Fire up the kettle! Siobhan tweeted this study the other day, and I’m just tickled by it. It turns out that good old black tea—something I quite enjoy (for all you vegan challengers, I recommend trying it with some coconut milk for creamy deliciousness)—is just as hydrating as water.
Conventional wisdom says that caffeinated beverages are diuretics, i.e. that they cause water loss. But in research conducted on 21 male subjects—females weren’t used because of how menstrual cycles influence water retention (tell me about it, right?)—and controlled for all kinds of variables, it appears that tea is just as good as water when it comes to keeping us hydrated. The outcome according to the study abstract:
It was concluded that black tea, in the amounts studied, offered similar hydrating properties to water.
You might be thinking (as I was): How can that be? Drinking tea and coffee makes me pee all morning long! But then I realized something: Drinking anything makes me pee. Deep thoughts, I know.
So, have you avoided caffeinated tea because you’re worried about dehydration? Pass the cucumber sandwiches.
A tea party we can get behind: image via
While researching something at my job recently, another editor came across a statistic that got us thinking. It said that on average, people laugh 17 times a day. So here’s a question: Does that seem high or low to you? And here’s another question: How many times a day do you laugh?
Alexandra and I are both big laughers—sometimes with other people around, sometimes alone in our offices because someone on the other side of the country just said something really, really funny on gchat. In any case, I definitely consider us both people who are pretty easily entertained and promiscuous with a laugh—but I also know it’s possible that I think I laugh way more than I actually do. And so:
Starting tomorrow (or today if you’re an early bird), we’d like you to count how many times you laugh—obviously typing LOL, ha, or haha does not count unless you actually, you know, LOL—and then post it in the comments. We’ll tally up the results and divide by the total (math math math) and see if we laugh more or less than the average.
No big science here, and no makeup tips—just the basic truth that laughter is a great antidote to stress and sadness, and that literally every single person under the sun looks beautiful when they’re laughing.
So get counting! And happy laughing.
Happy Friday! Big news: Scientific groups representing more than 40,000 researchers and clinicians have come together in the pages of the super-influential journal Science to insist that federal regulators do more—and do more, more quickly—to assess the human safety of the 12,000 new substances registered every day at the American Chemical Society.
“The need for swifter and sounder testing and review procedures cannot be overstated,” the letter says.
The letter’s corresponding author Patricia Hunt, a professor in the Washington State University School of Molecular Biosciences, said:
“As things stand now,” she added, “things get rapidly into the marketplace and the testing of them is tending to lag behind.”
Hunt told ScienceDaily that the letter was inspired by growing concerns about BPA, which more than 300 studies have found to cause adverse health effects in animals. Hormone disruptors more broadly, were also of concern. She says:
“Hormones control everything—our basic metabolism, our reproduction. We call them endocrine disruptors. They’re like endocrine bombs to a certain extent because they can disrupt all these normal functions.”
Boom. She also said one of the problems is that the methods used to assess safety—primarily toxicology—are insufficient. “The FDA and EPA need to look beyond the toxicology of substances to the other ways chemicals can affect us. … One of the problems they have is they look at some of the science and don’t know how to interpret it because it’s not done using the traditional toxicology testing paradigm,” she said. “We need geneticists, we need developmental and reproductive biologists and we need the clinical people on board to actually help interpret and evaluate some of the science.”
I think this qualifies as a sign that things are changing, no?
Cross those legs, ladies (and the gents, if you’re out there): New research has shown that meditating for just a couple of months could have a significant positive effect on your brain.
Research done by the Massachusetts General Hospital and set to be published in the January 30th issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging showed that eight weeks of meditation had measurable effects on parts of the brain that deal with stress, empathy, memory and sense of self. From this article in Science Daily:
The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress… None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.
Here’s the thing with me and meditating—maybe some of you can relate. I’ve done it, and in the right environment (like an ashram in India) I’ve stuck with it. But I’ve had a hard time implementing it into my everyday life outside of those controlled environments, despite my best intentions.
Do you meditate? Do you have advice? The research on it is so compelling that I’d really like to give this practice a proper shot.
The ladies at Jezebel are discussing a new study today that may finally prove that women who are not interested in sex actually have a measurable problem.
According to the study by Wayne State University in Detroit ”hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (HSDD) takes place in the brain. Here’s what the BBC is reporting on the findings:
[The study's] author, Dr Michael Diamond, said it suggested that HSDD was a genuine physical problem.
He recruited 19 women who had been diagnosed with the condition, and compared their brain responses with those of seven others using a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which can measure levels of activation in different parts of the brain by detecting increased blood flow.
The women were asked to watch a screen for half an hour, with everyday television programmes interspersed with erotic videos.
In the seven women who did not have the HSDD diagnosis, increased activity in the insular cortices – parts of the brain believed to be involved in the processing of emotion – could be seen. The same did not happen in the women with HSDD.
This is all very interesting, but we’re kind of with the skeptics on this one. Just because there is a “physical problem,” as Diamond suggests, does not mean that’s where the issue originated, does it? Any number of things could be at the root of a lower libido, from stress to trauma to depression. We’re not scientists, but couldn’t that then be affecting the brain’s response?
Do you we have an expert in the house? Or, hey, just someone with an opinion?
Before you set your alarm to squeeze in that two-hour morning workout, consider the latest findings on sleep and weight:
According to a new study, dieters who sleep less than 6 hours lose 55% less fat and 60% more muscle than those who get more than 8 hours.
Of course, we’re not telling you to skimp on exercise (and we don’t believe in “dieting”), but we’re always looking for more reasons to encourage sleep. And finding after finding indicates an inextricable relationship between sleep and weight.
Like many Americans, if you struggle to maintain a healthy body weight, not enough sleep could be part of the problem.
Have any of you noticed a relationship between your sleep and weight changes?
If you grew up in Canada like we did, you probably grew up loving David Suzuki. The environmentalist and educator has been ahead of so many issues for so long, so we were quite delighted to see that the foundation that bears his name has taken on cosmetics. Yesterday they announced the findings of their months-long research into cosmetics, and they’ve unveiled their own Dirty Dozen, which has a lot in common with the ingredients we warn about in the book (where we show you how to actually find these mysterious things on product labels, and in which products they appear). We like their list!
We’d love to see Canada pave the way for reform, but considering the head of the cosmetics industry in Canada is also a former government health official, we won’t be holding our breath.
You can download the complete PDF here. And read on to see what made their list:
1. BHA and BHT
2. Coal tar dyes
3. DEA
4. Dibutyl phthalate
5. Formaldehyde-releasing preservatives
6. Parabens
7. Parfum (a.k.a. fragrance)
8. PEG compounds
9. Petrolatum
10. Siloxanes
11. Sodium laureth sulfate
12. Triclosan
This is not the first time we talk about Tata Harper and her clean line by the same name, nor will it be the last. Last month Siobhan raved about her new favorite cleanser, and this past Friday I got a facial from the lady herself while she was visiting L.A. I’m feeling pretty lucky about it too.
Harper (who is seen above making lab glasses look chic) is the picture of an exciting entrepreneur. Sure, it helps that she’s jaw-drop beautiful and has luminescent skin—but it’s even cooler that before she was into beauty she was an industrial engineer, and that she spends half the week on her organic farm in Vermont where she grows many of her own ingredients.
During my facial she explained that it was her stepfather’s cancer diagnosis that set her down the clean path—when doctors at the Mayo Clinic recommended he stop using all of his products that contained synthetics and carcinogens (which was exactly all of them), a dumbstruck Harper had her a-ha moment. Since then she spent six years formulating her perfectly clean line, which launched a few months back.
Is it expensive? Yes, but it is also genuinely high-performance stuff. It won’t be for everyone but if you are in search of luxurious, clean products that deliver, do check them out. The line wasn’t out when we wrote the book but you can be sure that we will continue to review individual products as we try them… In fact, I left my facial with a few pretty bottles in hand, and I look forward to testing them all.
Right now you can find Tata Harper online at their site and at Spirit Beauty Lounge, at Evolue in Los Angeles and at Space NK in New York.
Image of Harper via her site
Oh, hey, look at this: A hair product claiming to be formaldehyde-free isn’t. Which is not surprising to us as all, but is still big news. The Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology in Oregon was contacted by a Portland salon when the straightening solution they were using in their salon caused difficulty breathing, nose bleeds and eye irritation in stylists using the product as directed.
Guess what the product was? Brazilian-blowout straightening solution, which was labeled explicitly formaldehyde free.
The Oregon OSHA laboratory analyzed the sample using four different test methods. Formaldehyde was reported to be detected by each method at 10.6%, 6.3%, 10.6% and 10.4% of the product.
Because our Brazilian blowout inspired us to write our book in the first place, we get asked about this a lot. And in the last little while, we keep getting the question-statement: But Brazilian blowouts don’t use formaldehyde anymore!(?) To which we always say: Perhaps not, but they do use biformyl, which is also known as glyoxal and Oxaldehyde, and is a relative of formaldehyde, that isn’t particularly safe and also sometimes also contains the big F.
You can see some toxicological info for that chemical here and here. Note how the second one, under “exposure” it says: “AVOID ALL CONTACT!” (Caps and exclamation mark are, for once, not ours.)
Image via
Last week the New York Times reported on the results of a new study about massage, and it’s clearly of interest—the piece is still being featured as top-read content. To find out just what happens to us after a massage, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles recruited some 53 healthy candidates to receive some treatments.
About half of the group was assigned Swedish deep-tissue massages and the others a lighter-touch style of rubdown. All subjects were strapped with gear to take blood samples right before and immediately after the one hour massages. Here are the results:
Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.
Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment … and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol.
Even skeptics are having a hard time ignoring these exciting outcomes. To celebrate, Siobhan and I both went for great cheapie massages this weekend. I’m definitely partial to deep tissue, but it looks like all different kinds could offer benefits.
Do you get regular massages? And if not, does this study inspire you to?
