FN 225: Nutrition
Noy Rathakette, Ph.D.
Health Professions Division
Lane Community College
Eugene, Oregon
LECTURE 3B:  Wilbur and Solar Power


Be certain you understand the difference between our FORUM and MAIL.  If you want to send a message to me, use MAIL.  There are notes about mail on page 15 of your packet.

The Lectures NEXT week (Week 4) are longer than usual, so please plan your time for next week accordingly.


FORUM for Week 3:
  1. During Week 2, students sometimes talk about the difficulty of finding a balance between being informed about nutrition while not becoming obsessed.  Here's something along those lines: Orthorexia: Obsessing Over Health Food: Eating Disorder Stems From Too Much of a Good Thing, By JOHN STOSSEL and MIGUEL SANCHO, ABC News, Sept. 5, 2008.

    Here is the definition     of normal eating that Ellyn Satter gives.  She is a Registered Dietitian with 40 years of experience in helping adults be more positive, organized and nurturing in caring for themselves and their children. What is Normal Eating? 

    Read the above 2 links.  What do you find useful in those links?
  2. Is there anything in either Lecture 3A or Lecture 3B or the Study Questions 4-1 that you have comments or questions about?

For this lecture, have in front of you the "Wilbur Drawing" on page 39 of your packet and page 40, "Your Notes about the Wilbur Drawing.

It's sort of hard to read the bottom of the "Wilbur Drawing.  It says in cells everywhere in body.

You'll notice in the lower left of the page it says art by Carol Gallatin.  Carol was a student in this class in the early nineties and something she did made me realize that she's a talented artist.  So I hired her to do this drawing and the class named him Wilbur.  Carol now lives on the Oregon coast.

The "Wilbur Drawing" in your packet is subtitled "How Energy Goes from the Sun to Human Cells".  I will be using corn as a specific example of this, but it's what happens in all plants.

01corntapestry

A card I received from the organization Native Seeds/SEARCH

I used two books in particular to help me learn more about this process.  Both can be found at the LCC Library.  Here's one of them.

04newoxfordcover02newoxfordcorn03newoxfordrice

I chose corn because it's a crop native to the Americas.  The illustration on the right shows rice, which would be better used to illustrate this process if we were in Asia.

The other book I used was Isaac Asimov's book Photosynthesis.  He was a Russian-born biochemist and writer who died an American in 1992.

06asimovphotosyncover



Isaac Asimov is the author of 300 books, many of them science fiction.
08asimovcavesofsteel1953

You can fill this in (below) on page 40 of your packet.

5 steps of the Wilbur Drawing
  1. Photosynthesis

    Where is the Wilbur Drawing showing photosynthesis taking place? ________

    On the Photosynthesis formula at the top of page 32, make these notes, if needed:
    CO2 =     the molecule carbon dioxide
    H    2O = the molecule water
    O    2 = the molecule oxygen we breathe (2 atoms of the element oxygen)

  2. Making starch in the plant. The starch in the popcorn is digested down to individual glucose molecules.

    Where in the Wilbur Drawing does it show starch being made in the plant?

  3. Digestion.  Where is the Wilbur Drawing showing starch enzymes being present?  You should see TWO places.

  4. Absorption & Transport. The individual glucose molecules are absorbed from the small intestine into the bloodstream which transports them to cells everywhere.

  5. Cellular Respiration- Inside cells everywhere, the glucose is broken apart, releasing its energy.  Only then does Wilbur get any energy out of the popcorn.




Have the "Wilbur Drawing" in front of you as you're watching this video clip.

To watch them, you need the latest version of QuickTime on your computer.  Click here to download the newest version of Quick Time.

Video Clip 1 of Wilbur Lecture
about 14 minutes



The little snippet of music in the previous Video Clip is Garrison Keillor singing "Sweet, Sweet Corn".
 
Video Clip 2 of Wilbur Lecture
about 17 minutes
The above Video Clip leaves out something that helps Step 5 happen.  And those "helpers" are enzymes.

When ANYTHING burns, Step 5 (cellular respiration) happens and
  1. CO2 (the gas carbon dioxide)
  2. H2O vapor and
  3. heat
are produced and released into the atmosphere.  

It could be:
  • glucose in our cells being burned, 
  • or it could be the fuel we burn (like coal and natural gas) to heat and cool our houses,
  • or the fuel we burn (like gasoline) to power our cars
  • or the rain forest trees that are burned to clear land.

This released CO2 is the primary “greenhouse gas”.  It can raise the earth's temperature, leading to "global warming", because the CO2 can trap heat near the earth and keep it from rising up.  

The following is a site with a simple explanation of global warming that the kids you know might be interested in (from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' program called Environmental Education for Kids): Global Warming is Hot Stuff!

Here's some other information for those of you who are interested:

For biodiesel enthusiasts, the gas is always greener, By Tim Christie, The Register-Guard, June 22, 2008.
"Historically, oil is transported from distant fields by truck, ship or pipe to giant centralized refineries, where it gets processed into fuel and shipped out again to far-flung markets."

"Most commercially produced biodiesel is made from virgin oil from seed crops, mostly soy oil.  But about 90 percent of SeQuential’s feedstock is used cooking oil, while the balance comes from virgin seed oil grown in the Northwest."

"Hill said the company also is trying to foster alternative sources of seed oil crops that can be grown in the Northwest, such as camelina, a crop that’s cheap to grow, has a short growing cycle and doesn’t require irrigation."

 Acidic seawater could disrupt food chains. By Dan Catchpole, The Associated Press, in The Seattle Times, May 27, 2008.
The acidic seawater is moving closer to shallow waters containing the bulk of marine life, according to an article this month in the journal Science. The increasingly corrosive water threatens the survival of many organisms, from microscopic plants and animals at the base of the food chain to shellfish, corals and the young of some marine species.

“We actually saw the shells dissolving off these living organisms. They were dissolving off the terapods as they were swimming around,” Sabine said. Such creatures comprise as much as 40 percent of the Pacific king salmon’s diet.

“As long as CO2 continues to increase in the atmosphere, the oceans will continue to absorb that,” Sabine said. “What we’re seeing is only going to get worse.”

Here are two recent stories about bacteria performing photosynthesis:
A Bug to Save the Planet: Genome pioneer Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO2 and produce fuel. By Fareed Zakaria, NEWSWEEK, June 16, 2008.  This articles describes a "bacterium that will ingest CO2, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs".

The Most Important Microbe You've Never Heard Of, by Joe Palca, Morning Edition of National Public Radio, June 13, 2008.
"By some estimates, the oxygen in one out of every five breaths you take comes from a bacterium called Prochlorococcus. Numbering in the trillion trillions, this tiny microbe is one of the most abundant organisms on Earth.

So when Prochlorococcus perform photosynthesis — using energy from the sun to release oxygen from a water molecule — that adds up to a lot of oxygen."

In addition to being the food of shrimp and others at the base of the ocean's food chain, these bacteria consume a lot of  CO2.  Prochlorococci bacteria were discovered in 1988 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Sally W. Chisholm (pictured below).



END OF LECTURE 3B