Friday, March 12, 2010

Talk Your Heart Out



When a person tries to convey his or her message to the counterpart, a medium is needed. This medium is known as "communication". Through communicating with the person whom you want to talk to, you will need to create words in your mind and start speaking up, and voicing up.

Talk might seemed like an extremely easy task to do, but many people tend to isolate themselves, and as a result becoming a socially-inept person. Whenever a person steps up and talk to him or her, rejection is always the answer to that. Such phenomenon, according to a latest study, does not seem to be healthy.

As reported in the Psychological Science, a journal has posted a somewhat interesting findings relating happiness and talking. According to the study, happy well-beings appeared to talk more compare to those who do not speak up. To be more precise, happy individuals involve themselves with substantive conversations rather than high frequency of small talks.

Derived from the Department of Education & Training in Queensland, substantive conversations basically can be divided into four different categories, which are: Intellectual Substance (making critical reasoning by discussing different ideas through various types of mental analysis), Dialogue (address comments, questions and statements directly to the others), Logical Extension & Synthesis (collectively understanding of a topic or a theme) and Sustained Exchange (exchanges extend beyond the routine IRE - initiate, response, evaluate).

According to the scientific study, happy people spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking, comparing to those unhappy ones. This result can be further discussed when it comes to substantive conversations: happy individuals had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Sweetened Drinks



Sugar sweetened drinks have been the favorite choice of food for all categories of individuals, either young or old, sweetened drinks such as those famous carbonated drinks, are often the common selections. What is more, during these days where the scorching sun hangs up high above our heads, the possibility of such inclination goes even higher than expected.


Although these drinks are sweet, they curb our desperate thirst especially under the hot sun. However, it brings us great negative impacts as far as our biological system is concerned. In America itself, researchers estimate that the increased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages between 1990-2000 caused the emergence of 130,000 new diabetes cases.

In general, these drinks ranged from 120-200 equivalent calories per drink. Consequently, these added calories could potentially increase the number of individuals, not only in diabetes sufferers, but also in obesity sufferers. For the increased number of obese patients particularly, there is already a clear journal published in JAMA in the year of 2004. This piece of study can be downloaded from this link. The mentioned journal associates sugar sweetened beverage consumption with weight gain and incidence of Type 2 Diabetes.