History rewritten

There's an iconic picture circulating around the web of a group of female firefighters at Pearl Harbor, supposedly taken on December 7, 1941. [It wasn't and here's an article about that.] Nevertheless, the picture, shown below, strikes me as amazing for a couple of reasons.

First, it's of female firefighters at a time when women were still considered the fairer sex. Sure the war changed things, and women who had to step into traditionally male roles proved they could do more than bake cookies and make babies. Nevertheless, it's humbling to see these courageous women at work doing something so few women even do today.

Second, the ethnic diversity strikes me. There is a black woman, a Hawaiin woman and several Caucasian women, all working together during a time when diversity wasn't embraced or mandated as it is today. There's another new perspective for me of a time when I thought things were a certain way, and it turns out maybe they really weren't.

The third thing I notice about the picture also tells me that some of the historical facts we're bombarded with today, just may not be true. The 'fact' I question is that all those years ago people were slim and healthy because they ate fresh whole foods and exercised more. I look at these women, and I see courage and strength, but I don't see bony physiques and slim silhouettes. They're not supermodel shaped, thus evidencing the fact that back before the standard "American diet" took effect and began making everyone fat, women still weren't skinny.

In this related photo you can see it clearly. None of these women is slender. At a time when the fashion was the cinched waist and flouncy hips, these women didn't have an hourglass shape. I wonder how Dr. Oz or all the other weight loss and "health" gurus would deal with them. Eat less and exercise more? Who's got time for that when you're busy protecting the country? Seriously.

I have no doubt there are plenty of photos from this time of the ideal woman with perfect measurements, but I have the feeling she was no more 'average' than the size 0 supermodel is today. This picture shows women living life as it should be lived, not munching rice cakes and sweating on a treadmill or dancersizing. That's how to stay healthy and be real - do what needs to be done. Stop counting calories and fat grams and striving for the perfect BMI and go put out some fires. 

Eating Plan, plan to eat!

Part III of my Trouble losing weight? Lose weight series

I went to the dietician yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to speak to someone who was intelligent and knowledgeable. It’s funny how what a supposed doctor can tell you about weight loss while they’re looking at your blood work is very different from what a dietician can tell you about how to take better care of yourself.


Here’s some of the differences between doctor/PA and dietician:


PA: Cut bread out of your diet

Dietician: Eat two slices of whole grain bread with breakfast and lunch. You need carbs in your diet.


PA: Insulin resistance will turn into diabetes, you must lose weight.

Dietician: Insulin resistance doesn’t always turn into diabetes. You can improve insulin resistance.


PA: Keep a food diary.

Dietician: You don’t need to keep a food diary.


PA: Cut out snacks between meals.

Dietician: You must eat a morning, afternoon and evening snack.


PA: Avoid cheese.

Dietician: With your low cholesterol you can certainly have cheese.


PA: Switch to skim milk.

Dietician: Drink 1% milk, it has less sugar than skim milk.


PA: Change your life to accommodate your diet.

Dietician: Let’s create a food plan that fits into your life.


Now, armed with some sensible and doable ideas to tweak my eating habits, I hope to improve my health, not just drop pounds while I starve myself in order to fit into an ‘ideal’ weight category.

My ultimate advice: Trouble losing weight? Lose your doctor, and find a medical professional who understands health.

Evil Avocados

This is part II of my Trouble Losing Weight? Lose Weight – Series




Yesterday in the mail I got my follow-up paperwork from my farce of a doctor visit this week. Included with my test results was the ubiquitous DIETARY MANAGEMENT PAGE.

The notation at the bottom of the page tells me this list was printed up in 2001 – or maybe 1901. I can’t really tell.

Below the GOALS, which include the specific and intelligently worded: Reduce weight to ideal body weight [because everyone must be IDEAL at all times], is an exhaustive list of BAD FOODS to be avoided.

As expected, I’m to stay away from things like Whole Milk [how’s 40 years away from it, good enough?], Butter, Lard [cause I love a could scoop of lard now and then], Organ meats, [brains anyone?], Fish Roe [cause I can afford caviar], Honey, Candy, Chocolate [never giving that up!] and of course, the dreaded, evil Avocado!

Yes, to lower our fat intake we need to cut out that nasty avocados, which we find scandalously slipped inside dozens of different health food sandwiches. It’s heartening to realize the horrifying obesity epidemic could be solved if only we lowered our intake of avocados, those high fat fruits! I think I may go to the food store today and slap the avocados out of everyone’s hand and tell them how bad, bad, bad avocados are for us. We’re a nation of guacamole guzzlers, and it’s starting to show. We need to stop this frightening dependence on fatty fruits and get out there and start drinking more diet soda!

Stay tuned for Part II of Trouble Losing Weight? Lose Weight, where I plan to document my visit to dietician. Let’s see if she can tell me something I don’t already know about ‘healthy lifestyle changes’.

Trouble losing weight?

Doctor solution: Lose weight

I'm disgusted right now, having just come from a follow-up visit with my psuedo-doctor, [a physician's assistant, since, as a woman, I don't rate seeing an actual doctor].

I visited three weeks ago with a couple of concerns: a feeling of generalized anxiety, a fluttering in my chest at times that made me anxious, a tiredness, a feeling of being overwhelmed, an inability to lose weight despite numerous 'healthy lifestyle changes', and just a general not well feeling.

Psuedo-doctor's first step was to prescribe vitamins, calcium supplements and Claritan [for a mild sinus irritation.] She then ordered blood and urine work, which I went for and today I went back for the results.

Well, my bad cholesterol is amazingly low!
My good cholesterol is also low. [How do you fix that? More exercise!]
My blood sugar is a little high [egads, I'm pre-diabetic - so now no other symptoms or concerns are of any importance. I could have had a broken leg and it wouldn't matter - I'm overweight and I have high sugar [9 points above normal] so therefore nothing else is of any value other than I LOSE WEIGHT!

Hold on, wasn't an inability to lose weight despite years of dieting and lifetsyle changes ONE OF MY COMPLAINTS?

Why, yes, it was.

What does the psuedo-doctor say? Here's a brief, disheartening transcript between me and the skinny little medical robot:

Her: You should cut out starches, pastas, sweets, white bread, white rice etc,.

Me: I explained to you already that I've done that. It made no difference.

Her: I'm sending you to Weight Watchers, people have lost 70 or 80 pounds on that. You should go with someone for moral support.

Me: I've been on diets since I was 17. They DO NOT work. I've counted points, calories, fat grams, etc. I've cut soda, white bread, salt etc. out of my diet and seen no weight loss.

Her: It's not just for weight loss, it's for a healthy lifestyle.

Me: I'm doing healthy lifestyle changes. They're not making a difference.

Her: How often do you exercise?

Me: I was doing it every day, it made no difference.

Her: But how about now?

Me: I'm TOO TIRED to excercise. That's my problem!

Her: Well, you can't just give up.

Me: Why not? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting diffrerent results is the definition of insanity.

Her: I can send you to a dietician. Maybe they can tell you something you're not doing.

Me: Fine. Whatever.

Her: I'd like to see you in three months and let's see if we can get that weight down, because we don't want you to become diabetic.

Me: I thought it wasn't about weight, it was about a healthy lifestyle.

Her: I'll see you in three months.

Me: No. You won't.

I am, therefore I think...

...or, let's put the cart before the horse.

It seems a group of esteemed researchers have made the fantastic intuitive leap that taking birth control pills leads women to choose boring men as mates. [Read the simplified version here.]

That’s sort of like saying … hmm, I can’t even come up with a similarly dumb analogy for that one.

Apparently, a study of 2500 women bore out the conclusion that those who take birth control pills tend to look for more stable, less exciting men to date, marry and have children with. They also report a higher satisfaction with their relationships.

So, ladies, if the exciting bad boys you’ve been dating just aren’t cutting it in the husband department, for heaven’s sake, go on the pill! You’ll be better able to, and apparently more interested in, a regular, down to earth, not so pretty, less macho, well employed provider type. It all has to do with hormones.

Apparently it never occurred to these researchers that perhaps, just perhaps, women who tend to be attracted to stable, intelligent, hard working, dependable men may also have the innate desire to better control their own reproductive lives, and be smart enough to choose men who will provide them with longer lasting, durable relationships. Or, let’s turn that around, women who give a crap about how many children they have and when, are more likely to choose men who are good husband material.

Duh.

Sure we’ve all drooled over the hot, macho guy who can bench press a semi, or wrangle a shark or put out fires with his bare hands, but is it really a little pastel pill that suddenly gives women who would otherwise be dating cowboys and daredevils the desire to settle down with a guy who has a steady paycheck and no dueling scars? Please. Give the female race a little credit, shall we?

I’d make a bet these researchers also think it was the chicken that came first.

Draw your own conclusions

That’s what this article by Sarah Klein at Health.com basically expects of readers.

The title presents one hypothesis – that the Super-Moms [or women striving to be] can become miserable. That’s a no-brainer. We’ve all known for a long time that society’s expectation that a woman can be a perfect employee and a perfect mother at the same time is damaging to everyone involved. The article, of course, presents this like it’s news.

What’s interesting is, as you read the article you find that the first line:

Working mothers are less likely to be depressed than stay-at-home moms, a new study suggests.

Which sounds like the antithesis of the title, is contradicted by the results of the study.

The women who supported combining motherhood with a career had a greater risk of depression later in life than those who thought women should stay at home to raise kids.

In fact, the young women who were the least likely to support the idea of blending home and work life had the fewest depression symptoms when they were actually working moms at age 40.

[Emphasis mine]

So, to follow so far – Super-Mom wanna bes are not happy, but working mothers are happier, except for those who think being a working mom is a good idea. Ultimately women who don’t think mothers should work are less depressed later in life when they DO work.

Say what?

This is why the results of studies conducted by graduate students don’t really need to be published. Or then again, maybe the study draws some amazingly pertinent conclusions which Ms. Klein simply couldn’t communicate effectively in her article.

Either way, I’m confused. The article concludes that it’s best to accept the fact that you can’t do it all and not to feel guilty if you’re a working mom.

Thanks for that, because all those guilty-feeling working moms out there can now rest easily. We all know the best way to make someone feel better is to tell them to feel better.

I really don’t mean to attack the author here, but it stuns me how often these health articles contradict themselves and draw conclusions that anyone with a modicum of common sense has known for years. While a study that reinforces the conclusions of other studies may be helpful, presenting it with contradictory conclusions based on the same study is not.

My overall conclusion: Reading health articles on the Internet is bad for your health.

Pick your poison

At what point does the cure become worse than the disease?

I’m starting to wonder about a lot of the so called cancer treatments and cancer preventions coming down the pike. Everyone is terrified of cancer, and it seems the medical profession is working over time to find cures or at least treatments that can prolong life, ease suffering or make it less likely for people to get cancer.

What scares me is, it seems like most of the things they’re coming up with cause greater problems.

This article talks about hormone replacement therapy as a possible stop gap in the fight against colon cancer in women. It highlights a study that shows estrogen therapy has some effectiveness in lowering the risk of colon cancer, the controversial side effects of HRT itself notwithstanding.

Is it worth it to risk:

o Endometrial bleeding
o Breast tenderness
o Increased breast density, higher rates of abnormal mammograms and breast biopsies
o Increased risk of cancers, including breast, ovarian, lung, and malignant melanoma
o Cardiovascular events (e.g., heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular death)
o Gallbladder disease
o Venous thromboembolic events (blood clots)
o Reduced insulin sensitivity
o Brain atrophy, increased risk of dementia, decline in memory and cognition

in order to prevent colon cancer?

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t understand why we should have to choose between one health risk and another. Good health is good ‘overall’ health. How can the medical profession tout something as being beneficial if it helps one thing while making something else worse?

We all accept side effects of our medications – everything has a down side, even taking aspirin can put you at risk for some other health concern. But should we really accept side effects, especially deadly ones, as just a matter of course? If you use HRT to prevent colon cancer, why should you have to then fear an increased risk for some other disease? In my opinion, something is not truly effective as a disease prevention if it has to the potential to cause another disease. Obviously, if doctors believed this, we would have very little in our pharmaceutical arsenal…but then maybe we could hope to find a medicine that helps without hurting.

Or is that too much to ask?

More Mammography Controversy

I found this interesting tidbit in a Newsweek article by Sharon Begley.

In today’s issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists are reporting a study (the journal has made it available for no charge, so read it yourself and print it out for your doctor) that strongly suggests that some of the cancers detected by mammography would have vanished on their own had they not been detected and treated.

Cancers that vanish on their own? How is that possible? We’ve been led to believe that cancer is a killer – without treatment a death sentence and sometimes even with the most radical, aggressive, state of the art medicine to tackle it. How can it possibly just go away on its own?

Another quote from the article discusses a study that followed women who were screened for breast cancer and women who were not:

breast cancer rates were higher among screened women than not-screened women.

Interesting, huh? Or maybe frightening is a better word. Based on the articles I read, I’ve been wondering if maybe cancer is something we all get once in a while, some of us fight it off unknowingly and it goes away and others have it detected and then undergo radical treatments to kill it, sometimes winning the battle and other times not. I’m not suggesting we stop all treatments for cancer, but it concerns me that maybe the medical industry treats it too aggressively. I’ve known enough people who have died after a cancer diagnosis and aggressive treatment. It bothers me to wonder if they might have survived if their cancer had never been detected in the first place.

There's a pill for that

Today I saw a commercial for another new product women should be taking. [Men, you can skip this post – you probably don’t want to know this anyway and it doesn’t effect you.]

RepHresh Pro-B is an over-the-counter probiotic supplement designed to promote feminine health [you know...down there.]

Apparently you take this pill like a vitamin everyday to maintain the proper balance of bacteria and yeast in your body. Anyone who has had a yeast infection knows, given that kind of discomfort, you’ll do anything to prevent it from happening again, but the interesting thing about this supplement is that, like so many pharmaceutical products, it wants us to assume that good health can only be achieved by taking the right kinds of pills.

I can understand a product that will do something to relieve discomfort when it occurs, and I’m all for prevention of disease, but I still think we need to move away from the idea that if we just have enough different bottles in our medicine cabinet we will be healthy.

Something I found interesting about the website for RepHresh Pro-B, if you notice in the box under: When pH imbalance is most likely to occur, one of the check points is: For freshness any time. So I guess pH imbalance can occur for freshness?

I also notice there are no side-effects listed. Now many dietary supplements supposedly don’t have side-effects, but I think a little blurb about it should be included anyway.

What do you think about probiotics in general? Do you think it helps to take a daily probiotic supplement, especially one designed to promote feminine health?

I did see this famous warning at the bottom of the web-site:
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

So we can assume RepHresh Pro-B is not a product of Big Pharma. It’s a product of wanna-B Big Pharma. Does that make it a better choice for our health or does it just mean if taking this product becomes popular there will eventually be a doctor-recommended prescription strength available that will cost ten times as much?

Cause and Effect or Cause and Detect?

The recent mammogram controversy has me disgusted. For years women have been told to get mammograms as often as humanly possible. Better safe than sorry, right? If you have breast cancer, you want to know about it as early as possible so you can begin life-saving treatments.

I know there are thousands of breast cancer survivors out there who are grateful that a mammogram detected their cancer early enough to afford them the time to treat it. But based on recent findings, I have to wonder how often mammograms cause cancer before they can detect it.

Now the guidelines have conveniently changed*, and women are supposed to have fewer mammograms for a host of compelling reasons, not least of which is the fact that the mammogram delivers a huge dose of radiation directly into the body.

How’s that for health and wellness? How can the medical industry justify a test that may cause the very disease it’s designed to treat? Are there acceptable losses in the battle against cancer? Are the detrimental effects of the test negligible when compared to the number of lives saved? So you get cancer – it’s okay. With a few rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, we can cure you. Sometimes.

I’m not sure I like the odds.

I’ve had a mammography. One. I know for many women it’s a painful experience, and for others just mildly uncomfortable. I fall into the second category. It wasn’t a picnic, but it was something I could handle if I had to do it again. The question I’m struggling with is, will I?

So far, the answer is no.

I’m researching the effects of mammograms and I don’t like what I’m finding. Sure, being able to detect cancer in its early stages is a great boon to modern medicine, but being able to prevent it all together is the miracle we’re looking for. I’m wondering, is it wiser to stay away from tests that have the potential to cause harm, or to risk that harm in order to get a head start on treating a too often deadly disease?

You tell me. Is the risk we are finding now associated with mammograms worth it? Are we doing all we can to protect ourselves from cancer or are we just lining up to be customers in the multi-billion dollar cancer industry which will crumble if people actually find a way to stop getting sick?

*If you follow health news, you may notice the guidelines have flip-flopped again. So how do we really know who to trust?