Food science

University just got more interesting.  This semester, one of my two classes is Food Science 1.  I like food, and I like science, so goodness me, this is going to be good.

I had my first lecture for food science yesterday and found my entire course of 11 people sitting together in the second row of the lecture theatre, with all the kids from the nutrition and dietician courses scattered everywhere else.  I was sitting there too but didn’t realise they were all in my course until the one person I did know introduced me to everyone.  I just like to sit up front because I’m a nerd like that. I’m rather pleased that they are all nerds like that too.

I’m going to learn a lot about food this semester, supplementing my newfound knowledge, I will be attending workshops every other week in a lab/kitchen.  In the first lab, we will be making fresh orange juice, and then testing it to find out some of it’s nutritional profile.  Things will get interesting when we do the same tests on long life orange juice that you find on the non-refrigerated shelves of supermarkets, as well as bottled juice you find in the cold section.  Now those results will be interesting!!

We get to do the same thing with yogurt (and yes, we get to make our own, which is good because I have made my own before, but it never turns out very well), bread, and sausages.  I’m really looking forward to the bread workshop.  Every single bread available for purchase seems to contain soy, but 93% of the world’s soy is genetically modified (and by genetically modified, I don’t mean a long history of selective breeding, I mean desired genes from a different organism, such as bacteria, are inserted into the DNA of a seed/crop).  Since I don’t particularly want to be a guinea pig for the long term health complications of GM food (Feeding studies of GM crops are generally undertaken by the very company that modified the seeds, and only last a maximum of 90 days.  There has been one independent lifetime feeding study in rats, lasting 2 years, with very scary results.  Although controversial, no one else has attempted a lifetime feeding study, so although GM foods claim to be safe, are they really? Do we really know in the long term?), I would like to avoid eating such things.  I’ve tried making my own bread, sans all the preservatives and soy, but it always comes out almost hard as a rock, and not very tasty.  Needless to say, I’d love to learn how to make it properly, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the nutritional test results.

Tumours on rats who ate GM corn in a lifetime feeding study (image courtesy of The Daily Mail)

This semester is certainly going to be interesting.  I’ll be sure to let you know the results of my orange juice, yogurt, and bread tests.  Hopefully you’re interested, but if not, sorry in advance, I’m going to write about it anyway.  It makes me feel better.

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Copyright 2013 Sheri Thomson

Creationist in an evolution class

So, did completing a university class all about evolution make me discard my creationist beliefs in favour of the more popular theory of evolution?

image courtesy of Smithsonian

Not. Even. Remotely.

“No scientists believe in Creation,” my lecturer said in one of the very first sessions “the only opposition to evolution comes from the uneducated.”

I should have put my hand up right then and there, but I didn’t.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe nerves.  Maybe because I didn’t want the possibly of being unfairly graded on assignments because of my beliefs.  I don’t know.  But I do know that there are plenty of university accredited biologists, physicists, chemists, etc. most with PhD’s, who believe in Creation.  There are at least two scientific journals written entirely by creation believing scientists (and I highly recommend Creation magazine, which is written so the non-science person can understand it).

As soon as I got home, I checked my textbook.  It at least it said that the majority of scientists believe in evolution.  Which is lucky, otherwise I would have been on the phone to it’s publishers causing all sorts of trouble.

We learned all about natural selection mechanisms like directional and disruptive selection, that lead to evolutionary change. In a lab, directional selection can be replicated artificially by breeding specific pairs of organisms.  Take fruit flies for example.  Scientists  picked out the flies with the most bristles on their abdomens and bred them together, repeating the process generation after generation until the bristle number increased dramatically.  They called this proof of evolution.

But is it really? We’re not seeing fruit flies turning into something else, they just have more bristles on their abdomens.  And the information for making bristles was already in their DNA.  It’s not something new.  Nothing has been added to their genome.

There are two different kinds of evolution though, micro evolution, and macro evolution.  Usually when people say evolution, you think the monkeys to man type.  That’s macro evolution.  But organisms are changing all the time.  You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that.  There are new flu shots every year because of new strains.  Certain dogs have been bred over the years to be smaller and smaller until finally we have a teacup Chihuahua.  But it’s still a dog.  That’s micro evolution.  The fruit fly example is also micro evolution. Creationists have no problem with micro evolution.  In fact, it’s expected when all of humanity came from a single couple and then later from a single family post flood.

It’s expected in animals too.  God told Adam to bring two of each “kind” aboard the ark.  That doesn’t mean that he needed to bring a pair of zebras and a pair of horses and a pair of donkeys, they are all the same “kind,” and they can interbreed with one another.

A Zorse (zebra/horse). Image courtesy of wikipedia

Similarly, one pair of dogs would have been aboard the ark, once pair of chickens, and so on.  Yet today we see heaps of different dogs and horses and chickens because they diversified, as they were intended to.  That certainly doesn’t prove macro evolution though, only micro evolution, which, as I said, is to be expected from a biblical point of view.

Speaking of the flood, science certainly doesn’t disprove a global flood.  We find fossils all over the world.  And how are most common fossils made? According to my text book, “the organism must be buried in sediment; then, the calcium in bone or other hard tissue must mineralize; and finally, the surrounding sediment must eventually harden to form rock.”  The process also has to happen “before the remains decay or are scavenged by predators,”  which means very quickly,  i.e. a flood.  I find it most interesting that practically every culture on earth has a global flood story.  All of the crazy and interesting rock formations can be explained by receding global floodwaters and the upheaval we read about during the flood in the Bible.

What about vestigial structures (structures that have “lost the ancestral function”)?  They say the anal/pelvic spur in some breeds of snakes is what’s left of ancestral legs.  The spur is connected to a pelvis.  But the spur is used in mating and also in fighting.  So it does have a use, and saying that legs once grew from said pelvis is a merely a guess.  Also, breeds of snakes with anal spurs are constrictors.  I wonder if the pelvis helps them with their constricting process somehow? It’s not like anyone’s removed a snake pelvis and anal spurs to find out how it would affect the snake (and I don’t recommend it either, that would be pretty cruel)

Let’s pretend for a second that the snakes did once have legs.  According to natural selection, an organisms fitness determines which direction evolution will take.  Basically, if a trait is advantageous, those in possession of the trait will live long enough to breed and therefore the next generation will show more of the desired trait.

Since macro evolution is said to take millions of years, the loss of limbs would take quite some time.  They would need to get gradually smaller and smaller until they were gone.  But how is that advantageous?  If a snake had only half sized hind limbs, it couldn’t walk that well, if at all, but it couldn’t really slither well either, so why would that mutation continue to live on? Wouldn’t those half-legged snakes get predated on more and in turn, not survive long enough to produce offspring, significantly lowering the fitness of the trait, making natural selection select for something else? (a common misconception amongst the layperson is that all organisms of a particular species evolve into something else.  I.e. why are there still apes if man evolved from apes? According to evolution, only some members of a given species would evolve into other species and organisms, even branching out into a couple or more different organisms, meaning that there would still be the ape, but some would eventually evolve into man, although with many organisms, the originals are said to have died after some time. If you believe that kind of thing).

Natural selection leading to evolutionary change makes perfect sense when we’re talking about micro evolution, but when we’re talking about macro evolution, it doesn’t make sense at all because when you get an in between organism, it’s not advantageous, and therefore wouldn’t be selected for.  Plus, we’re talking about many, many mutations which just so happen to compliment each other over millions of years in order for the eventual animal to be realised, with some things, such as wings,  multiple times in different animals. Hardly seems likely.

I remember my lecturer saying “and what does a plant do when it needs nitrogen? It evolves a way to get it.” Like the genes themselves have the intelligence to transform themselves they way they need to go.

We were shown the infamous cladogram of horse evolution which shows that horses originated from a very small, 4 toed thing, to what we see today.

Horse evolution?

The top horse and second horse could easily be the same kind.  Don’t let the tail fool you, it’s just their depiction.  As it is, the modern day horse has about a foot of bony tail that all the long hair grows off of.  With a proper tail drawn on, because, let’s face it, the drawings are only interpretations of the bone structure, the difference is minimal.  Who is to say from some bones that the other three are the origin of horse? Isn’t it completely likely that they are entirely different animals? So many animals have become extinct throughout the life of earth, why wouldn’t the “first horses” instead be a fossil of some other extinct animal?  Besides, if we’re going off similarities, the Eohippus is way more like this one, which still lives on today, so why was it lumped with the horse only based on some fossils? (I’m not saying the Hyrax came from Eohippus, I’m just making a point):

Image courtesy of Flickriver

Evolutionists argue that because of the layers of earth the fossils were found in, we can conclude that one evolved from another.  Can we really trust the “fossil record” though?  In north-eastern Oregon, the three-toed Neohipparion and one-toed Pliohippus were found in the very same layer. They say that the layers of earth correspond to different time periods, but there have also been many instances of animals, and trees found upright, some even upside down, through many different layers that represent “millions” of years. All that the supposed “horse” fossils prove is that an organism with those particular bones lived a long time ago.  All the rest is merely speculation, assumption, and interpretation.

The closeness of our genomes with that of other organisms is another major argument of evolution.  From a creation viewpoint though, it makes perfect sense: one creator, similar functions of structures, similar DNA sequences, etc.  If you design a forearm in one creature that works really well (and of course it would, this is God we’re talking about), why would you change it just because you’re making a different creature?

Homologous structures. Image courtesy of idc

When you get right down to it, we’re all made of the same thing.  Not just us, but everything.  Elementary particles.  Everything is made up of elementary particles.  When you make a large house with lego, it looks like a house, and (depending on how much detail you put in), functions as a house.  When you make a car out of lego, it looks like a car, and functions like a car.  But when you take it all apart, the blocks are all the same.  It’s the same with us.  Not because of evolution and a big bang, but because we’re all designed and created by the same thing. God.

On origins of the earth, it all comes down to the same thing.  But how did that get there?  That can be either God, or the non-living matter that went bang.  Either way, we are talking about something supernatural.  Life out of non-life.  Why is it so much harder to think the supernatural was God, rather than a big bang that brought life out of the non-life?

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Copyright 2013 Sheri Thomson

Officially a student

I’d always planned to be a stay at home mum. I didn’t see any point of doing 3-4 years of university just to have a couple of kids a few years later and then stay at home with them and not use the degree I paid thousands of dollars for.  Instead, I did a one year photography course at TAFE (a technical college), but that was mostly so I could stay in this country.

I always imagined playing with the kids all day, nurturing them, teaching them, providing them with healthy meals, etc. etc. I didn’t think a lot about what would happen when they go to school. I suppose I figured I’d make their lunches, get them to school or the bus stop, clean the house and do some cooking and stuff while they were away, and then help them with their homework, and play with them until bed time. It made a lovely picture in my head.

But Oh. My. Gosh. I never imagined the boredom.  The mundane-ness of all the housework, nappy changing, feeding, why questions, telling them the same stuff over and over and over again, and doing the same things day after day. The lack of adult conversation.  The feeling that I’m not accomplishing anything, even though I know that raising my kids is the most important job I could ever and will ever do.  It’s also the hardest, the most frustrating, and the most rewarding.

There is absolutely no way that I can stay at home and do housework and cooking all day after the kids go to school. No. Fracking. Way. Even now, I’m itching to do something.  Something that doesn’t involve kids, writing about kids, or being at home with kids or by myself (Aaron works all day).

In about 6 years, both kids will be at school, and I will be able to get a good job, the job of an educated person.  The job of someone with a degree. Not only that, but in about a month and a half, I will have something to work for, concentrate on, apply my mind to, and to call all my own. I am officially a student. I have enrolled in my classes, and I even have my student card with the tiny photo of me grinning like child on it (luckily the photo is tiny because after getting all dressed up for the photo, I somehow managed to take half of my eyelashes off with the eyelash curler, in one fell (foul?) swoop).  And next week, I can get my free iPad (oh yes, my university gives new students brand new iPads, how cool is that?).  I even have a scholarship. Everyone else in my course does too, but that is not the point.

Me with my shiny new student card. Also shiny is my face because it is so darn hot over here right now, plus I’m not wearing a lick of makeup. Also, that magazine in the background is a fitness magazine, not a dirty one. In case you were confused.

My whole plan changed with just one email. Basically, it said that if I changed my first preference to this other course, not only would I get an early offer (which is the university saying that I’m in should I choose to accept), but I’d also get a scholarship.  The cheap side of me jumped up and down in celebration.  A scholarship.  An early offer.

But still, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think I would truly want to be in that course, or if I thought I’d always wonder “what if” with forensics.  I looked up the course in the university handbook online. I read about the field on Wikipedia.  Coincidentally (or not) there was a show on TV that very night that was all about it.  I was so interested, glued to my TV.  I stayed up way past my bedtime, engrossed in all the information I found, convinced that I’m not supposed to be in Forensics at all, but this other field instead.

My course is a brand new course.  I will be one of the first students to ever take it.  By the time I’m finished though, the impact I could have locally, statewide, nationally, and even internationally, could be enormous. With the world population booming the way it is, degrees like the one I’m going to get will be invaluable.

I will be slowly studying my way to a Bachelor of Natural Science – Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security.  I am so excited. It’s right up my alley with the science-y bit, and the growing stuff and figuring out stuff bits.  Plus, someone has to come up with food solutions that don’t involve Monsanto (their website says “A sustainable agriculture company.” HAHAHA, they’re having a laugh! Feeding the population questionable GMO produce hardly qualifies as sustainable in my book! They also used to manufacture Agent Orange) and/or genetic engineering.

In other news, I just wrote my first negative review on my review blog. It’s hardcore, you should check it out:

http://www.amomsreviews.com/2013/01/11/wonder-winnie/

If you enjoyed reading this, please vote for my blog. All you have to do is click the link below. That’s it… Clicking the link brings you to the Top Mommy Blogs home page. You don’t have to do anything else. Any clicks from my site to theirs is a vote.  THANKS!

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Copyright 2013 Sheri Thomson

Why you should consider cord blood banking

When I was pregnant with Hannah, I’d heard a bit about banking cord blood, but didn’t know a thing about it. I asked at the hospital, but they didn’t have any information, nor did they do cord blood banking. Needless to say, we didn’t get her cord blood banked.

Is banking cord blood really worth while? Is it something you should do? Since I have no knowledge of the subject, here is a guest post written by Katie Green, and sponsored by CordBlood.com.

Cord blood banking involves the collection and retention of blood left in the umbilical cord and placenta when
a child is born. This cord blood is rich in stem cells, which are extremely useful in the treatment of a number
of human diseases, as they are able to evolve in to other types of cell.

There are a number of reasons why parents should seriously consider cord blood banking as a good option,
both for them and the child. Cord blood banking provides an opportunity to safeguard their child’s future by
retaining some healthy stem cells, which might be used to cure a number of life threatening conditions at
some point the child’s life. In addition, it may benefit other family members or other children in need, as the
cells can be used to treat anyone that is a genetic match. Donated cord blood is also being widely used in
medical research; scientists are currently investigating a number of incurable diseases, and whether core
blood may provide a cure or useful treatment.

Benefits of cord blood banking

Children who require stem cells as treatment for a serious illness often have to wait some time to receive
them, as there is often a limited supply in the public domain. However, if the child’s parents banked the cord
blood when the child was born, he or she can receive the prompt treatment that will provide the best chance
of recovering from the illness. Similarly, if a newborn has a sibling who already suffers from a condition that
is treatable with stem cells, cord blood banking can be invaluable in their treatment and could help to save
their life.

Core blood is now being used as an alternative to other more traditional sources of stem cells. The collection
of cells from other sources are often more invasive; for example bone marrow donation is very painful and
involves needles being stuck in to the center of the bone. However cord blood banking is completely painless
and does not harm or affect either the mother or the newborn. It makes use of valuable tissue that would
otherwise be discarded as medical waste.

How useful is cord blood banking

The stem cells found in cord blood are extremely useful. As they can develop to become other types of cells,
they can be used to repair body tissue, blood vessels, and organs. They are also used in the treatment of 70
types of blood disorders, cancers and other illnesses, including sickle cell anemia, leukemia, and lymphoma.
Recent studies are investigating how cord blood can be used to treat a wide range of other illnesses,
including heart disease and immune deficiencies.

Things you should know about cord blood banking

Parents should be aware that cord blood banking could help to save lives. Although a child has only a one
in 10,000 chance of needing a transplant of their own stem cells, the cells could be used to save someone
else’s life if donated to a public bank. Parents have the option to pay a fee to retain their child’s cord blood
privately, so that it is reserved specifically for them or other family members; or alternatively, they can donate
it to cord blood bank institutions for free, so that it can help others who are in need.

More information can be found on the internet, for example a stem cell treatment infographic.

Katie Green is a freelance writer who loves learning new things. She is currently interested in baby health issues and how they are being dealt with nowadays.

If you enjoyed reading this, please vote for my blog. All you have to do is click the link below. That’s it… Clicking the link brings you to the Top Mommy Blogs home page. You don’t have to do anything else. Any clicks from my site to theirs is a vote.  THANKS!

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Copyright 2012 Sheri Thomson