"The Down-low About Kissing"

An article that details twenty facts about kissing from DiscoverMagazine.com shows that kissing involves much more than just showing your partner you love them! This article teaches how kissing is cultural and learned, how it can make or break a relationship, how it produces certain chemicals in the body, and how nasty saliva really is.

First, kissing is not a universal behavior in all cultures, but it does exist in more species than just us humans. Apes press their lips together to show emotions, just as we press our lips to other people to show emotions. It is a cultural behavior because not all cultures do it, but the Romans, and later the Europeans, helped to spread the act of kissing throughout more of the world. It is also a learned behavior, thought of as coming from the natural feeding experiences that humans experience in early childhood as well as from an old tradition of smelling the cheek of a loved one. This was a surprise to me – I ignorantly believed that most, if not all cultures in the world kissed each other as a sign of affection. But, apparently this is just another example of me being so American-minded and not knowing enough about other cultures in the world.

People determine their compatibility with each other in a scientific sense through smelling each other. Being close to a person when you are kissing them gives you a perfect opportunity to be able to smell their specific scent and determine whether or not the scientific part of your mind thinks that you two make a good match. Apparently, women are even able to distinguish between men who have different immunity-coding genes than themselves, and are possibly even more attracted to such men. This would result in their baby having a stronger immune system than a baby whose father had the same immunity-coding genes as the mother. This seems like natural selection at work! I never had any clue that the brains of women could work like this, and choose men who have different genes through smelling them while kissing.

Besides the whole immunity-coding genes deal, there is another biological factor that kissing adds to the mix. Kissing spurs the production of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, known as “the love drug.” Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that is associated with feelings of happiness and desire. The production of this drug is especially present when kissing a person for the first time, and it can add to the feeling that is perceived as being in love because it causes a person to lose their appetite and not be able to sleep. Kissing also has other hormonal effects, causing men to produce oxytocin, which causes them to become more attached to the woman that they are kissing. Also, kissing reduces the levels of cortisol in the body, which makes people healthier and less stressed out. Who would have thought that kissing is actually healthy! It helps you to feel happier, healthier, less stressed and more attached to the person that you are kissing!

While there are several good things about kissing, like some of the few already mentioned, there is also a dirty, bacterial side to this deed. This article in particular details the nitty-gritty about saliva. More men than women prefer kisses with tongue, but there can be a downside to this – there are about 100 million bacteria in every milliliter of saliva! But, the act of exchanging saliva while kissing allows a man to pass testosterone to his partner, which could increase his partner’s sex drive and possibly even increase the number of offspring. Even though there is this upside to exchanging saliva, there is always the scary thought of having bad breath or something in your teeth when you’re kissing someone – but thankfully for us women, we care a lot more about that then men do. Although the thought of exchanging so much bacteria in your saliva is particularly disgusting, I highly doubt that it will cause anyone to stop kissing their boyfriend or girlfriend!

Article Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jan-feb/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-kissing

Image Source: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.quizilla.com/H/HIM6six6HER/1125605151_nocentkiss.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.myspace.com/blobmonkey&usg=__9Rgw3muZD6EpBZNyx_vYH8mknQ8=&h=285&w=416&sz=10&hl=en&start=0&sig2=eV6zLR6a-fvgRADK60Jkkw&zoom=1&tbnid=4liLCDT9Ko52IM:&tbnh=138&tbnw=184&ei=KNyGTdK5GYa3tgervI2-BA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dinnocent%2Bkiss%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1003%26bih%3D607%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=263&oei=KNyGTdK5GYa3tgervI2-BA&page=1&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0&tx=69&ty=103 

AIDS

If a survey was conducted that asked people what disease they would most like NOT to get, I bet that one of the top answers would be AIDS. This syndrome is a disease that leads to different diseases as well, and is caused by a virus called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). There are treatments available for this disease, but no ultimate cure that rids a body of AIDS.

In the 1980s, gay men and intravenous drug users started developing symptoms that led to the discovery of AIDS. Scientists think that this disease originated in chimpanzees in Africa, but moved to humans, possibly by humans eating infected chimps. Now it is a pandemic, an epidemic that is spread over a wide geographical area. It is present in every country in the world, although the concentration of AIDS is in sub-Saharan Africa.

AIDS is actually very easy to get – if you have contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, then the virus is transferred from their body to yours. Most people who get AIDS get it through unprotected sex, but there are other ways to get it too. The spread of the disease would be much less if people would only wear condoms, become more educated about sex, and even if circumcisions were performed for male. There are also treatments that can help to slow the replication of the HIV virus in the body, but there is no treatment to eradicate the virus from the body completely. Scientists are working on a vaccine for AIDS, and currently have about 30 potential vaccines, but none have been confirmed to prevent the disease.

I, personally, would be devastated if anyone I knew contracted AIDS. You always hear such scary stories about people dying from AIDS, especially in Africa, and it is so easy to get that I would not be surprised if I actually do know people that have it. I hope that the scientists working on cures and vaccines come to a major breakthrough that eliminates this disease from the world, but I doubt that it would happen for quite some time. Something that comes to my mind through learning about AIDS is the difference between the research for a cure for AIDS and the research about cancer. In my mind, my first thought is that more time and resources should be spent on the research for cancer, because patients don’t have any choice in the matter of whether or not they get cancer. It seems to me that AIDS patients mostly get the disease from irresponsibility on someone’s part, but I know that I do not know enough about the disease to make a judgment like that. I do hope that diseases such as cancer and AIDS will be wiped out in coming years, so that everyone will have a better chance to experience the joys of life in this world.

Image Source: http://panachereport.com/channels/old_school_update/AIDSBLK.htm

Article Source:http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-diseases/aids-article/?source=A-to-Z

"Discrimination Directed Towards Obese People"

Everyone has had an experience with discrimination at some point in their lives. Whether it be based on gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or whatever else, discrimination is never a pleasant experience for anyone involved. What some may be surprised to find out is that there is discrimination related to people’s weight going on in this country also. Research has been conducted that shows that when obese people feel like they are being discriminated against, it can have negative effects on their health. Now obviously, the obesity itself has severe effects on their health, but research conducted by a group from Purdue University says that obese people who feel discriminated against are more likely to have a steeper decline in their health over time than obese people who do not feel as though they are being discriminated against.

The Purdue team surveyed a group of people about health problems, and, as would be expected when this survey was followed up ten years afterwards, the obese people were the ones who had the worst health in the group. But, not as easy to expect, the obese people who felt that they experienced discrimination because of their weight experienced the biggest decline in their health and functional abilities over this period of ten years.

Everyone knows that discrimination is unhealthy for everyone involved. It’s not good for society and it has the capacity to affect the mental aspect of the lives of all involved. Although we mostly think about discrimination being because of race, now we know that it even applies to people who are overweight. I once saw an episode of “What Would You Do?” on TV, and one of the scenarios was that waiters would make fun of larger people for ordering big meals. I couldn’t believe that anything like that would happen in the real world, but now that I have thought about this type of thing more, I am sure that it happens a lot more than most people think it does. I think that, just as we should stand up for people who are being treated unfairly or cruelly because of their race or ethnicity, everyone should stand up for people who are being discriminated against because of their size. Normally, when I am in public, I don’t like to get involved with other people’s business, but now that I know that it is a proven scientific fact that discrimination against obese people significantly fare worse in their health, I will be more likely to interfere with such a discriminatory situation. Everyone deserves a chance at a happy life, and no one should be allowed to take that away from anybody.

Article Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/social.php

“Stigma weighs heavily on obese people, contributing to greater health problems”

Image Source: http://civicplatform.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-overcome-discrimination-in-world.html