Female Beauty

We all know that women’s magazines are 90% ads, and only 10% articles, and those articles are overwhelmingly about sex or relationships. Very little is published about your health that is really true and not agenda-driven. So here are a few things that every woman should know, but is unlikely to learn from magazines supposedly dedicated to her education and health:

1. “Health” foods and “organic” foods industries publish 10% fact and 90% nonsense, as their goal is to make money, not to truly inform or make anyone healthier. The term “organic” has no legal meaning and so is used on highly questionable products simply to justify marking up the price. If you want a healthy diet, save your money and buy fresh or frozen vegetables from the “ordinary” parts of the grocery store. 
2. Supposedly “all-natural” vitamins, such as ‘vitamin C from rose hips’, etc., are no better than synthetic vitamins – shhhhhhh – keep this fact quiet or we will ruin the long-running scam to charge you more for less. Even if vitamin C from rose hips were better than synthetic vitamin C, note that the bottles of C from rose hips actually mostly synthetic vitamin C and only a very tiny fraction actually comes from rose hips. This applies to most “all-natural” vitamin and mineral products. 
3. The big push for anti-oxidants to help you avoid cancer or other genetic damage is based on theory with very little corroboration from actually studies. There is no proof of the big claims made by anti-oxidant lovers, mega-C dosers, and so on. The theory behind it makes sense – but actual large scale studies have failed to find any correlation between antioxidant diets and any positive health effect, such as lower cancer risk.
4. Low-carb diets and other fad diets are not healthy in the long term, and actually do not help you lose weight any faster anyway. To lose weight, pay attention to glycemic profile and fat, not carb count. Glycemic profile is about how fast your blood sugar will rise after eating a particular food. A low-glycemic response is what you want – avoid simple carbs like sugar, cakes, donuts, cookies, white rice, white bread – but eat lots of complex carbs like vegetables and fruits. Don’t avoid carbs – your body needs them and runs cleaner on them than on protein – just choose complex carbs instead of simple carbs – whole wheat bread instead of white bread, for example.
5. Any weight-loss diet should be supplemented by exercise, and the exercise should be a combination of weight lifting and aerobic exercise – the combination works better than just aerobic exercise alone. It is best to do the aerobic part in the morning, and the muscle part in the evening because your blood chemistry is different from morning to evening. Because aerobic exercise takes time – you need at least 30 minutes just to begin using your adipose fat stores – it is best to build your lifestyle around that part of your regimen. Get your friends involved, or your kids – make it a social thing, not just you on a treadmill in a gym somewhere.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Beauty, Beauty Tips, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.