December 2008

Recently I’ve been asked for my advice about problem nails and flaky, itchy skin by several neighbors and friends. As soon as the weather turns chilly and the heat is turned on indoors, dry skin seems to spread like a flu outbreak.  While you can keep slathering on lotions and creams on the troublespots, that only provides temporary relief. If you dare to look beyond conventional quick fixes to a deeper understanding of the problem(s), and the potential for real solutions, keep reading here!

The Nails Tell All

A lot of different health problems can affect the nails and cause a variety of unbeautiful changes in them. Of course you can hide the unsightly changes by covering them up  with bright, thick nail enamel, but underneath the glistening polish, you’ve got trouble.

Anything that interferes with the body’s use and absorption of proteins, for example, can cause abnormal nail growth. Health problems that can leave their mark on the nails include inadequate production of stomach acid and digestive enzymes, low protein intake, nutritional deficiencies, acute or chronic illness, exposure to toxins, and environmental allergies. All or any of these problems can result in slow nail growth, either horizontal or vertical ridges in the nails, pale nail beds, white spots and brittle nails. Fixing these problem(s) can make a visible difference in just a few weeks.

Better Nails for Holiday Fun

Brittle nails and vertical ridges suggest poor nutrient absorption. Some questions to look into: are you eating enough protein foods?  Do you have digestive problems with protein meals or any meals?  If so, you might try taking digestive enzymes with your meals. I’d also suggest an organic, food-based, multi-vitamin/mineral supplement daily. None of these can hurt you, whether or not you need them. So consider this a trial by diet & enzymes. After 3 weeks, you should be able to see improvement, that is, whether your nails are staging a comeback.

I hope you will also look into whether you are producing enough stomach acid to break down proteins for absorption. Once you hit 50, it is likely that you have too little. Drugs, dieting, underactive thyroids are just some of the causes of low stomach acid that can set you up for poor nutrient absorption. Your physician should be able to tell whether you are putting out enough. Be sure to let him or her know about your nail problems, too, and see whether he thinks it’s due to poor absorption or something else, like an infection, diabetes, or some other physical disorder.

The Skinny on Skin

Dry, flaky skin also suggests the need for a good multi-vitamin/mineral supplement to make sure you are getting enough of all the major nutrients. What with dieting to fit into your holiday finery or too many cookies to bake and presents to wrap, we sometimes don’t stop to think about what parts of the food pyramid we’ve been nibbling on, lately.  But your skin and nails know! You can’t fool them the way you can fooI your memory when remembering is inconvenient.

1. Be sure to include daily foods naturally high in calcium, potassium, and magnesium;
2. Eat at least 1 tbs. of olive, walnut or flaxseed oil daily to increase the moisture-holding properties of your skin;
3. Herbs and vegetables than can be healing to the skin (in soups and stews) include: garlic, burdock root, parsley, and onions;
4. Take 1 tbs. of a good quality omega-3 fatty acid daily. It does wonders for the skin and fights dryness.

Balms for Itchy Skin

November 2008

Still teary-eyed from watching the election returns that marked a great, generational shift in America, I decided this was the best day for me to write my November blog. I had been holding off, afraid to take a deep breath until I knew whether our future was now or still to come. I am happy to report that the future arrived last night, not only in the iconic figure of our new president, Barack Obama, but in what it confirms about who we are as Americans and what we can accomplish together. I hope and pray that we can set aside our pain, struggles and fierce beliefs long enough to fix our most urgent problems and create the landscapes of our dreams.

What I had planned to blog about is the truth about stretching. Not stretching your dollars, although we might need to do some of that, too, right now. No, this is the lowdown on warm-ups, technically called, “static stretching.” You know, stretching your legs, touching your toes, and holding a stretch for 30 seconds or so before starting to exercise — what you learned from your gym teacher or high school coach. It turns out, according to Duane Knudson, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, that using static stretching to ready your muscles before working out is bad for you.

“It actually weakens them,” says Knudson. His research shows that static stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. What’s more, just stretching one leg can reduce strength in the other leg, and weakened muscles are less responsive for up to 30 minutes after stretching. Not a good way to start a workout!

What is the right why to warm up? You want to do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase range of motion in the joints and warm up the body. When the body is at rest, there is less blood flowing to the muscles and tendons and they get stiff. To avoid injury and increase exercise efficiency, you need to increase blood flow and body heat before you workout. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels, says Knudson, pull more oxygen from the bloodstream and use stored muscle fuel more effectively.

So what should you do before a workout? To warm up, begin with a light jog. You can jog slowly in place or around the court or gym for three or five minutes. But watch the intensity of your workout. Too long and intense workouts will make you tired and stiffen you up, especially your back. After the warm-up, take a five minute recovery period. But don’t sit around for a half hour or longer after warming up or you will lose all the benefits of the warm-up.

One newer form of dynamic stretching is called “Spider Man,” which involves getting down on all fours and crawling the width of the court or practice area as if you were climbing a wall. All athletes can benefit from this and other dynamic stretching techniques. To learn more about warm ups and dynamic stretches, visit the website of the United States Tennis Association. Warming up and stretching is still important, but only if you are doing it in a way that actually prepares your body for the exercising you plan to do. To find out more about the benefits of warm-ups and stretching, visit the Stretching Institute.

Do you think our new president practices dynamic stretching before playing basketball, one of his favorite exercises? Tell us what you think and what you do.

Later, Luise

October 2008

In my September blog entry, I promised you information about an essential mineral, magnesium, that would knock your socks off because it is so vital to our body’s ability to stay well and heal from many of our most troubling chronic ills. We’ve known about magnesium as an essential nutrient for more than 100 years, but we lost sight of the fact that in our increasingly plasticized lifestyle, we get too little of it to protect our health and prevent many of the common killer diseases to which we are prone.

The US Department of Agriculture says that more than 90 percent of us are “deficient” in magnesium. You would imagine that might cause them stand up and shout that we are in grave danger and need to do something about this condition. Doing something about it should be pretty easy as magnesium is abundant - found in the sea and on land. If that is so, why is it in short supply in the diets of so many Americans? That is the question that started me and a colleague on a search for answers.

After many weeks of study, we found the answers we were looking for in a stunning story of the nutrient that the world forgot. We have written it up in an article titled, The Fountain of Youth and Health, published on the website, Enrichment.com.

Another place you can read the article in full, is on the Canadian website, Women’s Web.

Here is a preview of what you will find in this article:

“Needed by every cell in the body, a magnesium deficiency can be catastrophic and has now been associated with heart attacks, arrhythmias, cancers, diabetes, asthma, Crohn’s disease, premature aging, hair loss, twitches, cramps, high blood pressure, stroke, fibromyalgia, migraines, bone and joint pain, ADD, ADHD, shortness of breath, osteoporosis, muscle wasting, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, constipation, memory loss, sensitivity to light and loud noises, hearing loss, insomnia, fatigue, anxiety, tuberculosis, aggression, hyperactivity, panic attacks, nail fungus, Tourette syndrome, PMS, toxemia of pregnancy, numbness and tingling, eczema, psoriasis, depression, violence, gum problems, tooth decay, calcium deficiency, and virtually all chronic and autoimmune diseases now common in the US, including chronic fatigue syndrome.”

USDA says that 90% of us are deficient in this mineral, yet we hear so little about it. In our article you will not only find out how magnesium deficiency causes or contributes to various illnesses, but what you can do about it. It isn’t hard or costly to remedy the problem. Our paper spells it all out and provides references to back up what we say.

Good luck, but be forewarned, you won’t find many in either the medical or the dietetics fields who will agree with what we have written. This will be news to many of them as it is to most of us. Use your discretion in deciding whether or not to try the simple, safe and inexpensive remedies we recommend in the article.

Let me know what you think of the article and share with us your experiences with the suggested remedies. We’ll post them on our comments page.

Meanwhile, have a great fall season!

Until November, Luise

September 2008

Last month, I left you with the promise that I would look into anti-aging, anti-wrinkle creams and report back to you on what I find out. This was a tall order. Googling “best anti-wrinkle creams” yielded over two million (2,000,000,000) websites promising the best-looking skin money can buy. Products ranged from an ultra-expensive cream attributed to an astrophysicist named Huber who experienced a horrific chemical explosion that covered his face with burns. He searched but couldn’t find any salve or cream able to soften his facial skin and improve his appearance. Twelve years and 6,000 experiments later, he perfected a cream that made his skin look and feel smoother and softer. La Mer, the product in question, now sells for a King’s ransom in upscale stores.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, next I visited a website that claimed to have tested dozens of anti-wrinkle creams and found that none of them were effective or lived up their promises. But now (2008), the author of the site, Jen Hopkins, was offering free samples of something called LifeCell, based partly on a scientific breakthrough that won a Nobel Prize (for a scientist, not her), now formulated in an all-natural cream that prevented cell damage linked to facial aging and wrinkles. I signed up for a free sample (which hasn’t arrived yet) after I read the testimonial of a dermatologist and plastic surgeon who recommends LifeCell to his patients who don’t have the courage or dollars to go through Botox injections, plastic surgery, laser resurfacing or other invasive medical procedures. But it’s not cheap–a 40-day supply of this miracle face cream will set you back $189.00. The aged model in the photo on the site looked tired and droopy, but in the comparison photo she was vital, radiant and youthful-looking, as if she had found the fountain of youth! Should I believe it?

Kicking the can down the road, I decided to search one more website before surrendering to the seductive lures of an aesthetician and her sell-sational marketers. I went to the Environmental Working Groups’ (EWG) website, Skin Deep, a cosmetic safety database.

Wow! If you haven’t been there, you had better go! Here’s how they describe their website cum data base:

“In 2004 we launched Skin Deep, an online safety guide for cosmetics and personal care products. Our aim was to fill in where companies and the government leave off: companies are allowed to use almost any ingredient they wish, and our government doesn’t require companies to test products for safety before they’re sold. EWG’s scientists built Skin Deep to be a one-of-a-kind resource, integrating our in-house collection of personal care product ingredient listings with more than 50 toxicity and regulatory databases.”

Mama mia!  I won’t put anything on my face without checking the ingredients in the EWG data base! They have evaluated the safety and healthfulness of about 32,000 personal care products, rating them in terms of ingredients that are known to be carcinogenic, neurotoxic, immunotoxic, or with other known hazards. The best ratings are 0-2 (low hazard), the worst are 7-10 (high hazard). I didn’t find the two products discussed above on the lists, but I plan to check out the ingredients in the products above (those they reveal to us) against the ingredient lists in the data base, my next bit of research. You can do this too. It doesn’t have to be a facial cream. It can be a household cleaning agent, bar soap or a laundry product. Try it out!

Meanwhile, I am exploring another topic, and soon will have a paper for you to read, on the subject of magnesium. I am reviewing the topic with a friend and colleague, Mary Sparrowdancer, a scientist and journalist from Florida.  Magnesium is an essential nutrient so it is safe. But most American are short of magnesium, and that seems to take a terrible toll on our health and looks. It has been called, the Fountain of Youth mineral, because of its seemingly miraculous ability to restore skin, hair, and vital organs to strong, youthful looks and functioning.  Now I sound worse than the marketers that are trying to tease money out of your wallet with a bunch of promises, but this is something!

One of the things we are learning about the mineral is that when you get enough of it to satisfy your basic needs, your skin gets softer, smoother, and less dry, patchy, bumpy and wrinkly. I kid you not! Did you know that the USDA says over 70 percent of Americans (we think it might be 90) are deficient in magnesium? It’s the ubiquitous nutrient we can’t seem to get enough of in our bodies! And no one is talking about this. So what is that about? We’ll tell you what we think.

Next month, I’ll reveal secrets you need to know about magnesium, and offer ideas for a little (safe and inexpensive) experiment you can try to smooth and soften your skin, and relieve some of the aches and pains so many of us experience from time to time.

Catch you later, Luise

August 2008

If the child-bearing years are remarkable for nesting behavior, the post-menopause years are marked by de-nesting. It’s not just me. I keep meeting friends, neighbors and age-peers at the recycling center and the various donation sites around town. We exchange knowing looks, and one of us will say, “I can’t stand clutter any longer. I am giving everything away that I can live without.”

I keep wondering what else I can do to simplify, streamline, and disengage from activities that used to take up a lot of my time but now seem like so much busy-work. It’s not that I have such a super-busy schedule! I manage to keep quite busy, but that’s my choice. A lot of things I used to busy myself with aren’t worth my time anymore. Guess which things those are?  Shopping and laundry top my list.

Take laundry, for example. There was a time when I organized my laundry by color, heaviness, soiling, and wrinkle-ability. Sweaters and delicate fabrics were  air-dried, and I extracted clothes from the dryer so fast they didn’t have time to wrinkle. Being a laundry snob took a lot of my time, but I thought it was worth it. Now, I tell myself, it’s just laundry! Who cares? I don’t like wearing wrinkled clothes but I have given up ironing, except for “going-out” emergencies. Hovering over a hot iron is no longer an item in my day-planner.

A lot of other people around town seem to have given up their irons, too. Shirt collars are giveaways on single men, and wrinkle-free fabrics are telltale signs on women. I don’t say anything, of course, but it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in letting wrinkles go in exchange for time. Wrinkles on my face are something else entirely!

It seems that every other ad on the internet, these days, involves a very wrinkled woman’s face that magically transforms into an 18 year-old when you run your mouse over the image. What are they trying to tell us? Has someone invented a youthing cream?  Or, is this code for, don’t apply for a job if you look like this because we want an 10-year old. That’s age discrimination, of course, but does anyone pay any attention to that anymore? I think this wrinkling thing needs my attention. I reject Botox, why would anyone in their right mind inject a toxin near their brain? And getting an eye tuck from a plastic surgeon who specializes in boobs and tummy tucks is a frightening idea!

Vanishing wrinkles is something I definitely want to look into, though. My mother slathered her face every night with “cold cream” to avoid wrinkles. She had great skin! Wrinkle-free, until the very end! I have looked for the product she used but it is nowhere to be found, these days, and a pharmacist told me the company was bought out by a bigger one. Now all I find on the store shelves are very expensive creams that come with instruction booklets. If I followed all of those instructions, several times a day, I would end up spending more time on facial wrinkles than I used to spend on laundry!

Wrinkle-free skin interests me a lot more than wrinkle-free laundry, and at this point, I’m considering trying the whole washing, slathering and cleansing program described in the cute little brochure that came in the mail. The product I picked for my facial smoothie is French. It smells good and it costs a fortune.  I feel a little guilty that I will end up poorer but no better off than where I started, having spent an awful lot of money on “creme de baloney!”

Maybe I should consult my daughter first, who has tried every facial product and makeup brand in the stores. I will get her recommendations, and test drive the product(s). Next month, I’ll tell you all about it. For now, I will keep it simple, drinking green tea, which is said to prevent wrinkling, staying hydrated, and taking my omega-3 fatty acids, which work on wrinkles from the inside out.

Now that I know sunblock creams don’t protect you, and baseball caps don’t cover enough territory, I will have to get a straw hat so I don’t sabatoge my beauty routine with sun-dried, leathery skin, this summer. Love how the sun feels, but not how it looks on me. Sun is not my friend, a dematologist once told me. I bet he says that to all the girls!

Have you noticed how many high school girls hang out at tanning salons? New places keep opening up in my town and, despite the recession, they are completely booked up. I guess the girls are not worried about wrinkling. They will be, a few years from now, when they start worrying about keeping their fresh, unlined looks.

A friend told me about emu oil. Have you heard of it? It comes from an Australian bird and is supposed to have wonderful skin softening efffects and anti-wrinkle properties. Have you tried it? If so, please share your experiences here.

Next time, Luise

July 2008

Whatever you’ve read or been told by family, friends or physicians, the realities of menopause are very often unexpected, disorienting, and disconcerting. I can only compare it to the late stages of labor when your body feels as if it has been taken over and is being pulled apart, without your ability to do anything about it. While not as painful as labor, my first menopause sign was just as surprising and uncontrollable. And it was an indelible experience!

I was racing about a half mile from the central train station to a conference in Washington, DC, where I was to be the main speaker. In heels and a business suit on a sweltering day, I knew that my mad dash from the train depot would make me a wilted dishrag by the time I reached the conference, and that I would have no time to freshen up before I would have to speak. They were anticipating a crowd of 350 people, so I couldn’t disgrace myself professionally and be late or not arrive. I had to get there.

I arrived just in time, took a deep breath, and started my presentation. Before I could get one word out of my mouth, it felt as if I’d been struck by an electric current that was vibrating up and down my spine, superheating me, and making me sweat profusely. Now, I was not only wilted but red-faced, with beads of sweat breaking out all over my face like hives and streaming in rivulets down my body and legs under my clothes. When I regained some composure I figured out what it was, but not what to do about it or how to calm the embarrassment I felt as I continued to cook and steam like an overheated iron.

I managed to get through my presentation, although my knees were knocking and my usually strong voice was shaky. No one said anything, but the people in the front rows must have seen the look of panic in my eyes, my crimson face, and damp clothing. Maybe they thought it was apprehension about public speaking. Whatever it was, I couldn’t turn it off and had to let it run its course, assuming it would be over soon. And it was, except for the indelible impression it left with me. This was my first hot flash.

What are your indelible impressions of first menopause symptoms? I’d love it if you would share your thoughts, comments, and stories with our blog community. Write them here and I’ll add mine, too, from time to time.

Later, Luise.

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