The End of a TRIP! by Jenan Hazazi

Initially I had thought that four to five hours was an excessive amount of time to accomplish things, but came to find out after TRIP, it is nearly not enough for the lab. I truly enjoyed my time, and quite frankly, looked forward to spending my Saturdays in the lab with my flies. It had honestly felt closer to half an hour than the five hours I spent there. Well, I can thank Dr. Leystra, Dr. Purdy and my fellow bright TRIP peers for making this experience worthwhile and anything but tedious. I will forever cherish this part of my life as I have grown so much, gained so much insight, and lab experience. Yet most importantly, I gained a profound appreciation for the lab and created everlasting bonds with my new TRIP family.

Going into this, I had no idea that a micropipette existed, and hadn’t even considered that people sort flies for experiments. It just hadn’t crossed my mind. Now I’m quite proud to say that I have an entire independent experiment done using drophila as my test subjects, and that I can sort about a good 200 flies in 15 minutes. When I first started my experimental project, so many ideas of what to study had flooded my mind, yet I decided to focus on individuals who are looking to lose weight since it is something that I hear in my everyday life from friends, family, and even on social media.  With growing fast food chains and increasingly unhealthy habits that people have come to acquire, obesity has become a global rising concern, especially for the US which ranks 12th for obesity in the entire world. Also social media tends to ruin one’s perception of themselves so many find themselves trying to lose weight to feel more accepted, and tend to do so in an unhealthy manner. When starting my experiment I had understood that not everyone was able to go workout to lose weight whether it be for health problems or even just a lack of time since life can be hectic. So, in my independent project, I had looked into digestive alternatives that people may take to exercise, in hopes of finding one that would aid in weight loss, while also not affecting overall health negatively. ​

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I ended up testing a lesser known digestive alternative to weight loss, that being different teas: Weight Loss teas, saffron tea, and turmeric tea. All have been said to have positive effects on weight loss so I tested to see which out of three tea alternatives would be the best option in terms of both weight loss and maintaining good overall health. I had thought that since saffron is so extremely expensive, that saffron tea was sure to have profound positive effects for losing weight and overall health, though to my surprise that wasn’t the case. Turmeric tea, a tea people tend to not give a second thought about, had actually the most prominent positive effects, showing the most weight loss in fruit flies as well as the maintenance of the overall health of the fruit flies shown through the development of the larvae and their eclosion rate. So if you ever want to lose weight , consider giving turmeric teas a try!