When Women Attack – The Battle of Booby Vs. Bottle

At a family dinner last night, 6-year-old Allison hugged me and said,”Grandma, why do women have boobies?” To which her 90-year-old great-grandmother tartly replied “So we can feed our babies. God didn’t put them there just for some man to play with.”

To which I (silently) added, “Well, not JUST…”

The stars must have aligned in the Milky Way, last week, because the news was all about The Sacred Breast,

The World Health Organization released a report saying that only 1 in 5 countries is in full compliance with its International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, which puts strict limits on how infant formula can be advertised and sold.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that breastfeeding is still on the rise in the U.S., with 44%  of moms nursing at 6 months, and 23% still doing it at 12 months

And JAMA Pediatrics published yet another study concluding that breastfeeding makes kids a little bit smarter – about 2 IQ points by the time they’re 7.

The breastfeeding debate is still as hot and sensitive as a new mom’s nipples after 3 days of newborn gnawing.  Are breastfed babies healthier, smarter, stronger, faster, able to leap tall  buildings in a single bound? Should young mommies have yet another thing to feel guilty about from Day One? Won’t there be enough to feel guilty about by Year 14, Year 25, Year 38, when that darling babe comes back home dragging two of her own?

The answers: Possibly, No, and Hell. Yes.

There’s no doubt that formula has come a long way since the days of mixing cow’s milk and Karo syrup, although I did just come across such a recipe on Ehow (evaporated milk, corn syrup, boiled water). But even cans of Enfamil, with their rosy, genius-looking baby labels, remind moms that formula plays second nutritional fiddle to breast milk.

Of course, this is clinically accurate. Mom’s proto-milk, colostrum, is low in fat and high in protein and antibodies. Preemies get more of everything than term babies – more fat, more protein, more immune agents, minerals,and  electrolytes. Boys get more protein and girls, more fat. Hormones in milk lower the lifelong risk of obesity and  resultant diabetes, and even shape the way the baby may respond to stress throughout life.

Even economic status plays into the mixture. In 2012, a study in rural Kenya found that well-off mothers were more likely to breastfeed sons, while poor mothers nursed daughters more often. The richer mothers also produced richer milk for their sons, with a much higher fat content than the milk they produce for daughters. The milk of poor women, on the other hand, was creamier for daughters than sons.

How come? It’s evolution, baby.

According to the Trivers-Willard theroy, natural selection pushed us to invest in girls during tough times, and boys in times of plenty. When a girl survived to womanhood, she was almost certain to help repopulate her group,  building it up again baby by baby. But a boy might or might not find a mate and contribute offspring. In times of plenty, however, boys who survived were likely to have the bride-price for at least one wife, bringing to their group the possibility of many more children much more quickly.

Modern-day Eves find themselves lost at this crossroad of biology and sociology. All mothers want to give their babies the best possible care and most won’t argue that breast milk offers advantages that formula just can’t copy. But breastfeeding doesn’t fit into every woman’s life, for a myriad of reasons, each of which lugs its own load of angst. One woman may be cowed by the fear of post-nursing boob droop. Another, a struggling mom working at a minimum wage job, doesn’t have the time or place to pump and store milk. Even most financially secure women have to go back to work sometime, and months and months of pumping at work is a daunting idea.

So let’s just go head and say it. In a developed country with an abundant supply of safe drinking water, formula is fine. Babies can not only live on it, they can thrive on it

Yet we remain wildly divided on the issue. The Stir, a woman’s blog about parenting, is a good place to observe the contentious debate. Check out the comments. Militant breast-feeders demand the right to bare breast, while others want to keep both baby and booby under wraps. Formula-feeders resent the pressure to nurse no matter what, as well as the assumption that withholding mother’s milk is tantamount to child abuse. And those hybrid feeders whose babes imbibe from both fonts? That’s just crazy talk.

Motherhood  sets women up for an avalanche of guilt on every side. That beer you had before you realized you were pregnant. The job you had to return to at 6 weeks postpartum. The babysitter who wasn’t up to snuff, but who was all you could afford. The harsh words that slipped out one desperate night and haunt you for years afterward.

Although most non-motherly moments cause no lasting damage, mothers will never be able to let go of all their guilt. But when breastfeeding isn’t the right choice, for whatever reasons, the bottle shouldn’t become one more symbol of imagined failure.

Mens Sana in Corpore Sana

Illustration by Asics running equipment
http://www.dez20anos.com.br/

You should pray for a healthy mind

in a healthy body.

 

Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,

and deems the length of days

the least of Nature’s gifts,

 

that can endure any kind of toil

that knows neither wrath nor desire

 

and thinks the woes and hard labors of Hercules

better than the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.

 

What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;

For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.”

                                                                       – Juvenal, Roman poet, circa 60 AD

Diabetes and Alzheimer’s – (Dis)Proving the Not-So-Sweet Link

Release your kung fu grip on that salad plate. Maybe a milkshake isn’t as bad as you think – at least not for your brain.

Will a milkshake now freeze your brain later?
(Art by São Paulo ( Brazil )-based designer and illustrator Gusta Vicentini)

For nearly a decade,  researchers have been honing in on a  link between diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. People with diabetes are twice as likely to get the disease. The problem, studies suggest, is impaired insulin function, the hallmark of diabetes.

Insulin dysregulation starves neurons of glucose, their primary energy source. It weakens blood vessels, mucking up delicate brain circulation. Some research implies that normal insulin levels tamp down sticky proteins that clump up in neuron-killing brain lesions. Messed-up insulin levels might break down that safeguard, actually setting the stage for protein buildup.

But a new study that uses tissue from dead brains and  images from live ones questions the assumption that diabetes leads to Alzheimer’s.

Two groups were involved in the study, lead by Dr. Madhav Thambisetty of the National Institute on Aging. One consisted of 197 participants enrolled in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. While alive, these folks had oral glucose tolerance tests, which measure how the body responds to a sugar blast. When they died, they had a brain autopsy. The second group included 53 living subjects who had the same test, and also an imaging exam showing whether there was any Alzheimer’s pathology in their brain.

Short answer: There were no correlations between any level of impaired insulin function and the presence of amyloid plaques – the protein clumps that destroy brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease. Neither diabetes nor its younger siblings, pre-diabetes or insulin resistance, showed any relation at all to the physical signs of Alzheimer’s.

So should we celebrate this conclusion with a double mocha latte binge?  Maybe not. Dr. Thambisetty qualified his findings by saying most of the subjects didn’t experience the years of insulin dysregulation probably needed to cause that kind of damage. Just last week, a neuroscientist found that insulin in the brain seems to impair the way neurons connect to each other.  And there’s still that pesky worldwide finding that diabetes doubles your Alzheimer’s risk.

Like  most things in life, science sometimes presents conflicting views. But this finding doesn’t change the fact that what’s good for your heart, your lungs, your muscles, your cancer risk, your stroke risk, is also good for your brain.

Exercise, happy plate, no ashtray: Good. Junk food slurping, couch surfing, tobacco smoking: Bad

It seems the ancients had it right: A sound mind arises from a sound body.

 

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt

While I’m At The Dog Show…

(and I really am at a dog show this weekend)
….. here’s a really great comic

by Zen Pencils artist Gavin Aung Than. He’s taken the “Welcome to Science”  quotes by Phil Plait – better known as The Bad Astronomer – and given them a wonderful visual life. (Click on the link for the entire comic strip)

Mr. Plait’s blog is Bad Astronomy, at Slate.

And more amazing inspirational cartoons on art, being, fear, and courage at Zen Pencils.

“A lot of people forget how important it is to be creative. We get caught up in getting ahead and in day-to-day minutiae. But creativity is a fundamental mode of expression, as is being tenacious and standing by your own convictions and passions, even if it’s not the ‘popular’ choice.”

  -Tabatha Coffey

Time to T-Up: Women Take on Testosterone

In a groundbreaking study destined to flip the entire cosmos  on its head, testosterone has been found to make women smarter.

Alright. It was just a tiny bit smarter. And the smart-test administered was  a shopping list. And the women who took it only remembered 1.6 more things after 26 weeks of testosterone.

But still.

I’ve never heard testosterone referred to as the “IQ hormone.” Maybe the “Hey girls, watch me jump off this shed with a knife in my teeth” hormone. Or the “I am going to throw you down on this bed and pound it into a pile of splinters beneath you” hormone. But smart?

Testosterone does bring an element of reckless abandon to manhood, improving pain tolerance,  increasing risk-taking behavior, bulking muscles, and serving up a heapin’ helpin’ of aggression. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes lots of sense. If  you’re going to  throw a puny little sharp stick at a mastodon leg, you better have some guts. Crazy crazy guts. And some serious T-fueled bravado to make excuses about how often you come back empty-handed, bashed-up, hungry, and horny.

Meanwhile, back at the cave, we women – afloat as we were in collaboration-building estrogen – were strapping babies on our backs, foraging far afield, hauling home sacks of roots and nuts and berries and turning it all into dinner. Looking for healing herbs to bind up those manly mastodon wounds. And maybe some kind of pretty nice-smelling flower or a fluffy new cattail pillow.

Given these primal – but still ingrained – differences, I was very surprised at the study of 90 postmenopausal women who got a little brain boost from  6 months of transdermal testosterone gel. Women who used the gel were able to remember about 2 more words on the International Shopping List Test than they did before they gelled up. Women who used a placebo gel still forgot about the same number of items.

According to lead author Susan R. Davis, of Australia’s Monash University,  the uptick in memory, though small, should be enough to prompt a bigger investigation of how testosterone might improve cognition in post-menopausal women.

Because, after all, life hasn’t changed much since the cave-days. Even we memory-ravaged old ladies must still range far afield every day, gathering food for the tribe, hauling it home, and turning it into something tasty, applying band-aids to scraped knees and broken hearts, and buying flowers and pillows.

Men? Not hunting mastodon anymore. But still jumping off sheds, playing with knives and turning bed frames into splinters.

“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”

― Robert Wilensky

The Mercurial Debate Over Autism

Vaccines cause autism.

Genetically modified food causes autism.

Gluten causes autism.

Come on. Just one won’t hurt

Well, actually, no they don’t.  And now we can add one more thing to the ever-growing list of things that don’t cause autism: mercury.  This finding has 30 years of fact to back it up.

The Seychelles are an idyllic cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. As you might expect, residents eat a lot of fish – 10 times more fish annually, in fact, than Europeans consume. So, according to new research published in the journal Epidemiology, the archipelago is the ideal place to study the relationship between prenatal fish-sourced mercury exposure and autism

Mercury finds its way into the ocean not only from man-made pollution, but from natural sources like volcanos, geothermal activity, and natural deposits. Released from fossil fuel burning, it can drift through the air for up to a year before precipitating out – often over the globe’s oceans. It’s dense, so it sinks to the bottom, coats algae, and gets gobbled up by plankton.

Fish consumption is a great way to study mercury in humans because we’re the super-predators who eat the secondary predators who eat the bottom-feeders who feast on the mercury-laden plankton.

The 30-year Seychelles Child Development Study has followed almost 2,000 children from birth, correlating the mercury levels found in their hair with scores on communication and behavioral tests and with their teachers’ observations.

Short answer: There wasn’t any relationship between mercury, cognition, and behavior, even when the team looked back at babies’ very first hair samples – the hair that grew while they were still inside Mom.

According to lead investigator Dr. Philip Davidson, the Seychelles study could be the last word on the mercury-autism debate. “This study shows no consistent association in children with mothers with mercury levels that were 6-10 times higher than those found in the U.S. and Europe … if it does not exist here, then it probably does not exist.”

So, moms-to-be, you don’t have to feel guilty about that Chilean sea bass dinner. Unless of course you contemplate how your craving contributes to the death throes of an endangered species.

Oops.. Wait a minute. Hold on to your mother-guilt…  This just in....

It seems Mom’s own antibodies could be programming her unborn baby for autism. Apparently about 25% of mothers with an autistic child produce “antibrain antibodies” that can slide through the placenta and into a fetal brain. There they attack regions associated with learning, memory,  and communication, according to the paper, published in Translational Psychiatry.

When pregnant monkeys were injected with the antibodies, many of their babies behaved abnormally, didn’t develop well socially, and some of them grew abnormally large brains – a trait that’s been observed in some humans with autism.

I wonder how Jenny McCarthy will take that one.

Sex Addiction: In Your Head or In Your Hormones?

 Listen up, gals. Quit hiding behind that fake diagnosis of sex addiction. It turns out your mother was right all along. You’re just a ho.

Yes, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM for short), the revered book of official psychiatric diagnoses, has eliminated “hypersexual disorder” as a real mental illness. And a (lady) researcher at UCLA thinks she knows why.  Sex addiction is probably all in your head.

    Researchers at UCLA  probed some dirty minds to find out. Fifty-two volunteers aged 18-39 years old,  all of whom reported difficulty with sexual fantasies and behaviors, participated. EEGs measured their brain waves while they looked at a series of pictures. Some were designed to elicit the most primal cravings for sexual contact – like the super-hot one of your man doing a load of laundry without being asked. Others were not so hot – like dismembered people, skiing people, and, of course, people actually having sex.

    The EEG tracings picked up the subjects’ near-instantaneous brain reaction to each pictures. Dr. Prause wondered if the line would go off the chart in response to the blatently sexual shots. Instead, she found no positive correlation between hotness level and EEG spikes. The sex photos were no more exciting than the neutral photos.

“Brain response was only related to the measure of sexual desire,” Dr. Prause said. “In other words, hypersexuality does not appear to explain brain responses to sexual images any more than just having a high libido.”

And in OTHER words… you’re just a horn dog.

Anyway…. I’m not convinced. Studies  have linked hypersexual behavior in adulthood with sexual abuse in childhood. And just last week, this study by University of Wisconsin researchers Leslie Seltzer and Dr. Seth Pollack seemed to bolster those findings. Little girls who’ve been abused don’t crank out cortisol, the stress-response chemical. Instead, their brains and bodies flood with oxytocin – the hormone of attachment.

Maybe the most well-known oxytocin scenarios are birth and breastfeeding,  when Mom’s oxytocin flood promotes baby-bonding. But oxytocin – the “love hormone” – plays a similar role in all intimate relationships. The more involved you become with a partner, the more ocytocin you release and the more attachment you crave. New love and orgasm trigger a deluge of the stuff.

When the researchers asked a group of 8-11-year-olds to do some complicated math and make a speech, the non-abused boys and girls AND the abused boys produced cortisol. The abused girls made none at all. But their oxytocin levels went through the roof, actually tripling from baseline.

So how come? Are they adapting to stress in the most evolutionarily positive way possible?  Ms. Seltzer suggest that answer is yes. Sexual abuse seems to physiologically prime girls for pair-bonding.

And that brings us back to sexual addiction. Abused girls are at heightened risk for early sexual behavior, teen pregnancy, and hooking up with aggressive, violent men. While the DSM symptoms for hypersexual disorder don’t specifically include these, a key criteria is repetitive sexual behavior in response to life stresses. This ties in rather nicely with early sexual activity, pregnancy, and choosing a dangerous jerk for a boyfriend.

Take that one with you to the bar next time.