In this unit, we learned that health is the measure of our body's efficiency and overall well-being in three categories: mental, physical, and social health.
I personally would not consider myself very healthy because I eat a bunch of junk food such was pretzels due to inconsistent meal times. I also probably do not exercise as much as I should because I am always busy and stressed by school assignments such as homework and projects. I feel like the majority of people at SHS are healthy physically, but we face a lot of pressure mentally and socially to fit in and have the best grades at the school. To help fix the amount of pressure on students teachers could get rid of any "busy" work (work that is given out just to have the students do something for homework and say that the class is doing something) that they give the students and concentrate the homework on lessons that will help them prepare for the AP tests or help them understand the lesson that they learned in class.
From this unit, I have learned that hormones play a big part of regulating healthy stress responses, eating, and sleeping habits in the body.While stress can help a person by boosting their productivity, too much of it can cause distress. Stress has three main stages, the alarm phase, resistance phase, and the exhaustion phase throughout which stress becomes an increasingly negative factor. Cortisol is the hormone that is secreted by the adrenal gland in response to physical or psychological stress, or sleep deprivation. Sleep helps us function by shutting down all awareness of the outside world and helps organize the long-term memory of the brain and deal with new information and our emotions. Eating is also an important function of the body that is regulated by hormones. Insulin helps move macronutrients such as carbohydrates and proteins into cells. From there, leptin regulates the amount of energy that is being used and amount of fat that is being stored, and regulates energy expenditure based on these two factors. Eating from the six classes of nutrients: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, vitamins, and water, help reduce the risk of receiving a chronic disease later on in life.
After this unit, the only thing that I didn't fully understand was section on exercise. I didn't understand why children need less exercise than adults do. This was very confusing to me as I believe that children are more physically active than most adults are and yet they need less exercise.
For the next unit, I will try to connect the different functions of the heart and their physiological affect on the body together, so I can understand how all the different sections of the organ can work together as a whole, and help benefit the body.
I have included above a link to a TED Talk on how nutrition helps mental heath. This Talk helps connect to our unit because health is defined as not only a person's physical fitness, but mental fitness as well. This talk includes both of these categories. Psychologist Julia Rucklidge states that in today's world we mostly rely on medication to help fix our mental problems. However, recent studies have shown that the amount of people with mental illnesses such as ADHD, depression, and bipolar disorder have gone up as has the number of prescription medicine. Through her studies, Rucklidge has seen that people with these illnesses who eat a healthy, balanced diet complete with vitamins and nutrients and don't take prescription medicine are less affected by their mental illness both at home and in the workplace than people who do take prescription medicine. People who eat balanced diets and have depression have actually reported that their depression has gone into remission versus people who take medicine have only reported a short term fix in their illness. Overall the research shown in the TED Talk has illustrated that a healthy diet can improve your overall mental wellbeing better than any artificial stimuli in prescription medicine.
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