At a moment when the popularity of the British TV melodrama, “Downton Abbey,” seems to have hit its apex in the United States, I’m hopeful that we Americans can take another cultural cue from the Brits.

Last week, a controversial bill calling for teenage girls to be given compulsory lessons in sexual abstinence was pulled at the last minute from the House of Commons order of business.

It was proposed by Nadine Dorries, a Conservative member of Parliament who is concerned that British society is “saturated in sex.”

“Teaching a child at the age of seven to to apply a condom on a banana is almost saying: ‘Now go and try this for yourself,’” Dorries told the Guardian when the bill was first proposed.

The bill was taken off the agenda before a protest by a coalition of feminists, humanists and abortion rights activists assembled outside of Parliament could even begin in earnest. It had already been roundly criticized by members of all three major political parties in the U.K. , including many Conservatives.

The general sentiment seemed to be that — however you feel about abstinence as an effective means of birth control — there wasn’t much sense in confining sexual education to only one gender. As one columnist in the Guardian noted, “And what about those boys? Should they just sit quietly in a corner with their fruit and their Durex Extra Safe?”

Read the rest of this article at The Washington Post’s She The People blog…

Image: Untitled by Riley Alexandra via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I’ve been thinking a lot about middle age of late, and what it is – exactly – that makes us more or less happy as we round this phase of life.

It might be that my 46th birthday looms on the horizon next week, which makes me feel like I’m already entering the second half of my existence. (For reasons I can’t explain, I have apparently decided that I’m going to live to 90.)

Or it might be that Blue Monday (the third Monday of January, purported to be the saddest day of the year) just passed. Fictitious or not – that milestone always prompts me to reassess my emotional state and decide if I’m happier or sadder than I was at this time last year.

To that end, I’ve taken a keen interest in recent research on emotional health in adulthood and what makes for happier grown ups:

1. Maternal Care – While the research is still confined to rats, it looks like maternal care influences brain chemistry into adulthood. Most of us would probably agree that this statement is likely true. But scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have demonstrated that intensive maternal care during infancy promotes the development of a specific hormone in the brain, which in turn controls the development of anxiety and stress responses. While the study still needs to be extended to humans, the preliminary results suggest that how much your mother dotes on you when you’re very young may be key to understanding things like post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders as you age. Ditto the adverse effects of maternal favoritism.

2. Religiosity – Another important factor in determining emotional well-being in adulthood is how religious you are. Modern happiness research leaves no doubt that religious people are happier than their contemporaries. This is something that has been born out both within societies and across them. Interestingly, however, American Jews scored the highest of any religious group on a “well-being” index within the United States, even though more than half of Jews are non-religious. So disregard all that kvetching and moaning; behind it all, Jews are actually feeling OK. (Perhaps that’s why I identify so much with them?)

3. Imaginary Friends – Oh! How excited I was to learn this:  a recent study out of NYU shows that having imaginary friends in childhood lays the groundwork for a more stable emotional adulthood. And that’s because through these imaginary friendships, what you’re actually doing is practicing how to express your emotions without fear of censorship or derision, all the while bolstering your creativity and verbal skills. As someone who grew up with a best friend called Con Brick Chair – and must listen endlessly to my own daughter chattering away in her imaginary play – I’m so pleased to hear that this behavior may actually be functional!

4. Early Sex – On the less encouraging end of things, research also suggests that early sex could trigger mood swings in adulthood. Again, the research has so far been conducted only on animals. But it implies that there may be an appropriate “age” to begin having sexual relationships, and that adolescents begin too young, this may have negative consequences for anxiety and depression later on. (Interestingly, being sexually active doesn’t seem to affect their school performance.) Something tells me that – if born out on real teens – these results might be of interest to politicians!

5. Choosing Happiness – I was delighted to happen upon a summary in the New York Times of a new book by Karl Pillemer called 30 Lessons For Living Well. In it, Dr. Pillemer – a human development scholar at Cornell University – interviewed more than 1,000 Americans from different economic, educational and occupational strata to get their personal views on what has made them happy throughout life, ranging from marriage to careers to aging itself. The article is fascinating on many counts, but one particular result stood out. Almost every single one of the interviewees concurred that happiness is a choice, not the result of how life treats you. So regardless of what happens to you early on in life, the consensus from those who’ve been there is that you are in charge of how you react towards those stimuli and for adopting a pro-active approach to being happy.

It’s nice to end on a positive note, no?

Image: Self Portrait by kasi metcalf via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

“There’s not a single part of my body that I’d want to change, even if I could,” a woman commented to me the other night at dinner.

“Liar,” I wanted to say back.

It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with the tenor of her remark. We were discussing the ongoing breast implant scandal in the United Kingdom, which has the government and private medical clinics here squabbling over who should pay to replace faulty silicone breast implants: the companies that put them in, or the government that certified their safety.

My dinner partner correctly observed that the real culprit in the scandal was body image: the idea sold to all of us that we’re meant to look a certain way. And the horrific lengths to which we go — vomiting, starving ourselves, paying inordinate amounts of money to plastic surgeons to add or subtract a curve — to comply with that ideal.

But I don’t really think there’s a single one of us — certainly not female — who hasn’t fallen prey to the lures of an Atkins Diet, a Slim Fast regime or a Weight Watchers program at some point. I have one friend who couldn’t contain her delight when she discovered that her anti-depressant doubled as a dieting pill. “A twofer!” she exclaimed to me giddily over the phone.

Read the rest of this article at The Washington Post’s She The People Blog…

Image: scale by vividBreeze via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

These days, product recalls are nothing out of the ordinary. From children’s toys to Tylenol, you locate the offending item, send in your receipt, and with any luck, get a refund. But when the recall in question concerns a breast implant – as it does right now in a scandal here in the U.K. – then the process is a quite bit more complicated.

In case you haven’t heard, silicone breast implants made with P.I.P. – an industrial grade silicone – by a French company have now been declared faulty, exposing women to ruptures, leaks and possible risks of cancer. Over the past 12 years, some 300,000 of these implants were sold to women around the globe in more than 65 countries, predominantly in Europe and South America. (The United States banned this product and declared it unsafe.)

The French government has recently recalled all P.I.P. implants and agreed to pay for their removal, but only for women who’d had the original surgery done in France. The British government maintains that the link between P.I.P. implants and cancer is far lower than suggested by French data. It has agreed to pay for any removal on implants performed by the National Health Service (NHS) over the past decade (primarily those linked to breast cancer reconstructive surgery). But this accounts for only about 5% of the 40,000 women who’ve had implants in this country during that time.

As for the remaining 38,000 or so cases, the government is urging private clinics to perform the recalls for free on moral grounds. (As a last resort, the government will step in to pay for removal of implants put in in a private clinic that has closed or is unwilling to provide the service.

And this is where things get interesting.

Read the rest of this story at The Washington Post’s She The People Blog…

Image: breast implant 5 by matthewlucas via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, jump in the shower, turn on the radio and hear the best news you’ve gotten in ages?

No, not world peace. But close.

Apparently, coffee is now good for you. It holds a host of physical – not to mention psychological – benefits which scientists are only now beginning to appreciate.

In a household where our espresso machine holds a hallowed place, this is definitely grounds for rejoicing. I haven’t been this excited since I learned that sugar made a comeback.

So hear ye, hear ye: five reasons to drink (more!) coffee:

1. It reduces depression in women. This just in. A new study out of Harvard University shows that women who regularly drink coffee — the fully caffeinated kind — have a 20 percent lower risk of depression than nondrinkers. This comes on the heels of previous research showing that the risk of suicide decreases with increased coffee consumption. So by all means, toss out that Paxil and fire up some French Roast.

2. It lowers the risk of lethal prostate cancer in men. But it’s not just the ladies who will benefit from more java. In another study out of Harvard (what are they drinking there? ahem!) men who drank six or more cups per day had a 60 per cent lower risk of developing the most lethal type of prostate cancer and a 20 per cent lower risk of forming any type of prostate cancer compared to men who did not drink coffee. Given that prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

3. It may protect against head and neck cancers. A study from the University of Utah showed that people who drank more than four cups of coffee a day had a 39% decreased risk of cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx combined, compared with those who didn’t drink coffee. Regular consumption of coffee has also been linked to a lower risk for brain tumors, reduced rates of colorectal and endometrial cancer as well as liver cancer and cirrhosis.

4. It may ward off Alzheimer’s disease. Several studies looking at how caffeine affects brain development  in mice have confirmed that caffeine significantly decreases abnormal levels of the protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease. When aged mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease were given caffeine – the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day – their memory impairment was reversed, according to a report issued by the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centre. Should these results be replicated on humans, it might suggest coffee as an effective treatment for this disease, rather than just a protective strategy.

5. It appears to stave off diabetes. Numerous studies have shown that coffee may be protective against Type 2 Diabetes, although the precise mechanism is not well understood. An analysis in the Archives of Internal Medicine, for example, found that people who drink three to four cups of coffee a day are 25% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those who drink fewer than two cups. In the United States alone, nearly 24 million children and adults in the U.S. — nearly 8 percent of the population — have diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease and accounts for about 90 to 95 percent of these cases.

Whether these studies will prove robust in coming years – or be cancelled out by some of caffeine’s adverse effects on things like sleep and high blood pressure – remains to be seen.

But I’m going to blithely hedge my bets and carry on enjoying my cuppa (or two).

Latte or Cappucino?

Image: Coffee by Mshades via flickr under a Creative Commons license.

It all began when I got back from a two-and-a-half week vacation in the United States last January. As I resumed my normal routine of running, yoga and the daily schlep to both kids’ schools, something didn’t feel quite right. Specifically, there was a throbbing pain on the left side of my bum.

I’d had recurring trouble with my piriformis muscle before, so I began doing some stretches that I’d learned during my last round of physiotherapy. But after things got so excruciating that I had to give up yoga and started popping painkillers on a regular basis, I booked in to see an osteopath at a nearby facility. (I’d seen an osteopath successfully for a different injury a few years back.)

Osteopathy didn’t work this time around. The pain didn’t go away. Instead, over the next few months, it migrated to other parts of my back – upper and lower. There was one point when I could hardly walk. Meanwhile, my migraines – which have grown in intensity over the past decade or so - were getting progressively more frequent, despite changing – and upping – my meds.

Enter Pilates. At the advice of a friend who’d also had severe back pain, I began doing intensive Pilates and massage with a physio-therapist in my neighborhood three to four times a week throughout July and August. She also did acupuncture on my back and neck and gave me this weird magnetic patch to wear on my back on the airplane and when I sat at my desk for long intervals.

The upshot? I feel fantastic. Sure, I spend 40 minutes every morning doing back exercises (because eventually we all turn into our mothers.) But other than the occasional twitch to remind me that I still have something called a Lattisimus Dorsi muscle and it isn’t necessarily my friend, I feel really great. I’ve resumed running three times a week. And most importantly of all, I haven’t had a headache in 16 days…which must be a record for since moving to England five years ago.

I wouldn’t say that the cumulative effect of this experience has been to make me an evangelist for alternative medicine, but it has certainly moved me much closer in that direction. I’ve never had an issue with popping pills to address aches, pains and all manner of illness, and I still don’t. But I now feel that alternative medicine – whether used alone or in conjunction with traditional medicinal cures – can be hugely helpful.

And apparently, I’m not alone. More than one third of adults and nearly 12% of children in the United States now rely on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), according to a large Federal survey released in 2008.  Non-vitamin, non-mineral natural products are the most commonly used CAM therapy among adults. But use has also increased for things like deep breathing exercises, meditation, massage therapy and yoga. What all of this suggests is that CAM is becoming normalized within our health care system, as reflected in the fact that several CAM provisions were included in President Obama’s health care reform bill.

So the next time that back gives you some trouble and you reach for the Vicodin, give it a second thought and call a physical therapist instead. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.

How about you? Have you ever tried alternative medicine and found it useful…or not?

Image: Pain by Racchio via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Like many middle-aged adults I know, I’m fairly obsessed with sleep. I’ve always been a bad sleeper, and have tried numerous remedies to help myself sleep better over the years.

I’m know that I’m not the only one with this issue. According to an article in The New York Times, in 2008, 56 million sleeping-pill prescriptions were written, up 54 percent from 2004. Doctors say they are dealing with more than 80 separate sleep disorders.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Arianna Huffington famously exhorted all women to “sleep their way to the top” in 2010 (meaning, ahem, to get more rest…). And as blogger Gretchen Rubin is fond of pointing out, once you hit the middle years, sleep is the new sex.

In light of my ongoing sleep-related issues, I’m always interested to read up on the latest research on sleep. Here are five new facts about sleep culled from studies over the past year:

1. Some people don’t need all that much sleep. I was fascinated to learn – courtesy of The Wall Street Journal - that for a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep isn’t all that necessary. These so-called short sleepers only need about fix or six hours of sleep a night. They also tend to be energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious – and do so without the aide of extra caffeine. (Think Bill Clinton.) Oh yes, and many of them tend to be bloggers and active on social media. (Oh! To be one of them!)

2. You need less sleep as you age. More good news, at least for some of us. Recent research in the U.K. confirms what had long been suspected: that older people need less sleep. While the average person in their 20s needs about 7.3 hours of sleep per night, the average person between ages 66 and 83 needs only 6.51 hours. The amount of time spent in deep sleep, measured as “slow-wave sleep,” was also less in the older groups.

3. Sleep deprivation blurs the line between being awake and asleep. So much for the good news. Even if you do need less sleep as you age (and especially if you’re not in that magical 3% of people who only need 4-5 hours), getting too little sleep can really interfere with your body’s normal functioning. According to a paper published this month in the journal Nature, when people are really low on rest, parts of their brains can actually go to sleep without their knowledge. So while they might look normal and might even be carrying on with everyday life – e.g., cooking/working/driving (eek!) – parts of their bodies have actually gone into a deep sleep. (As both a control freak and someone who is perennially sleep-deprived, I find this study really troubling.)

4. Getting too much or too little sleep in middle age can impair cognitive functioning. New research out of the University College London Medical school finds that middle-aged people who sleep more than eight hours or less than six score lower on virtually every test of cognitive function. The magnitude of the effect is equivalent to four to seven years of aging. (Yikes! I think I just turned 52!)

5. Naps are really good for you. Naps improve perceptual skills, motor skills, reaction time and alertness. According to a study out of Harvard University, people who took a 60 to 90 minute nap dramatically outperformed those who didn’t. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley suspect that the reason naps are so conducive to productivity is that they clear the short-term memory, making room for new information.

So what are you waiting for? Go take a nap. But please, don’t sleep too long…

Image: sleeping by spentYouth via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it would appear that the New York Times magazine isn’t the only iconic American institution undergoing a makeover. McDonald’s is changing its menu and ambiance to project a more grown-up image.

Over the past few years, the fast-food chain has embraced a whole new look and feel. On the menu end of things, it has begun offering healthier fare like salads, Asian chicken sandwiches and fruit smoothies. And on the appearance end of things, McDonald’s has also upgraded its look, offering free Wi-Fi, comfortable seats, funky lighting fixtures and cool wall hangings.

Front and center in this up-market move is coffee. According to Business Week, the company’s McCafe drinks, which were rolled out nationally in 2009, have driven revenue growth at the company in six of the past seven quarters. The idea has been to offer a lower-cost alternative to Starbucks (although Starbucks — which has had its own image makeover — disputes that McDonald’s is making serious inroads into its business).

The goal behind Mickey D’s transformation is to reach new, more sophisticated customers. And while that doesn’t mean renouncing its signature “Happy Meals” for children, the net effect is that the fast-food chain now feels more, well . . . adult. Indeed, among other casualties of the image overhaul is Ronald McDonald himself, who will now play a much more muted role in the company’s marketing.

Read the rest of this post at www.PoliticsDaily.com…

Image: Ronald McDonald! by jesman via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Woven into the many and varied items on my to-do list this week – which range from getting my haircut to helping my husband edit one of his academic papers to writing, oh, about 6,000 blog posts – is to be sure that every day, right before I pick up my son, I also pick up some tuna sushi.

Don’t imagine for one moment that I’m doing this for myself. I dislike fish…I hate sushi…and I almost never stop to eat once the whirlwind, 90-minute after-school pick-up run is in motion. (If only!)

No, I’m assiduously folding in a stop at Hi Sushi every afternoon this week because last week, my son officially passed an in-hospital food challenge for tuna. Which means that now that it’s safe for him to eat tuna, he needs to keep eating it for the rest of his life. (Specifically, three times a week for the next fortnight and once every two weeks thereafter.) More on that below.

Dealing with food allergies is so woven into my life at this point that I sometimes forget how little the rest of the world knows about them. (An immunologist once told me that they are also quite poorly understood by the medical profession as well.)

So for those of you who have a child with a known food allergy, fear that your kid might or simply wonder what is *up* with all those people freaking out about peanuts on an airplane, here are five facts about parenting kids with food allergies:

1. The science is changing. True, allergies may not be well understood vis a vis other common childhood diseases. But as the number of children suffering from food allergies continues to grow (according to a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3 million U.S. children have food or digestive allergies, affecting nearly 5 percent of all children under 5), we are learning more about the causes and treatments of food allergies with each passing year. And the science is changing. A fascinating recent article in The New Yorker detailed the nature of these changes which – excitingly for me – are being carried out by a research team here in London at my son’s allergy clinic. (Summary here; subscription for full article.) The thrust of the article is that whereas the conventional wisdom once held that infants with food allergies should avoid the foods at all costs (unless and until they outgrew them), the new thinking is that the best way to treat allergies is to “desensitize” infants by exposing them to the allergen in small increments over time.

2. Allergies come and go. As noted above, my son has just outgrown his tuna allergy. Last year, he outgrew his peanut allergy and a few years before that, his soy allergy. That’s the good news. The bad news? Allergies can also strike at any point. My son wasn’t always allergic to fish. Or to sesame. Until he was about four, I regularly fed him fish sticks from Whole Foods (egg and milk free!) as well as sesame bagels. But around the age of four, he could no longer eat cod or any other white fish without breaking out in hives (an allergy which persists, along with sesame.) And that’s precisely the reason that now that we know that tuna is safe, we need to keep giving it to him for the rest of his life, lest the allergy come back.

3. Alternative tests don’t work. The two main diagnostic methods for identifying food allergies are skin prick tests – in which potentially troublesome foods are scratched into the skin and any resulting swellings analyzed – and IgE (immunoglobulin) blood tests, which check for specific antibodies. But at least according to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), alternative tests for children’s food allergies – such as hair analysis or muscle weakness – should be avoided because there is little evidence that they work.

4. Mistakes happen. If you have a kid with potentially life-threatening food allergies as I do, you can kill yourself trying to eliminate every last possible trigger that might plausibly induce an allergic reaction. But you know what? Sooner or later, someone’s going to make a mistake. You’ll accidentally pour the wrong milk into his cereal bowl. (Guilty.) Or you’ll go to a restaurant and even though they’ve assured you up, down and sideways that  – no, the brocolli really wasn’t cooked in butter – it was. I once watched a two-year old with an egg allergy cavalierly march up to the table at a bake sale when his father wasn’t looking, down a blueberry muffin and – within minutes – turn blue and require an epipen. I almost fainted, with my own severely-egg-allergic child looking on. But you know what? I also learned a valuable lesson. The kid was fine afterwards. His dad (who administered the epipen) was calm throughout. And I realized – once again – that Sh%$ happens.

5. Don’t feel sorry for kids with allergies. If I had a dime for every time someone (well-meaningly) said to me: “Gosh, I’m so sorry for your son that he can’t eat… pizza…ice cream…milk chocolate…[fill in the blank].” But you know what? He’s fine! He doesn’t care that he’s never eaten ice cream because he doesn’t know what he’s missing. To him, dark chocolate is a luxury. So is marzipan (almond being one of the few nuts he can tolerate.) And the fact that he can’t eat most junk food means that he’s way healthier than most of his peers. (I have a friend whose ten-year-old son recently grew out of his milk allergy and she didn’t even tell him because she doesn’t want him to start eating Hershey’s bars.) Those of us who live this life know no other. So don’t feel sorry for us. But yes, by all means bring along some vegan donut holes the next time you drop by. Surprisingly tasty!

And speaking of which, I really must run. Hi Sushi beckons…

Image: Warning – Allergy Advice: Contains Milk by Danny McL via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Digital technology is transforming the world, helping to overthrow dictators in the Middle East and embracing gay rights at home. But if last week’s budget cuts are a sign of what’s to come, we may also need social media to save women’s health.

I got to thinking about this idea a couple of weeks ago, when I read an article in the New York Times by David Bornstein about text4baby, a service that sends free text messages to women who are pregnant or whose babies are less than a year old, providing them with information and week-by-week reminders to improve their health and the health of their babies. The program has been extraordinarily popular, boasting about 135,000 users to date with a goal of reaching one million women by the end of 2012.

What makes text4baby particularly appealing is that it targets precisely those women who are most in need of advice on healthy behaviors during pregnancy and post-childbirth, but least likely to obtain it. Low-income, minority women are far more likely than other women to delay prenatal care until the third trimester of their pregnancies, or go without it altogether. And that’s because while this information is widely available, these women typically lack internet access, a formal education and/or health insurance.

But they do have cell phones. According to the Times article, 80 percent of Medicaid patients send and receive text messages regularly and 61% of text4baby users live in zip codes where the median income is less than $50,000. For these women, getting a quick, friendly 160-character text message providing them with 1-800 numbers on topics ranging from how to quit smoking to the benefits of breastfeeding to how and when to obtain immunizations for new-borns has the potential to be extraordinarily effective in reducing infant mortality (which is suprisingly high in the U.S.).

Read the rest of this article at www.PoliticsDaily.com…

*****

And speaking of social media, here’s a post I did on Friday about Facebook’s new, more inclusive gay-friendly status updates.

Image: Texting by Ron Wiecki via flickr under a Creative Commons license