. This shows absolutely no scientific method in this experiment and, therefore, causes its finding to come into question. Especially with such a large claim being made about added sugar. Even though it’s not a huge secret that excessive amounts of added sugar isn’t exactly healthy for you, to make a claim such that it increases the risk of heart disease-related death like smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, you’re going to need more in your article than just your finding on the subject.  

Oceanic Undersight

According to a recent article, the oceans of the world are slowly becoming unable to support the organisms that live within them and could have potentially drastic future effects on us humans. This is due to several factors, most of which are man made. The first factor is global warming that causes the oceans to reach unsafe temperatures for the organisms living inside them near the surface, leading to their eventual heat-related deaths. Another factor is the amount of trash that is dumped into the oceans, particularly plastic, that is able to get into the gills of most fish and around the necks of other marine life strangling them to death. Another main factor leading to the deaths of the oceans is overfishing in general. Whether for food or for sport, fishing is a major way of spending time all across the globe. Because of this there is a high chance certain populations of marine life could be fished to extinction, eliminating their presence from this Earth completely. A final factor affect our oceans is toxic chemicals from factories being dumped into them. Not only does this lead to overall marine life death, but it also poisons drinking supplies and washing water for communities. In other words, by poisoning and slowly killing our oceans with these factors that have easy alternatives, we are poisoning our future survival as a species. The worst part about this is that there are easy alternatives to every single one of these factors that would save the oceans, if we used them enough. To solve global warming have less factories producing greenhouse gases, to solve the trash recycle what is recyclable and put the rest inside the earth or burn it, to solve the overfishing put more regulations in place for fishermen (like with deer hunting), and to solve to poisons from factories going to oceans scrub out all of the toxic chemicals and dispose of them in a more proper manner.    

Ironically Ignored...Because it Should Be

There has been a new study surrounding the meat industry with a general conclusion that people who eat more processed meat are at a higher risk of getting cancer over time. While it’s not as drastic of an increase compared to other consumables that increase the risk of getting cancer, such as tobacco, it’s still said to have a profound effect. However, the majority of people should not start freaking out and going all out vegetarian from here on in. Humans have been eating processed meat for decades now and it’s not likely that you’ll start seeing the meat industry being restricted in federal courts on how the can advertise or sell their products, mainly because of the risk increase being very small. People who eat processed meat were recorded to have 2 times the chance of getting cancer than people who didn’t, but compared to tobacco increasing a person’s risk of cancer by 20 times it doesn’t really stack up as a complete endangerment to humans. In other words, you have just about the same risk of getting cancer as walking outside in the sun. We, as humans, try and avoid things that cause cancer for the most part (tobacco, radiation, etc.) ,but freaking out over every little thing that increases the risk of cancer just slightly is pointless. In fact, a lot of the things we need to have to survive as humans has a slight increase to the risk of cancer. The main contenders of this trait are sunlight and water, so to freak out over meats being identified as increasing the chance of getting cancer isn’t really much to worry about overall. It might cause people to eat a little less hotdogs and bacon, granted, but it most certainly is not worth everyone becoming a vegetarian. What should happen is everyone living their lives how they want to live them with this little fun fact simply tucked away in their minds, either to be forgotten or to remind them that they’re very much mortal beings.