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Your Health This (Alternative) Week
Young lesbians are twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to be obese. This must speak to the innate need of all women to sit down with other women and eat ice cream, or to the uber-amounts of nesting inherent in any two-woman relationship (nesting = fat), or merely a freeing from male/societal expectations of thinny prettiness. Sounds good to me! Except the obese part.
Left-handed women have an overall higher mortality rate, according to a study of 12,000 Dutch women. During the 13-year study, lefties were 40% more likely to die from all causes. Just doesn’t pay to be different, does it?
Kids with mental illness face stigmas at school, which may prevent them from getting the right treatment and also make their lives suck MORE than your average elementary kid or high-schooler. Different = Bad.
Consummate alterna-favorite activity yoga seems to help both the psychological wellbeing and immune systems of breast cancer survivors. Women who enrolled in yoga classes self-reported that their disease was less burdening, compared with women on a yoga wait-list “control.” They also showed reduced levels of a key immune compound indicative of damaging stress. Just imagine the potential of a yoga/wheatgrass combo!
If you want a little more bang for your herbal buck, why not take black cohosh? This herbal supplement is used to ease the symptoms of menopause (and might totally not work). But it also seems to prevent breast cancer, according to a study of nearly 2,000 women. Ladies on the herb had a 61% lower risk of breast cancer. Of course if you do get breast cancer while on black cohosh, according to this story, it might be more severe. Ah, the cost-benefit analysis. Why not just do some exercise? It reduces risk of breast cancer, reduces menopause symptoms and reduces the likelihood that you’ll die if you DO get the disease. A little too mainstream for you? Or is it just that exercise doesn’t come in pill format?
Speaking of taking some alternative shortcuts, why exercise and eat healthy, low-calorie foods when you can just sit back, drink lemonade/maple syrup/cayenne pepper all day and just watch the pounds melt off – through your ass. So deliciously detoxifying, ain’t it?
Alternative rock is the most effective type of music for promoting healing and wellbeing in hipsters with cancer. Okay, I made that one up. Sue me.
Disclaimer: Your Health This Week and Inkling magazine would like to remind you that this is a humorous article. Although the above recommendations make it sound as if going with the flow is a healthy approach, please remember that the whole reason Inkling exists is because the mainstream wasn’t really working for us. So before you blow your paycheck on black cohosh and maple syrup, end things with your same-sex partner, or enter the lotus position permanently, please crank up some alternative rawk (suggestions here) and think things over for yourself. It’s an anadromous world out there; please swim upstream whenever necessary.
