Introduction

The anatomy and physiology of the human body had always fascinated me and I
grew up with a love and passion for biology. When I was a curious young child, I was
constantly asking why certain things occurred in my body and my interest for
medicine began around that time. As I got older, I started narrowing my options within
medicine and my interest for surgery began around 7th grade when we started
dissections. Although dissecting on dead animals and operating on live humans are 2
very different processes, I still loved the procedure and could imagine how operating
in a real human body would be extremely meaningful and rewarding. I was able to
narrow down my field a little but even surgery has many more sub-fields and soon my
interest for cardiothoracic surgery began. Because of the working knowledge I had
about the heart and my familys history of heart disease, I sensed that studying the
heart would be really interesting so I decided that cardiothoracic surgery was the best
choice for me.
After choosing my field, I started researching everything I possibly could about
heart surgery and collected a lot of information. Throughout this semester, I have
extensively researched the effect of certain food on the heart. For me personally, I
felt like this research would help me become motivated to have a healthier diet and
exercise more regularly. Although many people know of the long term effects of
unhealthy food on the heart, it is important to consider the short term effects and
how fast these detrimental foods can affect ones body. It is common knowledge that
America is known for two things: heart disease and obesity, and every year for the
past decade these issues have escalated and have become one of the main subjects
scientists focus on improving. More than 1 in every 3 people are obese and every year
1 in every 4 deaths occur due to heart disease. Because of extreme statistics such as
those and many others, I decided that testing the effect of food on the heart would
be really beneficial to my research and could teach me and others that a healthy diet
is crucial to ones heart and overall body health.
After I chose to do food, I had to choose what food to test. After much thought and
research, I chose my 2 unhealthy options: salt and sugar. Those two substances have
the most severe effect on the heart since sugar tends to cause issues with cholesterol

and diabetes whereas salt causes high blood pressure and general vascular problems.
Originally, I was going to do a healthy option as a control to compare to and I had
chosen avocado toast but then I realized avocado might affect the heart differently
and would not be a good base to compare. Instead I decided to just compare the
unhealthy food to someone who did not eat food. Also, for the sugar option I was
between donuts and muffins and I ended up choosing muffins because I found muffins
that had higher sugar content than all the brands of donuts I researched. For the salt
option, I was between french fries, pretzels, and instant noodles and I chose french
fries over the others because I thought they would be the most desirable and were
only a little less in salt content compared to the other options. So the final
experiment was the effect of salt, in the form of french fries, and sugar, in the form
of muffins, on the heart.

The Process
Now that I knew what food I was going to test, I had to delve deeper and chose
what aspects of the heart, what specific food brands to buy, who I was going to test,
and the time at which the test will occur. I chose to do the basic vitals: heart rate,
respiratory rate, and blood pressure, since those show an overall understanding of
heart and lung health. Choosing what brand of muffins and fries to get was an
extensive process and took many hours of research. After going on multiple different
websites and visiting a few fast food restaurants who did not have their nutrition facts
online, I finally chose where I would buy the fries and muffins from. I bought the fries
from McDonalds because their large fries had 350 mg of salt which was higher than
the salt content in Wendys, Whataburger, and Burger King. I bought the muffins from
Sams Club since they are really big in size and have over 40 grams of sugar per a
muffin. So it was set that I would buy muffins from Sams the night before the day I
test and fries the morning of.
The age group I wanted to focus on were teens since that would be the most
relatable and easily accessible group to test. I used the website signupgenius.com
in order to create a sign-up and on that sign up I allowed people to choose between
muffins, fries, or the control group. Since I wanted to do the test as soon as possible,
I allowed the sign up to be out for a week and decided to test people on December
12th at 8 a.m. What I planned to do was check each participants vitals before eating
and then after they finished eating I would set a timer for 15 minutes and they would
sit and wait. After the 15 minutes were up, I checked the participants vitals again
and record the data. I chose to do the test in the morning in order to avoid the effect
of any other food the participant ate that day. A problem arose when there was
supposed to be 10 per a category, but only 9 people signed up for french fries, 6
signed up for muffins, and nobody signed up for control but I fixed this by moving 4
people from the fries category and 1 person from the muffin category into the
control. I would still allow them to eat the food that they wanted but I would not
check their vitals after eating.
By this point, I had everything sorted out and all I had to do was execute the plan
but before I did that I had to keep in mind some sort of hypothesis. I predicted that

with the muffins, the heart rate and blood pressure would increase and respiratory
would stay relatively constant and for the fries, blood pressure should increase and
heart rate and respiratory rate should stay constant. Now that I had a hypothesis, I
began the process by buying muffins the night before, borrowing a blood pressure cup
from a friend, and waking up early to order a fresh batch of fries in the morning. I
arrived at school around 7:55 and set up in Mr. Wysongs room. Something I really did
not take into account was how hectic the process would be. As soon as I checked the
vitals on one person I would quickly give them the food and move on to the next
person. I was not really a fan of allowing the participants to time themselves but
since everyone eats at different paces, that was the only effective way to do the
experiment. I was also glad that I reduced it to 5 per a category or else I would not
have been able to complete the experiment in one day.

Results & Conclusion

After conducting the experiment, I collected the data and decided to graph them
and out of all the graphing methods, I believed that the bar graph was the best
option. For heart rate and respiratory rate, I did the bar graph but for blood pressure
I did it on a line graph because I wanted to show systolic and diastolic separately
since when they are together, the graph will take it in as a fraction and the change is
not as noticeable. I also thought that doing an average of everyones results would be
easier and more concise to graph. Overall, the results matched some of my hypothesis
and surpassed my expectations.
For the muffins, the average heart rate and blood pressure did increase but in
addition to that the respiratory rate also increased. Sugar is a substance that the body
takes in a absorbs quickly which is why the participants only had to wait 15 minutes to
see a change in their vitals. So when the participants ate that whole muffin, a rush of
all that sugar was absorbed in the bloodstream which would increase the blood sugar
level. An increased blood sugar level usually disrupts normal blood vessel functions
and this would cause an increase in blood pressure and heart rate. These elevations
can feel similar to a rush of adrenaline can last up to 6 hours but usually energy from
sugar last only about 30 minutes.
For the fries, the blood pressure did increase like expected, but the heart rate and
respiratory rate increased as well. I already predicted that salt would increase blood
pressure because when it gets absorbed into the bloodstream, the osmotic pressure of
blood would decrease and therefore more water would have to enter the bloodstream
to balance it out and the kidneys would be unable to remove that water. Because of
the excess water added, more pressure is put on the walls of blood vessels therefore
causing high blood pressure.
Something I did not consider for both variables is that the actual process of eating
food would take some energy as well and that is most likely the reason why the
respiratory rate increased for both and the heart rate still increased for the salt
variable. When eating anything excessive and at a rapid pace, the body is forced to
breathe faster in order to have efficient digestion. Also, because the participant ate
an excessive amount all at once, their stomach blocked the diaphragm from moving

down as much and therefore their breaths were short and fast which would cause an
increased respiratory rate for both variables. Because the participants are breathing
faster, the heart rate automatically increases because the heart would have to pump
at a faster rate in order to exchange deoxygenated blood with oxygenated blood at
the lungs.
The data was mostly accurate but there were still a few outliers and some other
aspects of the experiment I should have considered. One of the test subjects
accidentally ate a banana before coming in for the experiment so her heart rate
jumped 30 beats per minute which was quite extreme but that did not affect the data
too much when averaged with the other participants 5 in the muffin category. Also, I
allowed them to eat ketchup with the fries so that could have skewed the data since
ketchup contains some salt. Overall, the experiment worked out as planned and I got
desirable and logical results so this test was a success.

Real World Application

With all the results tied in, we can safely conclude that eating excessive amounts
of salt and sugar is really detrimental for the heart and although my experiment only
captures the short term effects, we can conclude that if one constantly eats
unhealthy food that contains high salt or sugar content, he or she will have heart
issues and may develop heart disease and other dietary issues. Eating excessive
amounts of salt causes high blood pressure which can lead to stroke and possible
ruptures in blood vessels and eating excessive sugar can cause stress on the heart
which can build up and possibly cause a heart attack. These results prove that we as a
society need to take action and inform younger generations about the harmful effects
of these food.
It is important to remember that one can still eat these foods in moderation but
he or she must be able to regulate and control themselves. Adults have general
knowledge about the harmful effects of unhealthy food on the body so I would target
younger children on the importance of heart health not only in diet but in exercise
and daily life activities. When I was a child, I was naturally energetic and therefore I
never had to worry about exercise but now kids have more ways of having fun indoors
without using up any energy so it is important to push that upon them. Also, the diet
of a child tends to depend on what the parent chooses so it is important to educate
parents on healthy food options for their child. The reason why it is important to
educate children on this matter is because once they grow up and become
independent they will not know how to eat correctly if they were not thought and this
would cause a lot of heart issues.
Another way this research could be used is in the media and to inform food
companies. Like I mentioned, adults know the effects so we can infer that processed
food companies and fast food chains know this as well so one might question why they
still produce and serve unhealthy food. Well, junk food is known to be addictive in the
sense that one finds happiness in eating it even if they know it is not good for them. If
one company decides to decrease excessive salt and sugar in their products they
would not improve the condition because the people would just go to a different
company to get their food. The only way to rid of this practice is to team up and

decide and overall plan for all companies and fast food chains to follow so that the
people would have no other place to go. This way, people will be forced into making
good decisions for their own health and America can become a healthier place and
less obese nation.
After all this research and testing one might wonder why a cardiothoracic surgeon
would care about the nutritional aspects of ones body. At this point we have made
the connection to food and the effect it will have on the heart but in surgery it goes
beyond that. Common sense tells us that if there is healthier food, there would be
less heart disease, and therefore less risky surgeries but one might overlook the fact
that an unhealthy body can make it harder to operate in the first place because of
decreased viability and a more sensitive and unstable heart. These effects are
important to consider and that is why my test proves that eating healthier is
important for heart and overall body health.