Plog post 3

Third Blog Post Assignment

Dustin Never

I will be writing to athletes everywhere who are trying to improve their ability, college students, and healthy individuals.  Athletes would be interested in the effects of whey protein on their strength training, how Gatorade affects performance, and if energy drinks are really effective.  College students would be interested to see if energy drinks really do improve school performance, and the ability to concentrate.   Lastly healthy individuals will want to see the most effective way to stay healthy without risking side effects and crashes in energy.   I have a pretty good idea of who I would be writing to right now and how would be interested in my research.  My topic is timely because college students make up a huge part of energy drink sales.  Also advertisements with famous athletes and actors are flooding the air waves with their support of Gatorade and different energy drink products.   Athletes everywhere including high school and college athletes are trying to find ways to improve their game and one product commonly used is whey protein to boost muscle building.  I am invested in this topic because I have used all of these products myself and I want to see if they really aid my health and are effective, or if they are unhealthy and have been hurting me.  I think high school teachers made us write objectively with no personal investment because they wanted our papers to be politically correct, and with personal investment comes some amount of bias.  College teachers suddenly care because real writing involves personal investment or it means nothing.

                I am starting to see multiple viewpoints emerge in my research because most of these products especially energy drinks seem to have some negatives with the positives.   Energy drinks can increase energy for both athletes and college students, but they can be addictive, create crashes, and have huge amounts of sugar and caffeine.  Gatorade can improve performance, but it can also create weight gain, and there is a large amount of sodium which can be unhealthy.  Whey protein can be effective in building muscle, but if taken incorrectly it can have harmful side effects.   One interesting thing I have found so far is that Rock star energy drinks have the same amount of calories, and sugar as 6 Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.  I have found that the process of research is long and time consuming, but if you sort through information with filters it makes it go a lot faster.

                I chose to review Cody Laws blog post 2 because I found it interesting how he found a web site saying that steroids are less dangerous than some medicines in our bathroom cabinets.  It seems like there isn’t a lot of information to go along with the topic that steroids are healthy, so I would maybe try to move my topic to something else.  Maybe something to do with athletes and then tie steroids back in to your paper.