Food and Your Heart
To study the effect of various foods on your heart.
It can be challenging to stay awake through class after lunch. Sometimes it is more challenging to concentrate on your homework if you are hungry. A cup of coffee will definitely keep you awake but sometimes too much can make your heart race.
Undoubtedly food is one of the influences in our daily life. This depends entirely on the daily diet our body needs to respond properly.
One of the ways that the body responds is through heart rate. While performing many major tasks, we need oxygen, and heart circulates our blood to replenish oxygen in our blood. This is why our heart beats faster when performing physically strenuous tasks.
Sometimes we eat for pleasure, but the purpose of eating is so that our body has enough energy to sustain our activities in our daily life. However, our body has to work to convert food into energy. Ironically, digestion is like exercise for your digestive system. Your heart needs to work to provide needed oxygen to the rest of the body.
So, how does your digestive system convert food into energy that allows you to breathe, laugh, walk, run, and do so many more activities? We can break nutrition into three major categories: Protein, Carbohydrates, and Fat.
- Protein is the main component in making up key parts of the body.
- Carbohydrates are the most accessible source of energy.
- Fat as you know provides that pudgy fat layer, insulating your body.
So is one of these sources harder to digest? Can you tell by monitoring your heart beat?
Personalizing your Project
- Monitor the rate of your heart beat after eating. Try varying how much you eat, vary what kind of food you eat, when you eat, etc. You can also vary the age and gender of the person eating. See what kind of correlation you can find.
- Do a more theoretical study of the effect of food on the health of your heart. Are there certain types of food that are healthy for your heart, or bad for your heart? If so why?
- Try combining eating with other activities such as studying, exercising, or simple tasks (for example, taking out the trash). Does caffeine really help you concentrate? What effect does caffeine have on your heart beat? More importantly why does it have this effect and how does it work?
Things to Consider
Dealing with human subjects is a very sensitive issue. Please read through the ethics code in our Safety section.
Google Key Words
To do more research on the heart, try typing these words into a Google search.
- Digestive System
- Introductory Physiology Text book
- Introductory Human Biology Text book