Author: Armin Brott

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Wellbeing

The Things We Do To Prove Our Masculinity

There seems to be no end to the things guys will do to prove their masculinity—especially around someone whose attention we’d like to attract. If you’ve ever read Mark Twain’s classic book Tom Sawyer, you probably remember how Tom tries to win the heart of Becky Thatcher by doing all sorts of crazy (and dangerous) things, such as “Goin’ on like an Indian, yelling, laughing, chasing boys, jumping over the fence at the risk of life and limb, throwing handsprings, standing on his head.” And if you’re a male of nearly any age, chances are that you’ve done something similar. In fact, according to several new studies, men will lie, cheat, fight, commit crimes, and even overeat to show off how tough we are or to keep from being perceived as weak.

Eat your heart out.

There’s a strong connection between diet and mating. In many Western cultures where female slenderness is highly valued, women go on all sorts of diets, in part to show prospective mates that they’re healthy. Men, it turns out, do the exact opposite.
Over the course of two weeks, researchers at Cornell University surreptitiously observed more than 100 men and women at an all-you-can-eat buffet and charted how much pizza and how many bowls of salad each person ate. Then they correlated all of that with the sex of everyone each person dined with.
Women ate the same quantities regardless of whether they were with men or other women. Men whose dinner companions were women ate 92 percent more pizza and 86 percent more salad than those who were out with the boys.
Kevin Kniffin, the study’s lead author, speculated in an email to writer Julie Beck of The Atlantic that this kind of overeating might be men’s way of signaling that they’re “healthy enough that they can engage in unhealthful behavior of excessive eating (and still end up okay).” He likened it to other research that “explores the possibility that eating spicy food might be a way that people ‘show off’ since it (arguably) signals a higher tolerance for something that others would consider painful.” Kniffin’s study was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Get a grip.

Sapna Cheryan, associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington, wanted to see how men would respond in situations where their masculinity was threatened in relatively minor ways.
Cheryan and her team had a number of male university students squeeze a device that ostensibly measured grip strength. The researchers then randomly rated the subjects as either “weak” or “average” regardless of their actual strength. The subjects then filled out a questionnaire that asked a number of personal questions, including their preference for products that were traditionally masculine or feminine, their interest in athletics, their height, and the number of previous relationships.
Cheryan and her team found that male college students who were told that they had a weak grip lied about their height (adding an average of three-quarters of an inch), claimed to have had more sexual partners, described themselves as more athletic, and “showed less interest in stereotypically feminine consumer products.”
Men who were rated as “average,” however, told the truth. The researchers believe that their findings “underscore the pressure men feel to live up to gender stereotypes” and the things we’ll do to “reinstate a threatened masculinity.” This study was published in the journal Social Psychology.

What does it mean to be manly?

In the grand scheme of things, overeating or lying about your height is pretty harmless. But some men go to far more dangerous lengths to establish their masculinity.
Dr. Dennis Reidy, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, found that men who experience stress because they feel that others see them as less-than-completely masculine are far more likely to engage in risky or violent behavior than men who are less worried about what others think. Reidy is careful to note that not every man who feels less manly will commit some kind of violent act. “The key word here is ‘stress’,” he said in an interview with Reuters Health. “It’s important to understand that it’s a combination of the two things.”
If your masculinity is threatened, how far will you go to set the record straight?

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Wellbeing

It's Not Easy Being Big

We’ve talked about how the size and shape of your body affect pretty much everything in your life, from your risk of developing a variety of diseases and your life expectancy, to your salary and the quantity and quality of your romantic relationships. If you’re overweight or obese, several new studies add more doom and gloom to an already bleak picture: Overweight men face discrimination both as job applicants and retail customers. And if they’re interested in politics, they’re less likely to appear on ballots and, when they do, they’re less likely to win.
The first two studies—the ones that measured discrimination in hiring as well as in customer service—were conducted by Enrica Ruggs, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Ruggs and her team had a number of non-overweight male actors apply for a variety of retail jobs. Then, they had those same men wear prosthetics to make them appear overweight and sent them out to apply for similar jobs at other stores.
Those same men–both in their natural state and disguised as overweight–also shopped at retail stores. The goal of these experiments, says Ruggs, was “to see if there were differences in the treatment they received when they were not heavy versus heavy.” In all cases, the “overweight” men were subjected to what Ruggs calls “interpersonal discrimination.”
The men were asked to rate how they were treated on a 0 to 6 scale, with 0 meaning they felt no discrimination and 6 meaning that they felt quite a lot of it. In the retail settings, Ruggs also had observers who were pretending to shop but were actually watching the interactions between the store staff and the actors/customers and taking notes.
The observers and the “customers” reached the same conclusions: “Overweight” customers did, in fact, “experience greater amounts of interpersonal discrimination or subtle negative behavior toward them,” says Rugs. “Employees they interacted with would try to end the interaction early, there was less affirmative behavior like less nodding or smiling; there were more avoidance types of behavior like frowning and trying to get out of the interaction.”
There was a third component to these studies as well, and this time, it turned out that real customers may discriminate against overweight employees. The researchers filmed a series of fake marketing videos for several rather generic products, such as coffee mugs and suitcases. The actors in these videos were sometimes overweight, sometimes not. Actual customers watched those videos, which they were told would be used in online ad campaigns.
After watching the counterfeit ads, the customers filled out a questionnaire. The results were depressing, but not terribly surprising: People who watched the “overweight” employees saw them as less professional, less neat, less clean, and more careless. According to Ruggs, those perceptions spilled over into the viewer’s overall impression of the products and the manufacturers as well.
The same type of subtle discrimination rears its ugly head in elections too.
Mark Roehling, a professor of human resources at Michigan State University, and his wife, Patricia Roehling, a psychology professor at Hope College, analyzed data from a number of 2008 and 2012 U.S. senate elections. Their research assistants obtained color photos of candidates in 126 primary and general elections and categorized them as either normal weight, obese, or overweight.
One especially interesting aspect of both Ruggs’ and the Roehling’s studies is that they turn gender stereotypes on their head. We have a tendency to think of overweight women as more likely than men to be stigmatized or discriminated against. But it turns out that weight-related bias is pretty much gender neutral.
The exception, according to the Roehlings, is the issue of getting on the ballot in the first place. Obese candidates—male or female—were less likely than slimmer political hopefuls to appear. But when candidates were simply a little overweight, women were less likely than men to appear.
However, when it came to actual voting, the discrimination was gender neutral, with overweight or obese male and female candidates equally likely to lose to their more svelte opponents. According to Mark Roehling, there’s no question that heavier candidates didn’t do as well as slimmer ones (New Jersey Governor and one-time presidential candidate Chris Christie being a notable exception). And as if that wasn’t bad enough, “the greater size disparity between candidates, the greater the vote share of the more slender candidate,” adds Roehling.
The Roehlings’s study was published in the journal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

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Lifestyle

Grooming "Down There": Fashion Trend Or Health Hazard?

Women have been trimming (or removing outright) their pubic hair for thousands of years. Men generally enjoy the results (in a recent study by askmen.com, 41 percent of men said they prefer women with no pubic hair at all; 38 percent said they prefer a nice trim), but they’ve traditionally remained shaggier than their women. That, however, has been changing quickly, and manscaping has become all the rage—to the point where today, men are nearly as likely as women to shave “down there.”

How common is groin grooming?

Well, it depends on whom you ask, how old they are, and what their sex life is like. For example, Debby Herbenick, PhD, a researcher at Indiana University, found that 94 percent of female college students and 87 percent of male students had done some sort of hair removal (which included shaving, trimming, waxing, lasering, or using depilatory—hair removal—cream) within the previous month. Eighty-two percent of the women and 49  of the men said they’d shaved their pubes completely in the last month.
In a different study, Herbenick found that most women under 50 trim or remove at least some of their pubic hair. But those over 50 tended to be more hirsute. In both studies, hairless—or at least neatly trimmed—people had more sex than those with more natural growth. (Although it’s not clear whether those smooth-skinned people are already more sexually active or whether being hairless makes them more attractive to prospective sex partners.)

Why do they do it?

People elect to modify their pubic hair for a variety of reasons. At the top of the list for both men and women are variations of “everyone’s doing it,” “I feel clean,” “I feel sexy/more attractive,” and “I look better in a swimsuit this way.” For men, there are two additional factors. First, something along the lines of, “if I expect/want her to, it’s only fair that I do.” Second, and, some might say, the most important reason of all, is that it makes the penis look bigger—a “secret” the porn industry has known about for decades. A few years ago, Gillette ran an ad encouraging men to manicure their shrubbery, and they summed things up quite nicely: “When there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.”

The Downside

Pubic hair is there for a reason; actually, several reasons. One is to minimize skin-to-skin friction that can cause rashes, irritate, or otherwise damage the skin in delicate places (45% of the people in Dr. Herbenick’s study of college students said that removing their pubic hair was associated with some sort of genital rash). Another is that specialized glands in the armpits and genital areas secrete mate-attracting pheromones. The hair in those places is there to trap the scent and keep it there until we’ve done whatever we need to do to extend our family tree. Finally, pubic hair may be there to keep bacteria and other cooties from getting into our body (that’s a much more powerful argument for women’s pubic hair; it’s a little harder to grasp for men’s).
Some anthropologists and others disagree with the first two reasons. But the last one is definitely true.
Family physician Emily Gibson put it this way in an article she wrote for the website kevinmd.com: “Pubic hair removal naturally irritates and inflames the hair follicles, leaving microscopic open wounds. Frequent hair removal is necessary to stay smooth, causing regular irritation of the shaved or waxed area. When that is combined with the warm, moist environment of the genitals, it becomes a happy culture media for some of the nastiest bacterial pathogens.”
The results? Gibson and other experts have seen patients whose shaved pubes have welcomed a variety of staph infections, genital warts, boils, pustules, abscesses, herpes, HPV, and other STDs. Yech.
In addition, if you already have an STD, waxing or shaving can spread the sores to other parts of your body or to another person’s body.
The above notwithstanding, shaving pubic hair does have at least one public health advantage: It nearly eliminates genital crabs and lice, creepy-crawlies that much prefer to set up shop in warm, hairy areas than on smooth skin.

You’re going to do what you’re going to do.

We realize that logic isn’t always enough to change behavior. So if you decide that you’re going to do some manscaping anyway, at least follow these basic rules:

  • Use a clean razor. Used blades could be home to bacteria or viruses that could make their way into your body.
  • Don’t shave or wax if you have symptoms of an STD. Those tiny irritations and micro-cuts could spread the disease to other parts of your body or to your partner.
  • Don’t shave or wax right before having sex. Give yourself a few days for your skin to heal.
  • Consider trimming instead of complete hair removal. There’s much less risk of infection that way. Use scissors or a beard trimmer.
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Lifestyle

What Knot To Do To Keep Your Hair

If you’re one of those guys who follows celebrity fashion trends and hairstyles (and even if you’re not), you’ve noticed that a growing number of men are tying their hair up into a single knot on the top or back of their head. If you’ve been tempted to do the same to your hair, you may want to reconsider. A number of dermatologists and other experts believe that these man buns (sometimes called bro buns, hipster buns, or Samurai top knots) may result in permanent hair loss.
Here’s how it works. Pulling the hair back tightly and keeping it there for long periods of time puts an unnatural amount of pressure on the hair follicles and roots. If you’re lucky, your hair will simply break, but it’ll grow back. If you’re not, you can develop a condition called traction alopecia, which is a name for “pulling your hair out and leaving bald patches that won’t ever fill back in.”
Most men who wear man buns have relatively long locks. But there are plenty of guys with shorter hair—maybe an inch or two long—who wrestle their hair into painful looking buns that end up roughly the size of a blueberry.
Interestingly, traction alopecia isn’t confined to hipsters. It’s actually relatively common among Sikh men whose tightly wound turbans can pull on the hair. It also affects women (and men) who wear their hair in corn rows or tight braids, and female dancers, among whom the condition is called “ballerina baldness.”
If losing your hair isn’t reason enough to dump the man bun, you may want to consider whether it’s having the desired effect. Grooming retailer West Coast Shaving recently did a survey of men’s grooming trends such as beards, stubble, use of premium products such as face cream, straight-razor shaving, and man buns. They found that women like every single one of them—except man buns.
Sixty-two percent of the women surveyed said they either don’t like (35.5 percent) or hate (27.4 percent) man buns. And asked whether they think a current or past significant other would look attractive when sporting a man bun, 74.2 percent said “no.” Worse yet, the top five adjectives that come to women’s mind when seeing a guy with a man bun are, in order, feminine, trendy, weird, sexy, and hot. In case you missed it, “feminine” was No. one. Not the image most fashion-conscious guys are trying to present.
On the other hand, women see beards (again, in order), as manly, sexy, rugged, hairy, and scratchy.
It’s pretty easy to reduce the risk that your hairstyle will lead to baldness.
First, give up the man bun. Please. Second, if you absolutely refuse to take good advice, at least make sure your hair is long—that blueberry bun is especially dangerous. Third, simply (and literally) loosen up—don’t make those rows, braids, knots, or even ponytails so tight.
Finally, don’t use rubber bands—they stick to your hair, get it all tangled, and tear it out. Instead, go for scrunchies, which are snag-free. They come in manly black and brown or, if looking feminine is your goal, in pinks and other colors as well as with attached bows and flowers.

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Lifestyle

9½ Reasons You Should Sleep In The Buff

According to a recent study, only 8 percent of adults sleep naked. The rest of us either sleep in pajamas (74 percent) or “something else.” If you’re not among the 8 percent, here are 9 ½ reasons why you should donate your PJs and anything else you wear to bed at night to the nearest thrift store.

1. You’ll sleep better.

Your body temperature drops a little as you fall asleep and climbs back to normal when you wake up. Those cooler temperatures stimulate production of melatonin, a hormone that regulates your sleep and wake cycles and helps you sleep more deeply. Wearing PJs can increase your body temperature, which reduces melatonin production and can keep you from getting the most restful sleep possible.

2. You’ll burn more calories.

People who sleep in cool environments produce more brown fat. Sounds disgusting, but brown fat is actually good for you; it helps you burn calories, which generates heat. Just don’t go too far with this. You want to be cool, not cold.

3. It’s good for your boys.

As you’ve probably noticed, your testicles live outside your body–and there’s a good reason for that. The testicles manufacture sperm, but to do their job right, they need to be about three degrees cooler than the rest of you. According to a recent study done at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, men who wear boxers during the day and nothing at night have 25 percent less damaged DNA in their sperm compared to men who wear briefs during the day and at night. Those tighty-whities heat up your balls and cook your sperm. Something to consider if you’re planning on having kids at some point.

4. It’s good for your relationship.

In a recent study of more than 1,000 people in the UK, 57 percent of nude sleepers said they’re happy in their relationship, compared to 48 percent of PJ sleepers and 43 percent of nighty wearers. People who wear onesies (those full-body PJs with feet) were the worst off, with only 38 percent saying they’re happy.

5. It reduces stress.

Cooler temperatures suppress production of the stress hormone cortisol. As a result, you wake up more alert and relaxed. Skin-to-skin contact, which you’ll get a lot more of when you go commando, triggers the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which is essentially the opposite of cortisol. Oxytocin lowers your stress and anxiety levels, reduces your blood pressure, and boosts your immune system.

6. It’s cheaper.

Have you looked at the price of PJs and onesies these days?

7. It’s good for the environment.

We don’t know exactly what the carbon footprint of a set of PJs is, but if you don’t wear them, you’ll save water, gas, and/or electricity. Plus, you won’t be putting a bunch of detergent into the water supply.

8. It could keep you from becoming a hermit.

If you’re a PJ or onesies kind of guy, once you’re dressed, chances are you’re not going to go out for a beer with the guys. But if you sleep au naturel, you won’t get ready for bed ’til the very last minute.

9. It’s good for your skin.

Sweat and belly button lint build up when you wear clothes. Letting your privates and the rest of your skin air out helps keep everything fresh. In addition, cooler temperatures increase production of growth hormones that repair skin and replace dead cells. That explains why they call it “beauty rest.”

9½. You may get more sex.

Just imagine: skin-to-skin contact, oxytocin (which makes you feel warmer and cuddlier), a satisfying relationship, a relaxed demeanor, a few extra dollars in your pocket, an active social life, and a nice complexion. There’s only one place that leads. Just make sure you’re not wearing anything when you get there.

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Lifestyle

Could Masculinity Be Killing Us?

That whole sticks-and-stones-vs.-names thing turns out to be wrong. The truth is that while sticks and stones can, indeed, break bones and leave scars, there are a few words that are actually killing us: “Man up,” “Play through it,” and “Big boys don’t cry.”
The pressure to man up starts long before we can even stand up. John and Sandra Condry, a husband-and-wife team of researchers at Cornell University, conducted a few of my favorite studies. In one, they had several hundred men and women watch a videotape of a gender neutrally dressed 9-month-old playing with a jack-in-the-box. The Condrys told half of the adults that they were watching a boy, and the other half that they were watching a girl. When the jack-in-the-box popped, the people watching the “girl” described “her” reaction as fear. Those watching the “boy” described “his” reaction as anger.
That doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you realize that those perceptions translate into behavior–most of us would treat a frightened child very differently than an angry one. New mothers breastfeed girls longer than boys and they’re quicker to respond to, sooth, and cuddle with crying girls than boys.
The message is so strong that even a baby could figure it out (and plenty do): boys shouldn’t cry. Put a different way, boys—and later, men—need to be tough. “Real” men disregard pain, discomfort, and even common sense. Here are a few examples of how this plays out:

Our jobs are killing us.

More than 90 percent of people killed in a workplace are male. And more than 90 percent of those who work in the most dangerous jobs are male. These include military service, roofing, logging, mining, firefighting, garbage collecting, working on an oil rig, and driving a truck.

Our social life is killing us.

On average, men have fewer friends and we’re less emotionally open with them than women are. A number of studies have found that loneliness is one of the biggest predictors of functional decline and death in older adults.

Our diet is killing us.

Healthy food is for girls. Real men eat tons of fried foods, bacon, and red meat (click here for more on “masculine” vs “feminine” foods). Study after study has found a clear association between a “manly” diet and heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes.

Other stuff we put in our mouth is killing us.

Men are more likely as women to die from alcohol-related causes (which include cirrhosis of the liver, cancer, car accidents, and violence), and we’re more likely than women to smoke and die from smoking-related conditions.

The way we play is killing us.

Over the past few years, we’ve learned more and more about concussions and brain injury, a lot of which come from violent sports like boxing, football (the American kind), lacrosse, and rugby. Oh, and let’s not forget about mixed martial arts (UFC, and so on), where the gloves you wear are designed to protect your hands, not cushion the blows to your opponent’s head. And, of course, when we sustain an injury, we’re told to play through it. How many times have we heard about athletes who played with broken bones or other injuries?
Non-violent sports (like baseball and cycling) can be deadly too, especially when they involve taking steroids and other supplements that have been linked with long-term disability and death.
In the pursuit of “real” masculinity, we also have a tendency to make already dangerous activities even more dangerous by showing off. YouTube has videos of hundreds of catastrophic sporting accidents involving boys and men, and the X Games have turned excessive risk taking into an art.

Going outside is killing us.

Dermatologists recommend that all of us—male and female—put on sunscreen every day, and for good reason: too much exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays causes skin cancer. But because lotions and sunscreen are for girls, men are far less likely than women to apply sunscreen. As a result, twice as many men as women develop and die from skin cancers.

How we get from place to place is killing us.

Male drivers are more likely than females to cause, be injured in, or die in car accidents.

Our attitude about healthcare is killing us.

Men are half as likely as women to have seen a doctor in the past year. If we don’t go, we can’t get important health screenings that could save or extend our life. Jean Bonhomme, an advisor to Men’s Health Network, says it’s all about the “terrible twos.” In our teens and 20s, we’re too tough; in our 30s and 40s, we’re too busy; and in our 50s and up, we’re too afraid of what we might find out.
So the next time anyone tells you to “man up,” think about whether that’s something you really want to do. After all, it could kill you.

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Wellbeing

The Long And The Short Of It (No, Not That…)

Nature—actually human nature—seems to have a soft spot for tall men. Given a choice between two equally qualified job applicants, hiring managers will typically go for the taller (6′ and over) one. On payday, taller employees get a fatter envelope. And when you start talking about romantic encounters with the opposite sex, all you have to do is open your eyes and look around to see that women prefer men who are taller than they are (just in case you need science to back this up, one recent study found that in heterosexual couples, the man is taller 92.7 percent of the time, and by an average of 5.6 inches).
Given that, it’s not terribly surprising that researchers at Chapman University in Orange, California found that men who are taller than average have as many as three more sex partners over their lifetime than men who are shorter than average. Since, “height is relevant on the mating market,” as David Frederick, the study’s lead author put it, it follows that taller men have more children than shorter men.
If you’re shorter than 5′9″, it might be natural to be a little jealous of all those extra dollars and sex partners that tall men manage to pull in. But be careful what you wish for: being tall may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
For example, while having sex with more women might be nice when you’re young, most men eventually want to settle down. Because they don’t date as much, shorter men tend to get married when they’re a few years older than tall men. But according to a recent study done at New York University, short men—in this case under 5′7″—are 32 percent less likely to get divorced than average-height men. They also have sex more often. Yes, you read that correctly. Short men get lucky more often. There are, of course, a number of possible explanations for that, but one likely candidate is that short men do about 50 more minutes of housework per day on average than tall guys. They don’t call it choreplay for nothing.
Besides having sex more often, being vertically challenged has a number of interesting health benefits. For example, tall people are more likely to get cancer. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that for every 10 centimeters of height (4 inches) of height, cancer risk goes up 11 percent. Tall men are also significantly more likely to develop blood clots or suffer from heat exhaustion or sun stroke as short men.
Hands down, the biggest benefit of being benefit to being short is the increased lifespan. A number of studies have found that on average, the taller the man, the shorter his life. That rule seems to hold true regardless of the population studied, whether it’s professional baseball players, military veterans, or country of origin. Southern Europeans, who tend to be shorter than Northern Europeans (the Dutch are on average the tallest in the world), have far lower death rates from coronary heart disease and all other causes. And Okinawans, who are among the shortest people in the world, also have the lowest rates of heart disease and the longest lifespans in the world.

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Wellbeing

How Angelina Jolie Caused An Increase In Breast Cancer Surgeries for Men

When Angelina Jolie found out that she carried a gene that increased her risk of developing breast cancer–the same disease that killed her mother—he did something that shocked a lot of people: she had a double mastectomy, removing both breasts, neither of which was affected by cancer. For most women, the decision to have that kind of surgery is a private one, kept between the patient, her doctors, and her family.
But Angelina Jolie isn’t “most women” and she went public, doing interviews, writing op-eds, and openly discussing what she did and why. The result was what many have called the “Angelina effect”: dramatic increases in the number of women getting genetically tested for breast cancer as well as in the number of surgeries. Interestingly, women weren’t the only ones affected by the Angelina effect. The number of men having preventive mastectomies has skyrocketed, too.
We all know that breast cancer is a devastating disease, one that kills thousands of women each year. Efforts to increase awareness and to find a cure are everywhere, from public service announcements and postage stamps with pink ribbons to walkathons and NFL players wearing pink shoes. But what most people don’t know is that one percent of breast cancers occur in men. And besides having to endure the stigma of having a “women’s disease,” men with breast cancer typically have worse outcomes than women. As a result, more and more men are making the decision to remove both breasts—even if only one has a tumor.
Removing the healthy breast along with the diseased one is called contralateral preventive mastectomy (CPM), and the rationale behind this type of aggressive treatment sounds perfectly reasonable: removing both breasts brings the risk that breast cancer will develop or recur to practically zero. It also goes a long way toward reducing patients’ fear and improving their peace of mind.
But a growing body of research is indicating that these surgeries—particularly for early-stage cancers—are expensive, involve a high risk of potentially life-threatening complications, and may not actually help. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that women with early-stage breast cancer who had breast-conserving surgery (called a lumpectomy) had an 83.2 percent survival rate at 10 years compared to 82.1 percent for those who had CPM and 79.9 percent for those who had a single mastectomy.
To be fair, even though Angelina Jolie didn’t have cancer at all, the mutation of the BRCA1 gene meant she had an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer. For women with that genetic mutation or one in the BRCA2 gene, studies have shown that the preventive double mastectomy greatly improves life expectancy. However, 90 to 95 percent of women who get breast cancer don’t have either of those genetic mutations.
With men, the situation is a little more complicated. Because our breasts are smaller, lumpectomies aren’t very effective because removing the tumor and the surrounding tissue doesn’t leave much behind. So most men opt for the complete mastectomy. But, as with women, whether to remove the healthy breast at the same time is not an easy question.
“[F]actors like fear and anxiety of developing a secondary cancer definitely play a role,” says Ahmedin Jemal, the lead author of a study on men and breast cancer recently published in the journal JAMA Surgery. Jemal found that the percentage of men opting for double mastectomy, while small, has nearly doubled over the past decade. “This is not good news,” he wrote, “because there is no evidence for the benefit of the procedure in terms of survival and there is harm associated with it.”
The bottom line: even if you have a mutated BRCA1 or 2 gene, it’s important that you have some serious discussions with your doctor and your family and carefully weigh the risks and benefits of surgery. In some cases, it’s the right thing to do. In others, it’s not. Deciding between the two isn’t a decision you should make on your own.

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Wellbeing

Heavy Metal Music As Therapy?

As a rule, parents don’t like the music their children listen to—and they never have. We can just imagine Mr. and Mrs. Beethoven telling little Ludwig that playing Mozart would rot his brain. “You want some real music?” they’d say. “Sit down at that piano and play Scarlatti.” Ludwig, of course, would scream at his parents and accuse them of not understanding him. Then he’d slam the door to his room, slip out a window, and meet his buddies at the Mozart concert.
Over the generations and around the world, scenes like that have played out millions of times, with parents (and many other adults) predicting that their kids’ music will destroy civilization. Nowhere is that more true than with heavy metal music, with its often angry and/or violent lyrics.
But some fascinating research has found that listening to heavy metal might actually be good for kids.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Queensland School of Psychology who were looking at the effects of what they called “extreme music” on listeners—a group of 39 people ages 13 to 34 who regularly listened to heavy metal.
The researchers started with a 16-minute session designed to deliberately anger the subjects by bringing up unpleasant past memories or issues having to do with money, relationships, or work. The ticked-off subjects were then randomly assigned to either spend the next 10 minutes in silence or listening to heavy metal music from their own playlist. Half of those in the music group picked tracks that included aggression or anger, while the other half went for tracks with themes of isolation and sadness.
The results were a surprise.
Rather than making angry listeners even angrier, or triggering depressive episodes, suicide, drug abuse, or violence, heavy metal “enhanced positive emotions,” according to Leah Sharman, co-author of the study. “When experiencing anger, extreme music fans liked to listen to music that could match their anger,” she said.
“The music helped them explore the full gamut of emotion they felt, but also left them feeling more active and inspired. Results showed levels of hostility, irritability and stress decreased after music was introduced, and the most significant change reported was the level of inspiration they felt.”
That said, we all know that music can—and does—affect the way we feel, bringing up emotions such as joy, sadness, love, and anger. The big question, however, has always been whether those emotions trigger certain kinds of behavior.
One study found that young people who listen to punk and reggae music were more likely than classical or pop music fans to abuse drugs. Girls who preferred rap music were more likely to smoke. Boys who listened to heavy metal were less likely to smoke, and girls were less likely to drink. However, the researchers were very careful to note that there’s no evidence that the music actually caused the behavior.
A number of other studies have confirmed Sharman’s findings: that when listeners in a particular emotional state listen to music that matches that state—whether it’s Bach, Brahms, Taylor Swift, or Kanye West—they feel better. So the next time you’re feeling angry or frustrated, download two songs by Megadeth, Iron Maiden, or Judas Priest and call us in the morning.

Categories
Nosh

Are There Really Masculine And Feminine Foods?

When it comes to food, men and women have very similar nutritional needs. Sure, the average man needs to consume more calories than the average woman, and the two sexes need slightly different quantities of protein, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. But the general rule that you are what you eat applies to everyone: eat healthy foods and you’ll be healthy, eat unhealthy foods and you’ll be unhealthy.
Interestingly, when it comes to our perceptions of food, specifically what’s healthy and what isn’t, sex differences play a big role. And there’s another expression (one you probably haven’t heard until now) that might be even more accurate: “You eat what you are.”
Luke Zhu and his colleagues at the University of Manitoba ran a series of experiments designed to measure how sex stereotypes affect our perceptions of the healthiness and attractiveness of food. (Their article, which was published in 2015 in the journal Social Psychology, was cleverly titled “Macho Nachos: The Implicit Effects of Gendered Food Packaging on Preferences for Healthy and Unhealthy Foods.”)
In their first experiment, they asked subjects to rate the “masculinity” or “femininity” of a variety of foods prepared in two different ways: baked chicken versus fried chicken, baked fish vs. fried fish, regular potato chips versus light potato chips, baked potato versus French fries. As I’m sure you can guess, people rated the unhealthy options (fried or full fat) as masculine and the healthy (baked or light) as feminine.
In the second experiment, the researchers took identical blueberry muffins and packaged them in four different ways: feminine (with an image of a ballerina and the word “healthy” on the wrapper), masculine (an image of men playing football and the word “mega” on the wrapper), gender-neutral (nothing stereotypically manly or girly on the package), and gender-bending (the word “healthy” with the football players, or “mega” with the ballerina).
Chalk up another victory for stereotypes. When the written message and the image were in sync, “both male and female participants rated the product as more attractive,” wrote the researchers, “and said that they would be more likely to purchase it.” Nobody was interested in the gender-bending option at all. In fact, people said that the sex-stereotyped product tasted better than the one with mixed messages (even though all the muffins were identical).
Advertisers understand the “you-eat-what-you-are” idea quite well and they tailor their messaging accordingly. When was the last time you saw a muscular man in a commercial eating yogurt? And most of the people eating big, thick burgers dripping with bacon and cheese are men. There are a few exceptions, but when a woman eats a burger like that, she’s usually wearing a bikini and eating in a very sexy way in slow motion—an approach that tends to appeal to male viewers.
Some brands are trying to buck the trends but it’s not easy. Women are far more likely than men to buy zero calorie soda. But Dr. Pepper has been trying to change that with their Dr. Pepper Ten drink that’s aimed squarely at men only. As you can guess from the name, the drink has 10 calories rather than zero, which makes it significantly more masculine. And the TV ad campaigns feature a muscular, Arnold Schwarzenegger-type action figure dashing through the jungle, dodging bullets, shooting back, and taking time to punch a giant snake in the mouth. “Sorry, ladies,” they say, “Dr. Pepper Ten isn’t for women.”