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Your Health This (Romantic) Week
Trying to “rekindle the romance” tonight? Just get your man to stop showering. That’s right, women get all horny at the smell of male sweat. Sounds familiar, I know, but this time they actually showed an elevated cortisol (stress hormone) level. And if you wind up all hot and bothered but he … isn’t … well, Viagra is now over the counter in Britain. Because February 14th is National Impotence Day, too.
Seems that Britain also needs a National Sex-For-Dummies Day. A survey published on Monday found that nearly 1 in 3 Britons thought a woman could prevent pregnancy by jumping up and down, washing or peeing after sex.
For those of you actually trying for a baby, you might want to hold off until the summer. It seems that babies conceived in the spring are at higher risk for preterm delivery. Doctors who ran the study of more than 75,000 women from 1995 to 2005 have absolutely and completely no idea why. But it may be something about winter fatness, seasonal illnesses like colds, allergies, sun exposure, eating habits….
If you find the whole Valentine’s day experience more stressful than sultry, why not give your heart a rest? Take a nap at work. In a study of almost 24,000 Greek adults, researchers found that those who napped for around 30 minutes each day were 37% less likely to die of heart attacks over the study period. The effect was strongest in men and likely relates to reduced stress levels.
Are you in a clinical trial for a cancer drug? You might want to tell your doctor about all those herbal meds you’re popping. In a survey of clinical-trial subjects, around half were taking herbal medications, vitamins or supplements. Plants such as St. John’s wort and even high doses of vitamin C can interfere with chemotherapy – totally ruining the trial. It’s hard to reprimand the herbalizers, though: Subjects who believed that they were going to die within a year were more likely to take extra herbal meds.
Infant vaccinations are NOT linked to allergic disease, eczema and persistent wheezing (just like they aren’t linked to autism, but whatever). Vaccinations DO, however, prevent children from dying from such delightful illnesses as flu, polio, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough. Please tell ALL your friends. Kidnap the children of those who don’t agree.
Got postpartum depression? Might want to stop using copper pans. Women with postpartum depression have almost 30% more copper in their blood compared to nondepressed new moms, doctors report. Copper levels skyrocket during pregnancy, and women who get the baby blues likely have malfunctioning proteins that are supposed to normalize copper after giving birth. Okay, so the cooking pans probably don’t have anything to do with it, but better safe than sorry, eh?
Don’t take drugs. Even your grandchildren will hate you for it. In a study of 149 New York City daughters, mothers and grandmothers, psychologists found that drug abuse in the grannies resulted in strained relationships between the moms and daughters. The daughters were also more screwed up in general. Talk about cultural transmission of bad parenting.
And girls, if you have a prescription medication, please don’t overdose. It’s just not good for the complexion. Oh. And it could kill you. Deaths due to prescription overdoses are up from 4.4 to 7.7 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2004. The biggest increase was for white women aged 15 to 24.
Blame for eating disorders is officially gender neutral. After years of mothers getting all the flack for their daughters’ anorexia and bulimia, it seems that dads are equally capable of turning their kids into thin-obsessed mental patients. Parents who are overly critical of their children’s weight, who control their kids’ food or who diet and worry over their own body image are more likely to raise children with eating disorders. The effect was particularly strong for overweight dads in a Stanford University survey of 134 children. But let’s not knock dads too much; having one around seems to prevent teenage delinquency. So maybe they’re worth the Valentines after all.
Disclaimer: Your Health This Week and Inkling Magazine would like to remind you that this is a humorous article. We do not condone using stinky men to revive your libido, abstaining from sex all winter or kidnapping unvaccinated children. It’s a romantic world out there; please do consult your brain as well as your heart whenever possible.
