Author: HealthyWay Staff Writer

Ho, Ho, Hoax: The Psychology Behind The Myth Of Santa Claus

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date December 14, 2017

We’re not here to spoil the magic of Christmas.

We don’t want to end up on the “naughty” list, and we’re not here to take down the big man in the sleigh. Still, we’re going to attempt to answer one of the most difficult questions that parents encounter during the holiday season: When is it okay to tell your kids that Santa isn’t real? Is it healthy to encourage them to believe in Santa in the first place? And if so, what purpose does it serve?

According to a 2015 HuffPost survey, about 71 percent of parents with kids aged 10 or under say that at least one of their children believes in Santa Claus. Most parents would agree that this is totally normal; Santa is, after all, a big part of the Christmas experience for young kids.
But at a certain point, that belief starts to fade. Kids typically learn the savage reality by talking to their friends or older siblings, and for some children, the truth is hard to take.
We spoke with several psychologists and social workers, and we found out that many parents have misconceptions when it comes to Santa. For starters…

The “Santa hoax” isn’t exactly harmful. It might even be healthy.

“Parents should never lie to their children about anything,” says Frances Walfish, Psy.D., a Beverly Hills psychotherapist who specializes in working with children and families. “However, when it comes to myths like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, many parents want to carry on the tradition by nurturing a gentle belief.”

The term “myth” is pretty key to this discussion. Cultivating a belief in Santa Claus isn’t lying, per se; while parents are willfully misleading their children, they’re certainly not doing it maliciously. That should help to relieve some of the guilt you might be feeling.

I believe in giving little children all the harmless pleasure they can have. Let them believe in fairy tales and myths.

There are, of course, a few caveats. Some research suggests that rewards for good behavior may actually reduce a child’s motivation to do the right thing, so parents probably shouldn’t frame Santa’s presents as rewards. Likewise, parents shouldn’t use Santa to steer kids away from bad behavior; while the “lump of coal” threat may seem effective in the short term, it can cause anxiety, according to Walfish.
It’s also important to remember that many younger children won’t appreciate a trip to see Santa Claus, as any parent who’s dragged a screaming child away from a friendly mall Santa can attest.
“The reason [for this fear] is the costume, mask, makeup, false beard, rosy cheeks, and deep voice used by Santa,” says Walfish. “Toddlers have not yet mastered the concept of object constancy.”

Object constancy is the developmental skill that lets us understand that when a person leaves the room, they still exist. For toddlers, exercising this skill becomes more difficult when costumes are involved.
“It’s hard for a young child to imagine that a human man can remain a human person while wearing a costume,” Walfish explains. “In other words, the toddler sees Santa in his costume and believes Santa is a walking and talking alien.”
That sounds fairly terrifying. Still, most kids won’t be too traumatized, and the myth can be positive; it may encourage critical thinking skills, since kids eventually work through the logical leaps in the Santa myth and realize that something isn’t right.
If nothing else, the myth provides for some fun memories. With that said, all good things come to an end. Fortunately for parents…

Most kids will learn the truth on their own.

Kids generally learn about Santa from their friends, siblings, or parents. About half of parents won’t get a chance to have “the Santa talk” with their children—someone else will have beaten them to it.

“The secret and magic of Santa typically has its own ‘shelf-life,’ as kids interact with each other and share what they’ve learned or deemed to be big news,” says Kriss Shane, a licensed master social worker. “This may mean that your child finds out the secret from someone on a playground.”
That’s a pretty common experience, and it can be fairly traumatic. When kids find out about the Santa myth, they may feel betrayed or ridiculed—and if they’re in middle school, they may experience teasing or bullying. Of course, parents can step in and provide some assurance.
“You can mitigate the situation by explaining the meaning and feeling of the season,” says Shane.

She suggests shifting the focus away from the myth: “You can say that you wanted to wait to tell them because they have younger friends who might not be ready to hear, and you didn’t want to make them keep this secret from a friend.
“The goal is to bring the child into this secret rather than to make them feel silly for believing the myth.”

When a child starts wondering about Santa, that’s when experts recommend breaking the news.

There’s not necessarily a “right age” to tell kids about Santa. Our experts recommend staying attenuated to the child; as kids develop critical thinking skills, they usually start to unravel the Santa Claus mystery on their own.
“By age 7 or 8, most children wonder out loud and ask if Santa is real,” Walfish says. “It’s up to the parent at that point to respond honestly and openly.”

Walfish recommends explaining why adults want children to believe in Santa in order to make the experience less traumatic.
“[Say something like], ‘When I was a child, my parents thought it was a fun part of Christmas to teach us about the myth of Santa Claus,'” Walfish suggests. “‘I loved it so much that I decided to share those teachings with my children. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to carry on this family tradition or do Christmas in your own special way.'”

Little children find out soon enough that things are not as they are represented to be, without having it drummed into them from early childhood.

Kryss says that parents don’t need to worry about exposing the myth until it creates actual real-life problems.
“The only time to be concerned is if the child is letting their belief in magic interfere with their daily life,” she says. “For example, if your child behaves better because they want Santa to bring them toys (which you already know they’ll receive), there’s nothing wrong with this.”

However, Kryss notes that “If your child sobs when making a mistake because they fear disappointing Santa, it is time to help them understand that Santa is an idea and a feeling, not someone judging them.”
Kids might also associate Santa with unattainable gifts (for example, a pony), which can create anxiety; when the gifts don’t arrive, kids might believe that they did something wrong. If these sorts of issues begin to affect the holiday, it’s likely time to sit down with your child and have the talk.

When breaking the news, try to frame the myth positively.

Don’t start by saying, “We lied,” and don’t start with an apology. By breaking the news gently, you can give this difficult childhood experience a more positive spin.

“If you decide to share the secret, it’s important not to let your child see this as a lie, or even a fib,” Kryss says. “Instead, explain that the magic of the season is based on bringing joy to others. Santa isn’t a lie, he’s simply an example of the holiday spirit.”

Bring the child into this secret rather than to make them feel silly for believing the myth.

“Suggest ‘playing Santa’ together,” Kryss says. “Find strangers to gift gifts, or bake cookies for a neighbor. Help your child write kind letters to family members. Many local religious and community organizations host holiday celebrations that are open to the public, which may also help the child to understand the bigger picture. The goal is to share the concept … that the magic of the holiday season is real.”

At the end of the day, the Santa Claus myth is fairly harmless.

Of course, every child is different, but kids can be perceptive, and they’ll typically resolve the Santa question on their own without much trouble. Pay attention to your parental instincts, and don’t get too concerned if you haven’t noticed any troubling behavior.
If you’re still worried that telling your child about Santa Claus will cause permanent trauma, we’ll leave you with the wise words of a 13-year-old girl. She was part of the first known psychological study of the Santa Claus myth, which was performed in 1896, and she sums up the opinions of our experts pretty wonderfully.

“Indeed, I do think that young children should be taught to believe in Santa Claus,” the anonymous girl wrote in response to a question posed by researchers.
“In the first place, it is a pretty myth and will give them pleasure and will never do them any harm, unless it is used to frighten them into being good, and even then I think it won’t hurt them to amount to anything.”
“I believe in giving little children all the harmless pleasure they can have,” she continued. “Let them believe in fairy tales and myths, it won’t do them any harm, and little children find out soon enough that things are not as they are represented to be, without having it drummed into them from early childhood.”

It is a pretty myth.

People have been discussing the Santa myth for well over a century, and for the most part, the answer has remained the same: Don’t worry too much, keep Santa fun, and above all else, enjoy the spirit of the season.

Tags 50037786, hemingway, parenting

Wellbeing

There's A Scientific Explanation For That Old Floating Arm Trick (And Other Body "Magic" Tricks)

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date December 13, 2017

Not all magic is supernatural.

In fact some of the best magic tricks are downright…natural.

Psychology has a long tradition of exploiting such unusual experiences to explain the experience itself.

Take, for instance, one famous stunt that many of us tried as a kid: the floating finger sausage illusion (or, if you happened to grow up in Europe, the “frankfurter illusion”).

If that doesn’t immediately ring a bell, here’s how it goes: First, stand or sit still. Stretch your arms straight out in front of you, like you’re a zombie. Then, point your index fingers toward each other at eye-level a few inches apart while focusing your vision toward the distance beyond your fingers. Finally, move the two fingers slowly toward each other. If you’re doing it right, you should start to see what appears to be a floating third finger between the two real ones. Eerie, right?

The finger sausage trick is one of the simplest and best-understood body magic tricks.

Of course, as an adult, this trick may be a bit less mind-blowing than it was as a kid. What remains pretty interesting, though, is how this trick—and other body illusions, which we’ll get into presently—actually work. Turns out there’s a lot to learn about our bodies and minds from these silly parlor tricks!

Just ask Arko Ghosh, a neurologist who studies these sorts of things.

“Psychology has a long tradition of exploiting such unusual experiences to explain the experience itself,” Ghosh tells HealthyWay.

We’ll get deeper into his studies soon, but first, don’t you want to know what’s going on with that frankfurter illusion?

The explanation for the finger sausage trick is deceptively simple.

Humans, like lots of other creatures, including fish, birds, reptiles, and other mammals, have binocular vision—that is, we have two eyes. Because those two eyes are positioned slightly apart from one another, each gets a mostly overlapping but ever-so-slightly different view of what’s in front of them.

Our brains then take the information from both eyes and create a sort of single composite image from a middle point between them. Here’s the crazy thing: Neither eye is seeing that middle point exactly. It’s sort of imaginary.

This cyclopean image allows the brain to perceive depth by processing the subtle differences between the two images. That’s called a “retinal disparity.” But, if an object is closer to your face than the exact point on which your eyes are focused, your brain can’t reconcile the two images.

Instead of a single object, you’ll see two strangely transparent-looking blobs. Don’t believe us? Try focusing on a distant point and holding a single finger in front of your face. You’ll start seeing double.

When you do the finger sausage trick, parts of the two images—the tips of your fingers, in this case—overlap. Your brain processes that bit as though it is its own three-dimensional object. There’s that “sausage” for you.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s a really complicated explanation.” In reality, though, the finger sausage trick is one of the simplest and best-understood body magic tricks.

You see, this weird phenomenon only involves one of our senses: sight.

Lots of other perception-based novelties you may have tried as a kid involve multiple senses and other, even-less-clearly understood mental and physical phenomena. And, as it turns out, the brain combines signals from different senses in some weird and—we’ll say it—magical ways.

In some cases, scientists are still trying to understand what exactly is going on during these tricks.

Ghosh and his colleagues, John Rothwell and Patrick Haggard, used another popular bit of body magic—the “floating arm trick,” known in neurological circles as “Kohnstamm’s phenomenon”—to try to better understand how our brains control our bodies.

For those who somehow made it this far in life without being introduced to the floating arm trick, here’s how it goes: You simply stand in a doorway and place the back of your hands against the frame. Then push as hard as you can against the door frame for 30 seconds straight.

When you step away from the doorway, if you relax your arms, they’ll rise on their own, like they’re tied to giant invisible helium balloons. This bizarre phenomenon occurs when, after prolonged voluntary contractions of the muscles in the arm (specifically the deltoid and supraspinatus), the brain continues to send an involuntary signal to those muscles.

We know that much. What we don’t know, exactly, is why this occurs.

The trio of neurologists set out to to understand what’s going on in our brains during this phenomenon. Specifically, they wanted to know what happens when a subject resists this floating sensation and forces the affected arm to remain at their side.

Ghosh and colleagues discovered that, contrary to what many in the field had previously believed, the brain was not sending out two separate signals, one voluntary and one involuntary, the stronger of which prevailed. Rather, the voluntary signal to keep the arm stationary was completely shutting down the part of the brain that sends the involuntary signal to raise the arm.

In another interesting twist, the researchers also observed that subjects who voluntarily inhibited the arm’s upward movement felt like they were resisting something, like it was an extra effort to hold the arm down.

The most important finding of the study was that voluntary inhibition of movements may be totally different from the absence of voluntary motor commands. In other words, consciously trying not to move probably isn’t the same thing as not trying to move.

That insight could potentially have important implications for treating people with medical conditions that cause involuntary movements—for instance, the tremors experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease.

We wanted to know how else we could play with our own perception, so we asked Ghosh about other weird things like that floating arm.

He directed us to another, lesser-known body magic trick.

“My favorite is perhaps the Pinocchio illusion,” he says. Also known as the “phantom nose illusion,” Ghosh explains that this one does “need some more equipment to go along, unlike the floating arm trick.”

It really feels like your nose is getting longer.

Named and first demonstrated in 1988 by James R. Lackner at Brandeis University, this trick starts with a blindfolded subject, who is instructed to touch their nose with the tip of their fingers. While the subject touches their nose, a vibration is applied to their bicep. This causes a weird sensation, as if the subject is extending the arm.

When the brain combines these signals—the tactile sensations from the nose and arm along with the muscle sensation from the bicep—it gives the subject the sensation that their nose is growing.

As cognitive neuroscientist H. Henrik Ehrsson told The New York Times, when the process is performed on subjects, “they’re very surprised and shocked…It really feels like your nose is getting longer. You start giggling.”

You probably want to try it yourself, right? Well, don’t despair if you don’t have a bicep-vibrating machine in your home. There’s an easy way to create a similar sensation without any special equipment.

Here’s a kind of home version of the Pinocchio illusion.

It’s not quite the same, but it operates on the same neurological principles, so we’re going to call it close enough.

Like the original, this version of the trick will require a blindfold. Unlike the original, you’ll need two chairs and a person you’re very comfortable with (and who is very comfortable with you). First, you’ll need to sit down in one of the chairs. Next, the other person will place the second chair facing the same direction, as close as possible in front of you and sit down in it. Put the blindfold on.

Now, here’s the reason you need to choose someone you’re comfortable with: The next step is for you to use one hand to stroke the nose of the person in front of you, and the other to make the same motions on your own nose. After a while, there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to feel as though the other person’s nose is your own. It’s not quite the Pinocchio illusion, but it’ll do in a pinch.

Ehrsson used the the mental phenomenon behind the Pinocchio illusion to learn about self-perception of the body, which is way deeper than a simple magic trick.

By using a device similar to the one Lackner used on the subject’s bicep, Ehrsson was able to make subjects of his study feel as though their waists were getting smaller. The blindfolded participants were were instructed to place their hands on their waists, and the device was used to stimulate a tendon in the wrist that created the sensation the hands were moving inward.

At the same time, an M.R.I scanner was used to monitor brain activity, which Ehrsson and fellow scientists used to map the parts of the brain involved in body image.

“We know about touch, pain, and position,” Ehrsson told The New York Times. “But the sense of size of body parts has been a mystery. There are no receptors in the skin or muscle that tell the brain the size of body parts, so the brain has to figure it out by comparing signals.”

We don’t know if it’s the cause of anorexia but it’s clearly part of the problem.

According to Ehrsson, this research could help scientists to understand disorders like anorexia, which cause people to wrongly estimate their own size.

“We don’t know if it’s the cause of anorexia,” he said, “but it’s clearly part of the problem.”

While many people might write these illusions off as children’s novelties, researchers like Ghosh and Ehrsson are delving deeper, using them to understand how the human body and mind interact with one another.

Hopefully, that expanded understanding can be used to make people’s lives better. Now that would be real magic.

Tags 50037431, body, hemingway

Wellbeing

Are Women Really More Jealous Than Men? Here's What Science Says

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date December 5, 2017

Are women inherently more jealous than men?

It’s certainly a touchy subject, and with good reason—the trope of the jealous woman can be extremely damaging. After all, how many “overly attached girlfriend” memes can you take before you start to snap?
Nobody likes being painted with a broad brush, and it’s infuriating when a man won’t take a woman seriously because he assumes that she’s simply “being jealous.” It’s an inescapable stereotype that harms our careers and relationships.
Still, to address these types of harmful stereotypes, it’s important not to shy away from them. We decided to look into the science of jealousy and determine whether men and women process the emotion differently—and, if so, whether those differences have a biological basis.

Men and women get jealous about different types of things, and they differ greatly in how they respond to those triggers.

Before we get started, we want to make a few important points clear: Statistics don’t apply to individual cases, and reputable studies can easily arrive at inaccurate results. Keep those in mind before using this piece in an internet argument (and, by the way, men are more likely to dominate internet arguments, but that’s an entirely different discussion).
With that said, we weren’t quite prepared for what we found. For starters…

Current research suggests that yes, women are more likely to display certain types of jealousy than men.

Hold on, guys. Don’t start celebrating just yet, because we’ve got some major caveats.
In a 2005 study, researchers evaluated nearly 500 fifth- through ninth-grade participants, providing them with hypothetical scenarios and asking whether those scenarios made the participants upset. Girls were more jealous over their friends and non-friends than boys. According to one of the study’s authors, this was perhaps because “girls tend to expect more kindness, loyalty, commitment and empathy from friends than boys do.”

Of course, this research didn’t measure romantic jealousy, and the team didn’t evaluate any adults. With adults, the matter becomes considerably more complicated—as does just about everything in adulthood.
In a population-based twin study, Swedish researchers found that women were more likely to display jealousy than men when confronted with emotional or sexual infidelity. (By the way, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t point out that the researchers used something called the Screening Across the Lifespan of Twins Younger sample—or SALTY, for short.) The study also showed that jealousy probably has an evolutionary component.
However, this doesn’t mean that men aren’t more prone to feeling certain types of jealousy. That’s because…

Research indicates that men and women process jealousy differently.

Quick: Would you be more upset if your partner physically cheated on you, or if your partner fell in love with another person?

Chapman University researchers presented that question to nearly 64,000 Americans and found that about 65 percent of heterosexual women said that they’d be more upset by “emotional infidelity” than “sexual infidelity,” as opposed to 46 percent of men.

Heterosexual men are the only ones more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity.

In bisexual and gay couples, there wasn’t as much of a statistical difference between men and women, regardless of the sex of their partners.
However, heterosexual men are more likely to experience jealousy from sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity.

“Heterosexual men really stand out from all other groups,” said psychologist and lead author David Frederick in a statement accompanying the study’s release. “They were the only ones more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity.”
This gives credence to a fairly common evolutionary theory that isn’t perfectly politically correct. Strap in.

Some scientists believe that there’s a biological basis to our responses.

Wait, what? Our biology can make us jealous?
Well, potentially. The prevailing theory is that men are more jealous when women cheat because the infidelity could threaten the man’s lineage.

“With men, sexual infidelity on the part of a partner provokes a greater upset,” Joel Wade, PhD, professor of psychology at Bucknell University, tells HealthyWay. Wade studies mate selection criteria, reactions to infidelity, and love acts from an evolutionary theory perspective. “You can [argue that] worries about sexual infidelity produce more jealousy because it’s a paternity-certainty issue.”
To be clear, Wade rejects the idea that women are more jealous than a men overall, at least when controlling for social factors. He also says that there’s no special difference between the way that the sexes feel jealousy. Wade simply believes men and women get jealous about different types of things, and that they differ greatly in how they respond to those triggers.
“There’s a sex difference in the responses to jealousy,” Wade says. “Men are more likely to respond in a violent fashion than women are. Socialization plays a role, because, more historically, being aggressive [or] violent was considered more of a masculine than a feminine thing.”

Wade also suggests that biology could play a role here. Men have higher levels of testosterone than women, and higher testosterone levels are associated with “violent physical responses.”
Like we said, guys, don’t start celebrating: You’re more likely to get whipped into a frenzy after you discover that your partner is cheating.

Why, then, are heterosexual women more likely to experience emotional jealousy?

Possibly for a similar evolutionary reason—they want the man to remain close to the family unit and therefore see emotional attachment as a threat to that unit’s stability.

We asked Wade whether socialization could also play a role in the way that people respond to jealousy.
“Typically the reactions are very quick, without a lot of thinking, they’re almost automatic,” Wade says. “Even though [jealousy] gets reinforced socially, the actions themselves are, you could say, ingrained, hard-wired.”
“The socialization pattern is different in the United States compared to, let’s say, southeast Asia, or perhaps even a tribe in the Amazon … and the response is similar,” he says. “Those people aren’t being socialized the same way. How is it that they can have the same basic response? Biology plays a big role here.”
We’d add that study participants certainly had time to think about their responses when filling out their questionnaires, so while emotional responses may be biological to a degree, there’s still a social factor.

Even so, the science seems pretty clear: Women are more likely to become jealous over emotional attachments, and according to the surveys and studies we could find, they’re more likely to experience jealousy overall.
Is there any silver lining here? Sort of.

Jealousy isn’t always a bad thing.

“Most people think of jealousy as this horrible, negative thing, which it is a negative emotion, but it’s here for a reason,” Wade says. “It’s actually functional.”
As strange as it sounds, evolution plays a role in our emotions, and jealousy evolved for a reason. Some time in our distant past, that response served a vital purpose. Your great-great-great-grandmother’s jealousy might be the reason that you’re reading this article today.

“There’s an area that we look at called mate retention,” he says. “…You want the partner to stay with you. Jealousy could provoke mate-retention behaviors, because if somebody else is interested with my partner, or my partner is interested in someone else, then I need to step up my mate-retention behaviors. I could become more loving, give more time, show more commitment. Those would be positive things.”
Show your partner that you’re jealous, and you’ll likely prompt a response; in some cases, that response could keep the relationship together.

Jealous is here for a reason. It’s actually functional.

Of course, too much jealousy can be detrimental to a relationship. While a 2013 study found that closer partners tend to experience more jealousy, the authors cautioned against using the findings to justify the emotion.
“The key lesson from this study is that being ready to become jealous over relationship-threatening events is itself a signal that the relationship is worthy of such a strong emotional reaction,” the authors wrote.

In other words, jealousy can be a good sign of a healthy relationship, but it’s not something to strive for.
“If one gets jealous all the time, that’s probably going to create problems, because in any successful relationship with a partner there has to be some degree of trust,” Wade says. “If one is giving the message to a partner that they really don’t trust them, then that’s going to create problems in the relationship.”

And while the evolutionary argument is compelling, don’t ignore the social factors.

As we wrote earlier, the “obsessed, jealous girlfriend” trope is inescapable, and stereotypes undoubtedly influence the way that women respond to jealousy. Case in point: Remember this girl?

Yes, even our internet memes reinforce the idea that female jealousy is absolutely everywhere (although we still love Laina—seriously, she’s awesome). When confronted with these stereotypes (such as in memes or see any teen drama on TV), people are more likely to act badly and conform with those stereotypes. Social factors, however, can be extraordinarily difficult to study.
Research has also linked jealousy to low self-esteem, and in Western countries, there’s an enormous self-esteem gap between men and women. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that in a perfectly equal society, the “jealousy gap” would shrink (or even disappear).
Unfortunately, we can’t study a perfectly equal society.
Jealousy has both biological and social components, so before you attempt to explain away your partner’s emotions as an evolutionary holdover, keep this in mind: The scientific explanations for jealousy are fascinating from an academic perspective, but practically useless in our everyday relationships.

Tags 50037301, balance, hemingway

Sweat

Beauty Parlor Stroke Is Real: Should We Be Worried?

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 30, 2017

A simple trip to the salon can turn suddenly tragic. It happened to Elizabeth Smith.

How could that happen to me?

When Smith, 49, checked in at the Blowbunny: Blow Dry & Hair Extension Bar in San Diego in December 2013, she didn’t expect to leave with anything more serious than some extra luster and body in her hair. Instead, she alleges, she went home with an invisible injury that would eventually lead to a serious health condition: ischemic stroke, in which blood supply to the brain is cut off.

Brain cells can only live for a few minutes without life-giving oxygen, so strokes are extremely dangerous.
But what about a trip to the salon could possibly lead to such dire outcomes? Well, if you’ve visited a beauty salon, you know that most trips include a luxurious shampooing. This can be the most relaxing part of the experience: Your beautician tilts your head back into a deep sink to massage expensive-smelling unguents into your scalp. Then they rinse with deliciously hot water. It’s like a dream.

For Smith, though, that dream quickly turned into a nightmare.

A few days after her appointment, she noticed something strange. Her arms and legs felt somehow off, weaker and less responsive than usual. These alarming symptoms disappeared just as quickly as they’d arrived and Smith put them out of her mind.
Fast forward about a week. As if out of nowhere, Smith suffered a massive stroke.
“Initially, I couldn’t walk at all. It hit both sides of my body but more my left. I couldn’t move my left arm at all,” Smith told CBS Los Angeles. “It was just utter disbelief. How could that happen to me?”

The mother of two is still dealing with complications from that event. Four years later, Smith has difficulty walking, loss of motor skills, dizziness, and impaired vision. Even worse, Smith still has a blood clot in her brain, she said. At any moment, the clot could dislodge, travel through her blood vessels, block the flow of blood to a certain region of her brain, and even take her life.
Smith traces the entire medical disaster back to that fateful day at the salon. More precisely, she traces it back to the sink and the shampoo job. Smith is suing Blowbunny for damages and to help cover the cost of her medical bills.

What happened?

While the type of stroke Smith had isn’t rare (ischemic strokes account for 87 percent all of stroke cases), the way in which it occurred is incredibly uncommon—but not at all unheard of. Budding neurologists are familiar with the link between beauty salons and strokes. In fact, the condition is familiar enough in medical circles to be given its own name: beauty parlor stroke syndrome.

No one really knows what the mechanism is. But hyperextension or injury are the causes given by the medical dogma.

The terrifying condition arises when visitors to the salon lean their heads back into the wash basin for the shampoo. If they tilt their heads too far, they can hyperextend the neck—and that can lead to a horrifying injury that victims might not notice until it’s too late.

Vascular surgeon Charles Dinerstein explains that this type of stroke “is a result of an injury to the vertebral artery in which a portion of the three-layered wall become partially detached forming a flap. The flap is pushed by the blood flow against the opposite wall (like a valve) and cause[s] blood flow to stop.
“This is termed a dissection because of the separation of the artery wall. In other instances, the injury to the inner lining of the artery provides an area for a small clot to form which then travels further downstream into the brain,” he tells HealthyWay.
“These vessels supply the back of the brain so that symptoms of a stroke are not the classic problems with speech or movement of one side or another,” Dinerstein says. “It can impact balance and coordination primarily, speech in making it confusing or garbled, and coordination.”
These symptoms would be tragically familiar to Smith and the women who, like her, have experienced strokes following trips to the salon. And as if dizziness and balance problems weren’t enough, there’s always the possibility of clots remaining in the brain, as in Smith’s case.

However, before you swear off a shampoo at the salon entirely, be aware that there are usually factors well beyond hyperextension of the neck at play when someone experiences a stroke after visiting the salon, Dinerstein tells us.
The surgeon explains that, while the assumed mechanism of the stroke is hyperextension of the neck, “you would have to be bending the neck back a lot” to cause the injury that leads to stroke.
The more likely scenario is “a combination of some weakness of the wall along with hyperextension. No one really knows what the mechanism is. But hyperextension or injury are the causes given by the medical dogma,” Dinerstein says.

Examining the factors that lead to stroke—beyond beauty parlor visits.

It’s not just beauty parlor stroke you should be aware of. It’s important to be know the things that increase your chances of having a stroke of any kind.
Remember that, if you’re at risk for a having a stroke, your visit to the salon is probably not going to be the deciding factor. We’re not sure if this is comforting or just makes things worse, but the risk factors for stroke go way beyond salon visits.

Many common health problems increase your risk of having a stroke. And they are cumulative. That is, the more risk factors you have, the greater your chance of having a stroke becomes.
High blood pressure is the biggest contributing factor for most strokes. Luckily, it’s also one of the more controllable medical issues in the diagnostic guides. Having regular checkups, changing your diet, quitting smoking, or taking prescribed medication can all help keep your blood pressure under control. Heck, why not try all of them?
Diabetes, obesity, and heart disease are also major risk factors for stroke. Again, patients can usually control these things through lifestyle changes and/or medication.
But there are also plenty of things that raise your risk of stroke that you can’t control at all, like ethnicity, sex, and age.

Black, Alaskan Native, and Native American adults are at a higher risk of stroke than those who are Asian American, white, or Hispanic. Younger men are more likely to suffer from strokes, but women are more likely to die from having one.
Over ethnicity and sex, though, age is the great equalizer when it comes to stroke: The older you grow, the higher your chances of stroke tend to become.

If you have one or many of these risk factors, it’s important to know the signs and symptoms of a stroke.

Since stroke victims are racing against the clock to restore blood supply before their brain cells start dying, time is of the essence. Immediate medical attention is crucial, so watch out for the most common symptoms of the health event.

Time is brain tissue.

The American Stroke Association has a great acronym for recognizing these symptoms: FAST (F: face drooping, A: arm weakness, S: speech difficulty, T: time to call 9-1-1).

If you or a loved one begins showing any of these signs, “you should seek medical attention in an emergency room immediately,” says Dinerstein. “The statement for strokes is that ‘time is brain tissue’, so the sooner it can be diagnosed the sooner measures can be taken to protect the brain and reverse injury.”

So should you be worried about beauty parlor stroke syndrome in particular?

“Short answer—no,” Dinerstein tells HealthyWay.

It is exceedingly rare.

Yes, there are multiple reported cases of beauty parlor stroke, but it’s not something you should lose sleep over, not even if you’re a frequent salon customer, the surgeon says.
“It is exceedingly rare,” he explains. “The estimated incidence of [beauty parlor stroke syndrome is] 1 to 1.5 [out of] 100,000 people, or 0.000015 percent. Or to put another way, you are 20 times more likely to be struck by lightning than experience this injury,” says Dinerstein.

Again, we’re not sure this is any comfort, but plenty of everyday activities and movements might cause you to have an ischemic stroke. That’s why it’s difficult to have a 100 percent positive diagnosis that a stroke was caused by a trip to the salon.
It’s a little scary, but we can do some serious damage to our bodies without even trying. Playing sports, holding a cell phone between your shoulder and ear, whiplash, or even sneezing wrong can create an arterial tear. If you want to reduce your risk to zero, you’d probably have to stop moving entirely.
Because beauty parlor stroke specifically is so rare, then, there’s nothing you need to do to prevent it from happening to you. There are other common and more dangerous activities people participate in on a daily basis. For instance, it appears that chiropractors are responsible for many more of these injuries than hairdressers.

Dinerstein tells HealthyWay that neck injuries from chiropractic work are much more common than beauty parlor stroke syndrome, and can also have serious consequences.
“There is a larger literature on injuries to the vertebral artery due to chiropractic manipulation so that significant hyperextension of the neck and manipulation should be avoided,” Dinerstein says.
The point is that, yes, beauty parlor stroke can happen. But the chances are so slim that you probably shouldn’t let it keep you out of the salon when you really want a nice blowout.

Tags 50037216, body, hemingway

Wellbeing

5 Early Signs Of Dementia (And Why Everyone Should Know Them)

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 20, 2017

Dementia is an uncomfortable subject to talk about, particularly when it affects a loved one.

Throughout the world, there’s something of a stigma surrounding dementia. That certainly isn’t helpful, since the syndrome is extremely common. An estimated 47 million people worldwide are living with some type of dementia, per the World Health Organization, and that number will likely increase to 75 million by 2030. The WHO expects the number to triple by 2050.
Contrary to popular misconception, dementia isn’t a standardized syndrome. Different types of dementia affect the brain in very different ways, and as a result, some people ignore the early symptoms in themselves or their loved ones. Generally, dementia is progressive, so it gets worse over time, but early detection can greatly improve a patient’s quality of life.

Before we discuss some of these early warning signs, however, we should note that dementias share symptoms with other conditions. Only a qualified physician can make an actual diagnosis, and articles like this one aren’t intended as a replacement for a visit to the doctor’s office.
“Sound bytes don’t work for these types of discussions,” Dr. Roselyn G. Smith tells HealthyWay. Smith is a clinical psychologist and Fulbright specialist working in Pinecrest, Florida. “The research is far more complex than that—we can’t just take one symptom and follow it to a diagnosis.”

With that said, Smith notes that awareness is crucial, particularly for people with elderly loved ones. By obtaining a diagnosis in the early stages of dementia, patients can start treatment earlier, and in some cases, stop the progression of symptoms entirely.
Unfortunately, dementia isn’t a simple condition, and there are a lot of misconceptions. For example…

1. Memory loss is a common symptom, but different types of memory loss can mean different things.

Memory loss is closely associated with dementia, so it’s the symptom that most people think about when considering the diseases that cause dementia—Alzheimer’s, for example. However, physicians now know that memory loss doesn’t always occur in precisely the same way.
“With an Alzheimer’s type dementia, some of the earliest indicators are short-term memory loss—that’s what’s responsible for asking the same question over and over within a few minutes, or even a few hours,” Smith says. “The long-term memory can still be very sharp and intact into the more moderate to more advanced stages [of Alzheimer’s].”

Alzheimer’s prevents the brain from encoding memories, so the brain is unable to store its experiences. In contrast, other dementias may prevent the brain from recalling memories; the experiences are still in storage, but the person won’t be able to call them up. That’s a key factor that physicians consider when differentiating Alzheimer’s from other dementias.
“When we give cues to stimulate the short-term memory to someone who’s in the first stages of vascular dementia, the memory cues will prompt the person to recall what they’ve been asked to remember,” Smith says. Vascular dementia is the second-most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s.
“When we do that with someone who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s-type dementia, the memory cues will not [work]. The difference is that with vascular-type dementia, memories are still encoded in the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus,” says Smith. “With Alzheimer’s type dementia, the hippocampus itself is where the plaques develop and the neural fibers begin to tangle, so they’re not able to encode new information. If it’s not encoded, no cue is going to help, because it’s simply not there.”

Smith notes that other factors can prevent the memory from working properly. For instance, people with sleep disorders often have trouble with memory loss, per a 2008 study from researchers at UCLA. Researchers believe that we use sleep to organize our memories, so people with sleep disorders may have trouble recalling certain events. To an untrained person, that type of memory loss might seem like a sign of dementia, which is why physicians perform a much more detailed analysis of all of a patient’s symptoms.
“Memory problems deserve [clinical] attention,” Smith says, “but they’re not always indicative of dementia.”

2. Mood changes can be drastic—and in some cases, frightening.

Sudden mood changes can also indicate dementias, but again, they occur differently from patient to patient. Frequently, aspects of a patient’s personality will become amplified; a person who’s normally very sweet will become excessively sweet, or a bossy person will become downright authoritarian. In other cases, people with dementia will recognize that they’re having trouble concentrating or remembering, so they’ll become quiet, depressed, and withdrawn.

Mood changes are often one of the first signs of dementia, because they’re the first thing that family members notice. A 2015 study published in the journal Neurology showed that mood changes occurred in Alzheimer’s patients long before other symptoms—including memory loss—manifested.
“In the earlier stages of Alzheimer’s, there can be a kind of paranoia that develops, and eventually some agitation that goes with it,” Smith says.
With vascular dementia, apathy and depression are common, and patients may experience rapid mood changes that fluctuate between extremes. They may show too much emotion at relatively trivial events, which can be frightening for family members. Alzheimer’s patients often believe that people are stealing or hiding things from them, and they may become insensitive to the needs of their loved ones.

While these types of mood changes are distressing, they’re often somewhat manageable through diet, exercise, and medication.

3. Some patients show an inability to follow directions.

As the brain degenerates or neural pathways become damaged, patients may have trouble concentrating on certain types of tasks. They may become confused easily and have trouble getting from one place to another without constant guidance. Again, patients often ignore these symptoms at first.

“I had a case one time where a very successful individual in his early ’70s was unable to complete an intake form,” Smith says. The form consisted of a series of true-or-false questions, presented in vertical columns. The patient was completely unable to complete the form correctly, and he showed issues with problem solving.
“Each individual item was numbered, and he couldn’t even track with that,” Smith says. “He started answering randomly across the horizontal rows of items.”
The patient had also had trouble locating Smith’s office for his first appointment. That prompted Smith to recommend a full neurological workup, which led to a diagnosis.

In other cases, the symptoms become noticeable when a patient becomes confused easily while attempting to complete household tasks.
“Many patients [experience] agnosia, which is a failure to identify objects, despite the visual sensory functions being in place,” Smith says.
In other words, they can see perfectly, but they have trouble interpreting. Patients may also have trouble identifying family members, although Smith notes that this is a fundamentally different type of symptom.

“Recognition of the face occurs in a very specific hub area of the greater visual cortex,” Smith explains. “It’s located very precisely in the brain.”

4. Language disturbances can also occur.

A patient might have trouble producing language or comprehending others. This is called aphasia, and it’s especially common in stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients.
As Smith tells us, language is controlled by specific parts of the brain, and the exact nature of a patient’s language disturbances can help physicians determine the type of dementia. In Alzheimer’s patients, for example, aphasia often occurs without any change in the patient’s intellect—they’re just as intelligent and aware as ever, but they have trouble recalling words or listening to their loved ones.

“There may eventually come a time when the person can hardly communicate at all using language,” the Alzheimer’s Society writes on its website. “This can be distressing for them and those supporting them, but there are ways to maintain communication and support the person to express themselves.”

5. Medical tests can show certain types of dementia.

As we mentioned earlier, many dementia symptoms can be attributed to other health issues. When physicians attempt to diagnose their patients, they’ll look at all available symptoms to make a determination. They might also perform imaging studies to look for brain damage, and in some cases, they can perform cerebrospinal fluid tests to locate certain proteins associated with conditions like Alzheimer’s. With some dementias—for instance, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease—doctors may ask for blood tests.

With that said, Smith notes that dozens of different diseases and conditions can cause dementia or dementia-like symptoms. As such, doctors need to perform a variety of tests to diagnose their patients, which is one of the reasons that early detection is so important.
Unfortunately, many patients avoid their physicians because they’re afraid of a diagnosis. That’s a mistake, since things like blood clots, tumors, substance abuse issues, and thyroid issues can also cause the symptoms.

Even when a patient has a degenerative dementia, treatment is critically important. Dementia is not an unavoidable part of aging, contrary to popular belief.
“Treatment can really make a difference, once there’s a diagnosis,” Smith says, “but you can’t get that from a list on the internet.”
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Tags 50036671, hemingway

Sweat

Workout Machines That Can Hurt Your Progress (And What To Do Instead)

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 16, 2017

Sometimes, simply getting yourself to the gym feels like a serious accomplishment. The bad news is that it’s probably not the accomplishment you might think. While getting some kind of exercise is better than sitting on the couch for the umpteenth night in a row, achieving fitness results is not as simple as just showing up.
So what do you do when it’s workout-o’clock? There are a lot of options at a typical commercial gym. You’ve got your cardio machines, your assisted weight machines, and even that intimidating free-weight area. But not all of these devices give you equal return on your hard-won sweat deposit.

You see, the terrible truth is that it’s not enough to work out. You have to work out the right way. Add to that the fact that toning the body can be counterintuitive. (For instance, you’ll never get that coveted six-pack with nothing but an ab machine, even if you put in hours every day.) Too many people give up their fitness goals in despair, when the real problem isn’t that they aren’t working hard—it’s that they’re not working smart.
While changing your body can feel difficult, even impossible, don’t sweat it (er—poor choice of words). We’re here to shed some light on what the workouts that actually help you transform your body—and the workout machines that won’t. (Plus, we’ll even throw in a few helpful tips to get you on the path to being fit and healthy. You’re welcome.)

1. “Assisted” anything won’t really help.

For a breakdown on fitness goals and which machines will (or won’t) help you achieve them, we spoke with James Harris, a physical therapist and the owner of Brentwood Barbell, a strength gym in St. Louis, Missouri. Harris has worked with athletes and clients of all abilities for more than a decade in the fields of physical therapy and fitness and now focuses on getting clients stronger with basic barbell strength training.
Perhaps the biggest factor in gaining strength, building muscle, and losing fat, Harris proposes, is your own personal effort. Since assisted weight machines often take less exertion than free weights, the amount of personal effort necessary decreases.

“If you spend your time sitting on a machine, pushing on a lever, and adjusting a pin, you’re putting in the minimum amount of effort,” Harris tells us. “If you want more from your program, you have to put more into it.”
Assisted weight machines can give people a false sense of accomplishment, Harris explains, and that’s the last thing you want.
It’s also important to treat fitness as learning process—and for that, you need a gym that offers support, not a machine without instructions. Harris emphasizes the importance of finding “a gym or coach that teaches the skill of lifting barbells.” Do this, he says, and “you will find your program much more enjoyable.”
The key, Harris says, is to “focus on the process of learning a skill that results in better health rather than focusing on trying to improve your health in the absence of learning.”

If you surround yourself with a positive, informative, and helpful support system, you’ll be more likely to succeed. All the time and effort you put into building a solid, positive foundation will pay off later.
What we’re really saying here is that the most effective fitness facilitator at the gym may be the community of people who work out alongside you.

2. Walking in place will keep you there.

In addition to creating a support system, you have to learn how to manage your time at the gym. When many people begin their fitness journey, they fall into an easy routine, using machines that they are familiar with. That usually means spending hours at a time on the treadmill or elliptic. Those are bound to be beneficial, right?

Well, not in terms of really sculpting your physique, no.
If you want to see changes, your body needs to be challenged, and while a nice long stroll on the treadmill may help improve your health, it won’t get you the abs you want, for instance.
For serious sculpting results, you’ll need to start weight training, keep a strict eye on your diet, and use a serious, detailed plan. Harris explains the basic outline of a successful workout regimen:
“Assuming an hour to train each day, a better use of time [than machines] would be to strength-train three times per week, focusing on large compound movements like squats, presses, chin ups, and deadlifts done for two to three sets each,” he says.

“After eight to weeks the trainee could then begin making dietary changes that support their goals,” he continues. “Finally, after resistance training and nutrition are reasonably dialed in, the trainee would then add moderate intensity interval training once per week. This schedule is very effective, time efficient, and sustainable.”
Reaching your goals is completely doable—if you put the work into building a smart plan and have the discipline to stick with it. You can’t get everything done just by walking in place.

3. Deduct abduction and adduction.

If you’re serious about getting in shape, it’s time to skip hip abduction/adduction machines.
“If you can read a magazine while ‘exercising,’ I propose that you’re not really making any lasting measurable change,” says Harris.

Sitting on your butt while doing focused movements actually shuts down large muscle groups in your body. If you want to get stronger, start thinking bigger.
These hip abduction and adduction machines are popular because they supposedly workout your inner and outer thigh—spots lots of people wish were more toned. Harris isn’t a fan of this machine, though, because they “utilize a poor range of motion,” he tells us. “They are simply unnecessary. A trainee can work the entire hip/leg musculature with short list of deadlifts, squats, lunges, and step ups.”
Motions and workouts that use the whole body will get better results faster than using machines that focus on micro-movements.

4. Forget the abdominal obsession.

Another gym standard many people flock to with the hopes and dreams of gaining an iron stomach is the abdominal machine. Many exhaust themselves doing rep after rep and then walk away from their workout sore, feeling that they’ve done something beneficial. But “being sore does not equate to progress,” Harris cautions.

“Unfortunately, you can’t take fat off a muscle by working that muscle locally,” he says. “Rather, fat is lost over time through consistent training and a caloric deficit.”
Harris suggests that, instead of using an ab machine, “a better alternative would be a strength program that consists of compound movements such as deadlifts, chin ups, and presses along with a structured nutrition plan, and possibly some interval training.”

5. Don’t keep up with the Joneses by going after the Smiths.

The Smith machine, which locks a barbell into a strict range of vertical motion, is another piece of equipment that looks tempting but it isn’t the best to base your workouts around, Harris tells us.
“The only real use for items like the Smith machine is to overwork an already exhausted area of the body,” he says.

So if you’re lifting heavy and have already completed a full workout of squats and lunges, the Smith Machine is fine to use to finish off the workout.
It’s not, however, a great machine to use for the entire time you’re at the gym.

6. You’re cycling to nowhere.

You are probably wondering about how cardio fits in with all of this, too. Stationary bikes take up a lot of space in many commercial gyms, and they are very tempting to use. But unless you’re specifically working on endurance training, you should limit the amount of time you spend pedaling in place.
At Harris’ gym, they “use cardiovascular exercise as an adjunct,” he says. “It’s part of the plan, just not the centerpiece. We find that a barbell-based strength program with some accessory cardio is what works best for most people.”

And if you really want to work the cardio angle, there’s a better way to do it than mindlessly pumping away at the stationary bicycle.
“If I had to do cardio work in a commercial gym I would use a treadmill and perform walking intervals,” Harris says.
“I would walk at a moderate pace and incline (say 3 mph at 5 percent) for three minutes and then increase the incline to an uncomfortable level (say 15 percent) for two minutes. I would repeat this simple five-minute cycle, working up to 30 minutes two times per week.”

But wait… There’s a twist.

Creating a solid workout plan, setting goals for yourself, and using your gym time efficiently are all major factors in setting yourself up for fitness success. But even the most well-managed workout routine will only take you so far. If you’re serious about reaching your fitness destination, you’ve got to prepare your mind.

Nick Woolery is a personal trainer also based in St. Louis. Woolery works with athletes, diabetics, weight-loss clients, and those with chronic pain and injuries to dramatically improve quality of life by focusing on quality movement, strength, and a holistic approach to nutrition and preventative healthcare—and he wants you to get your brain in the game.
“Here’s a little secret: whether you use the Smith machine or not, or an ab machine or not, has almost nothing to do with whether you will reach your goals or not!” Woolery tells HealthyWay. “What’s going to dictate your success in the gym is your consistency with regards to attendance, your compliance to a nutrition plan, and your intensity while you are using your favorite machines or dumbbells.”
If you aren’t ready to focus and challenge yourself, it will be easy to abandon any goals that you’ve set.

“People don’t fail in the gym because they are using machines instead of free weights or vice versa; they fail because they are not forcing their bodies to adapt to progressively more challenging stimuli,” Woolery explains. “The most useless machine in the gym, if you are not seeing results, is your brain.”

The key to success? Exercise mindfully.

How do you get into the proper mindset at the gym? While there’s tons of workout programs and apps you can use on your phone, you probably find yourself checking emails or scrolling through Twitter in the middle of your workout.
The first step to getting focused is ditching your phone. “Your brain and your phone are your two worst enemies in the gym,” Woolery says. “Turn the former on and the latter off.”

How can you ever get through a workout without your digital device, you ask? Simple—buy a stopwatch. It’s a small investment that will lead to big results. Woolery suggests using the stopwatch during workouts: “For one week, time every single rest period and force yourself to start after 45 seconds of rest; reduce the weight five pounds if you need to. Do your muscles burn after three or four sets of eight to 12 repetitions? Good!”
If you don’t want your planning and effort to be in vain, set proper goals for yourself. Woolery outlines a quality goal as something “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive.”
Your goal should be exact, but not impossible. You need to be ready and whole-heartedly want to make changes in your life to reach it.

What it comes down to is how badly you want to see your fitness goals come to fruition.
“Stop blaming machines even if most of them are a waste of time,” Woolery says. “Lift heavier than you think you should. Focus on your biggest muscle groups. Find movements that make you stabilize your torso. Spend one hour of your day completely out of breath and learn to love the 45 or 60 seconds of rest that your stopwatch grants you.”
The key is to push yourself; that’s how all those hard bodies on TV got that way themselves, after all.
Woolery concludes, “If you want to look more like an athlete, train more like one.”

Tags 50036721, body, hemingway

Lifestyle

A Peek Inside A Real Cryonics Lab Where People Are Frozen

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 15, 2017

What if you could be frozen in time? What if, one day, you could step into a metal tube, and then wake up tens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of years later? Would you do it?
While this possibility is just a fun thought experiment to some, it’s no joke to others.

Real-life labs are dedicated to the preservation of the human body for as long as it takes to figure out the science of resuscitation, and they’re offering this service to the paying public. The process is called cryonics (not cryogenics, which is an established branch of science that studies extremely low temperatures).
The science of cryonics may seem like science fiction, but a few pioneers are working towards making it science fact. There are only three cryonics labs in the world, but together, they’ve preserved more than 300 bodies since 1967.

There are many people who see it as a ray of hope despite the present day fact that it is untenable.

While Austin Powers made it all the way to the 1990s to stop Dr. Evil, and Philip J. Fry was thawed out in the year 3000, in the real world, we’re still working on the resuscitation side of the equation. We haven’t yet brought anyone safely back from the deep freeze.
But that doesn’t mean these labs aren’t trying.

Explaining Cryonics

So what exactly is cryonics? Cryonics is a life-extending procedure involving the vitrification process—more on that in a moment—and extremely low temperatures. The cryopreservation process can only be administered after a person is pronounced clinically dead. People can choose to preserve their entire body, or just their head, believe it or not.

Of course, there’s no point to the process if you can’t successfully resurrect the body, and we don’t have the science to do that yet. Cryonics labs and their customers are banking on the technological advances of the future. It may seem like a long shot, but between the highly specified preservation process and recent advances made in the biomedical field, cryonic resurrection could be closer to reality than we think.
For an in-depth look at the process, we spoke with Linda Chamberlain, one of the founders of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and she explained the entire, highly detailed process.
Essentially, the goal of the cryopreservation process is to slow down death—biologically, Chamberlain explains. Most of us think of life and death as being absolutes. You’re either alive or not, with not much in between. However, it’s not a simple as that.

A person is pronounced clinically dead when their heart stops beating. But even though the heart has stopped, it doesn’t mean all other parts of the body instantly die. We couldn’t have organ transplants if that were the case (as explored in a fascinating article in the Texas Law Review). Cells, body tissue, and organs stay alive for a certain amount of time after the heart stops. The cryonics process uses this time to preserve a body with extremely cold temperatures.

Our best guess is that revival will not be possible or practical for probably 50 to 100 years.

“The body is basically still living, but it can’t sustain itself,” Chamberlain says of the time just after clinical death. “What we’re trying to do is slow down and stop that dying process, so that person has the possibility of being resuscitated in the future when medical science has the ability to do that.”

A Step-By-Step Guide to Cryonic Preservation

Chamberlain explains that, for the best results, the preservation procedure should start immediately after a patient is pronounced dead. The first steps are most effective if the cryonic staff is on the scene and by the person’s side when death occurs. Chamberlain does mention that this can be tricky—especially in cases of heart attacks or stroke victims.
However, if a patient learns they have a health issue, they can contact Alcor and a medical response director will call and check in with them as frequently as needed to monitor their status.

Chamberlain even encourages those who can to move to the Scottsdale area, where the Alcor lab is located, for final treatments or hospice care. The closer the patient can be, the better.
“When they are believed to only have a few days, we can have a standby team take the equipment and be with them in the hospice setting,” Chamberlain says. “Then as soon as they are pronounced, the procedures start.”
The first step is to cool the body down. There’s no freezing at this point, not yet, but you definitely want to lower the body’s temperature.
“Once the heart has stopped beating, we immediately move them into an ice bath. One of the best ways to slow down the biochemical dying process is hypothermia,” Chamberlain explains. “Cold is your friend in that kind of a situation.”
Then it’s time to bring on the medicine. While in the ice bath, two vital medications are administered: heparin and propofol. The first is an anticoagulant, while the second removes even the slightest chance that the patient will spontaneously awaken during the preservation process.

Next, a thumper is used to create a mechanical heartbeat and staff intubates their patient. They inject the body with other medications: antibiotics, epinephrine, and drugs that keep blood vessels from collapsing. Chamberlain stresses the importance of preserving the vasculature.
“We care about the vasculature because our procedure replaces the blood with an organ preservation type of fluid,” she says. “In order to get it circulated throughout the whole body, we have to use the circulatory system. A lot of attention is given to that.”
For a more detailed look at Alcor’s process, check out their cryopreservation protocol here.

Inside the Lab Itself

After all medications have been administered and the external body temperature has been lowered, the team moves the patient to the Alcor lab. The next step involves removing the patient’s blood and replacing it with an organ-transplant–style solution.
This is the same type of fluid used to keep organs for transplant alive and functional, and it helps to chill the body internally. (This article from the journal Transfusion Medicine and Hemotherapy explains the history of these cryoprotective solutions.) In addition to the chilled fluid, Alcor staff cool the outside of the body with nitrogen gas.

“They are being externally cooled as well as internally and we get them down to about two or three degrees above freezing. We don’t want any freezing going on yet,” explains Chamberlain.
Remember the somewhat macabre fact that people can decide to preserve either their whole body or just their head, or, more to the point, their brain. This is the point in the process where the surgeon will separate the body from the head, if that’s the agreement. Otherwise, the processes are essentially the same for both options.
With the body (or head) a few degrees above freezing, the Alcor team replaces the transplant solution with a cryoprotectant agent, which is really just a fancy term for medical-grade anti-freeze.
The most common misconception about cryopreservation is that the patients are frozen—that’s not entirely true. This cryoprotectant agent vitrifies the body, turning the tissues into something like glass. That way, the freezing won’t produce crystals, which damage tissues—instead, the body becomes a solid block. This is a necessary step, Chamberlain explains, “so that when solidification begins to take place, it’s not ice, there’s no shards, and they will turn into a glass-like substance.”
This is an incredibly long process, though, because at higher temperature the protectant is toxic. Chamberlain says they use a computerized injection system that ensures “every degree the temperature goes down, a little bit higher concentration of the cryoprotectant fluid goes in. We start with a very diluted, mild solution, so not to introduce damage,” she says.

This process lasts until the maximum capacity of the fluid is reached, which can take hours. When it’s complete, the patient will be close to solid-state vitrification.
Finally, the team takes the body to the patient care bay, where they will make their home for the coming decades—or longer.
“Now they are fully submerged in liquid nitrogen,” Chamberlain says of this stage. “Gradually, over seven days, the temperature is lowered until they reach -320 degrees Fahrenheit. At this point they will be a solid, mostly glass state, and are placed in the holding area where they will be held until resuscitation.”

What Does the Future Hold?

Alcor has more than 1,100 members signed up for this preservation process and currently has 153 patients. But what do these patients have in their future?

Even with the proof of concept, it will take time to develop the technology that is required to thaw a whole human being.

Researchers continue to study biopreservation technology and are discovering some interesting outcomes. In one study, scientists were able to successfully use radio waves to rewarm a vitrified tissue sample without any cell damage.

“Of course, a tissue slice is not the same thing as an entire brain, or entire human being,” Chamberlain cautions. “But it’s baby steps. It’s proof of concept that these things can be done. But even with the proof of concept, it will take time to develop the technology that is required to thaw a whole human being.”
Chamberlain is particularly hopeful about the possibility of nanotechnology to aid in the resuscitation process. The idea is that nanobots—tiny robots, no larger than a paramecium, perhaps—could enter the body, identify damaged cells or tissues, and repair the damage on a microscopic level.
“These are the kinds of things we envision for the future,” Chamberlain says. “That’s part of the reason why we tell people our best guess is that revival will not be possible or practical for probably 50 to 100 years, until these technologies can be developed.”
Tissue damage is the main concern when it comes to cryopreservation. Most of the patients are middle-aged or older, which means their bodies aren’t in perfect condition.

“At about [middle] age most of us begin to have arterial calcification, we get clots, all kinds of things, scar tissue from surgeries,” Chamberlain says. “These things will interfere with the circulation of our vitrification fluids. If there’s a blockage in some artery, the tissue beyond that blockage won’t get that very special fluid, and so they will freeze instead of vitrifying. There will be tissue damage in those areas.”
There are other unfortunate cases where a person may be deceased for a few days before anyone is aware that they’ve passed. When this happens, the only cryopreservation solution is to immediately lower their temperature to freezing for storage.
“We have about 18 hours after the heart stops that we can successfully use our procedures, with all these different chemicals and processes,” Chamberlain says. “If it’s longer than that, we usually have to do a straight freeze.” This will obviously lead to severe tissue damage, as explained in the journal Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, and these people will need even more advanced medical technology to be resuscitated.

So… Would You?

While the cryopreservation process is rooted in science, it seems like an awfully big (and expensive) risk to take.

Techniques to repair that damage would also have to be found if by some miracle the person could be reanimated.

Even with Chamberlain’s hopefulness about nanobots and medical advancements, it seems like a long shot to bring someone back after vitrification and liquid nitrogen storage, especially in the cases where tissue damage is inevitable.

Laurie Huget, the executive director of the Cryogenic Society of America (not cryonics, mind you), weighs in on the subject:
“There are many people who see it as a ray of hope despite the present day fact that it is untenable,” Huget says. “[The cryonics researchers] are sincere, if not knowledgeable about the physics and biology at play. I will just point out that legally a person cannot be cryonically preserved until they are dead. So even if great strides are made in medicine to cure diseases that are deadly today, the person will still be dead. And freezing does so much damage to the body that techniques to repair that damage would also have to be found if by some miracle the person could be reanimated.”
One thing that’s for sure is the discussion of cryonics will never be boring. On one hand, trusting in science so strongly you believe it can bring you back from the dead is an enviable act of faith. But maybe we’d be better off coming to terms with our mortality and enjoying each moment as it unfolds, aware that our time here is limited.

Tags 50036766, hemingway, nature

Sweat

This Is How Your Body Changes When You're In A Relationship

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 10, 2017

In the 1950s, a young man named Kyle Ballard worked as a waiter on the liner ship SS Lurline. The ship sailed between Honolulu and California, running vacationers back and forth between Oahu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It’s safe to say there were lots of married couples gathering in the ship’s dining room at mealtime.

Ballard and his fellow waiters got to know their passengers—they were assigned to the same tables every night for the entire five-day trip. Ballard still marvels at the details he and the other waiters noticed about these long-married couples.

“All the experienced waiters agreed on the same thing,” the octogenarian tells HealthyWay. “We could take all 20 people for dinner on sailing night when we first met them and jumble up all persons married at least 40 years, and we could match those couples [because] they looked so much alike.”

Even the height was similar, Ballard says, except the husband was typically a bit taller than the wife.

“Both with about the same weight,” Ballard says. “Even eating and dressing alike. We never stopped making that comparison.”

The thing is, the science backs up Ballard’s story of romantic seaborne adventures from long ago. One 1987 study found that after 25 years of marriage, couples did begin to resemble each other—as in, facially. One working theory is that spouses come to mimic each other’s facial expressions and that leads to physical changes in the face’s musculature over time. Twenty-five years later, you’ve got two faces that look more alike than they did on their wedding day.

If you think that’s incredible, or just incredibly romantic, check out these other physical and physiological changes that long-term relationships can create within our bodies.

1. You start to like the same foods and maybe even the same perfume. But it might not mean what you think it means.

There’s no need to argue over the wedding menu. You may hate onions today, but if your spouse is a die-hard onion ring devotee, give it a few years (or maybe a few decades).

A recent study in the journal Appetite makes the astonishing claim that the longer a couple stays together, the more their preferences in taste and smell line up. The researchers asked 100 couples between the ages of 18 and 68 to rate how much they liked the study’s collection of flavors and scents. Some of the couples had only been together for 3 months; others had 45 years under their belts, but most fell between these extremes.

The data revealed that “both taste and smell preferences are more similar the longer couples have been in a relationship,” according to the study’s abstract. However, in a surprise finding, the researchers report that people in happy marriages don’t necessarily love the same odors.

In fact, relationship satisfaction was “negatively related” to similar preferences in scents. So the happier people said they were in their relationships, the less likely they were to like the same smells. To further complicate matters, this finding did not extend to flavor.

So if you and your spouse still disagree about the smell of frying onions, don’t fret. You might be one of the lucky ones.

2. In the early stages, your brain chemistry goes haywire.

There’s a reason all the pop songs are about love or substance abuse. Or both. Apparently, the initial stages of an intense romantic relationship affect our brain chemistry not unlike an illicit pharmaceutical.

That’s according to David Bennett, a certified counselor and co-runner of the men’s support website The Popular Man.

“When you’re in love, your physiology changes quite a bit,” Bennett says. “And it’s the result of brain chemistry changes.”

In particular, Bennett points to three neurotransmitters that have powerful effects on the way you feel.

“Your dopamine levels go up, leading to feelings of excitement and euphoria related to your partner,” Bennett explains. That can also get you into trouble, of course.

“If your partner stops reciprocating attention (such as not texting back right away,) you’ll feel anxious and nervous,” he says. Call it love withdrawal.

Second, your brain produces extra norepinephrine, a chemical similar to adrenaline.

“This is why when you’re in love, you can barely sleep and will stay up late into the night with your partner, even if you have to get up early the next day,” Bennett says. It’s a good thing this particular effect tends to fade with time and familiarity, or else our work lives would be even rougher.

Oddly, though, serotonin levels actually drop during an experience of romantic love, Bennett explains. A 1999 study in the journal Psychological Medicine found that the loss of serotonin makes the young Romeo’s brain more similar to that of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, another psychological state associated with low serotonin.

“This explains why when you’re ‘in love,’ you want to spend time with your partner almost obsessively, and you jealously guard your time with them,” Bennett says.

3. That wedding ceremony line about “sickness and health” is onto something.

You might promise to care for each other “in sickness and in health,” but you’d better plan for these conditions happening to both of you at the same time. Long-married couples have health similarities that seem to go way beyond sympathy pangs.

A 2016 study published in the journal The Gerontologist lays out some of these findings, which include health similarities in some surprising areas. For instance, couples who have been married for decades and decades showed similar grip strength. That might not sound like much, but grip strength is actually a reliable predictor of mortality, so it’s a valuable metric.

Other indicators that long-married couples tended to have in common include cholesterol levels and even kidney health. No big deal, you might say. People choose spouses who are similar to themselves, maybe even on a genetic level.

But wait! The researchers controlled for that. They compared these health similarities in couples who had been married for fewer than 20 years, and didn’t find the same convergence. This seems to be something that grows over time—just like a lifelong romantic relationship itself.

4. Physical fitness habits tend to sync.

One possible explanation for the aforementioned health similarities between long-term couples is that your general predictors of health might align. We’re talking about the big two: diet and exercise.

“Couples influence each other,” says Michele Paiva, a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in body image disorders. “One person might be trying to be more healthy and the other is sabotaging them with ice cream.”

But this reciprocal influence isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Paiva points out.

“Perhaps they both go to yoga together and are vegan,” she says. That type of relationship would likely lead to better health outcomes over the years.

So if you really want to maximize the “in health” part of your marriage over the “in sickness” agreement, start working out and eating right—and do it together. It’s also important to be present and loving with one another, Paiva says.

“How the couple relates together intimately and how healthy their relationship is plays a part” in overall health over the long term, she says. “If there is a healthy relationship, there is not self-sabotage or sabotaging of the partner; there is mutual health encouragement.”

Now that sounds romantic.

5. You may feel less actual pain when your partner’s in the room.

Pain is subjective; that’s not to say it isn’t real, just that it’s a physiological event that occurs within your body and that complex factors can influence how bad it can get—what the scientists call “modulation of pain.”

A 2013 literature review published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience looked at six studies in which romantic partners were present while their loved one was experiencing pain.

Taken as a whole, these studies support the claim that the presence of a partner reduces the intensity of experienced pain for the patient. Of course, nothing in medical science is that simple.

In order to modulate pain, the relationship had to meet certain criteria: The partner couldn’t be seen as acting out of character, and the “adult attachment style”—the overall model of how you connect to others—makes a profound difference. Still, the idea of reducing pain just by having your sweetie hold your hand is a comforting one.

Romantic Love and Health in the Long Term

Ballard points out that his experience aboard the SS Lurline was far from scientific research. It was just something he and the guys would laugh about when the shift was over.

“This was not a study,” he says. “This was nature’s real life.”

The funny thing is what the study that backs up Ballard’s experience also found. The more those long-term couples came to resemble each other over the course of 25 years of cohabitation, the more satisfied they said they were with their marriages. Presence, it seems, makes the heart grow fonder.

Opposites may attract, at least in the beginning. But after a lifetime of partnership, it seems that similarity is one key to true marital bliss. If that’s not just as romantic as taking a liner ship to Hawaii with the love of your life, we don’t know what is.

Tags 50036676, body, hemingway

Wellbeing

Quit The Carrots: 6 Eye Care Myths, Busted

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 9, 2017

Chances are, your eyes aren’t perfect.
One Gallup poll found that about 70 percent of Americans wear some type of corrective lens—or, at least, they’re supposed to wear them.
Still, unless something’s wrong, you probably don’t think much about your eyes. When something is wrong, you go to an optometrist and hope that they’ll have the answers. The good news is that the field has come quite a ways over the past few decades.
The bad news: There’s still quite a bit of misinformation out there. To address some of the most common ocular myths, we spoke with Gary Heiting, OD. Heiting, who runs AllAboutVision.com and is an optometrist with more than 20 years of experience.

We ran some well-known “facts” about eyesight by Heiting—with some surprising results.

1. Sitting in front of a television will inevitably damage your eyes.

At one time, this bit of wisdom may have made sense.
“There was some concern that the cathode tubes in old televisions gave off significant amounts of ultraviolet radiation,” Heiting says. “That has been corrected, though. There’s no UV risk at all, and while televisions do omit blue light, the jury’s out as to whether that’s a major concern.”

Children often sit closer to the television because their eyes are good at focusing up close, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Over extended periods of time, focusing on a nearby object can cause eyestrain, which is unpleasant—symptoms include headaches, redness, and a “gritty” feeling on the eyes—but ultimately temporary.
“You can also get eyestrain from reading a book,” Heiting notes. He does, however, recommend against extreme binge-watching sessions.
“Kids shouldn’t watch too much TV, but not because of potential eye damage. The much bigger risk is childhood obesity,” he says.

Obesity, by the way, can contribute to the development of certain vision problems, so it’s not a completely unrelated point. Heiting recommends limiting TV time, but parents shouldn’t get too worried about distance.

2. Glasses make your eyes worse, year over year.

Clearly, this is a ridiculous leap of logic…right? There’s no way that glasses could do anything negative.
Actually, this one might have some basis in fact.

“For years, the standard response was, ‘no they don’t,’ but now, it appears that this isn’t such a simple question,” Heiting says.
To be clear, ophthalmologists don’t believe that eyeglasses cause myopia (otherwise known as nearsightedness), but Heiting says that some types of contact lenses might be more effective than eyeglasses at reducing the progression of the condition.
“Some research has shown that wearing a dual-focus contact lens may reduce the risk of the progression of nearsightedness,” Heiting says. “Eyeglasses certainly don’t reduce that risk.”
Heiting may have been referring to this randomized study, in which researchers studied 40 children for two 10-month periods. Each child would wear one single-focus and one dual-focus contact lens in each eye (chosen at random). The results were astounding: In 70 percent of the cases, nearsightedness was reduced by 30 percent or more in the eye wearing the dual-focus lens, as compared to the other lens.

To put that in simpler terms, there’s evidence that we may be able to slow down myopia—perhaps even reverse the condition. That’s an exciting development, given the current epidemic of nearsightedness (we’ll get to that in a moment).
As such, many ophthalmologists now believe that eyeglasses could may make certain types of nearsightedness worse, but it’s a hotly debated topic without a clear resolution.

“There still needs to be more research,” Heiting notes, “but there’s a lot more question about it than there used to be.”
With that being said, regular eye strain certainly isn’t great for your eyes, so if your doctor prescribes glasses or contact lenses, the safest course of action is to wear them. Going without glasses will lead to eyestrain—and again, eyestrain isn’t exactly fun.

3. Your vision will get worse if you read on computers.

Again, there’s potentially some truth to this one, but the science is still out.
“There’s been a definite increase in the progression of nearsightedness over the past 20 years, and that rise may be linked with the rise in usage of computer screens and other LCDs,” Heiting suggests.

Why? Well, nobody’s really sure, but it may have something to do with focusing for extended periods of time without any sort of break. The blue light of LED screens might also cause retinal damage, but again, there’s really not enough research to say.
“It is true that you’re straining your eyes a little bit more,” Heiting says. “There’s been a definite increase in the progression of nearsightedness over the past 20 years and that rise may be linked with the rise in usage of computer screens and other LCDs. [Lighting] could be a part of that. However, you’re exposed to much more blue light from the sun.”
The so-called “nearsightedness boom” is big news in ophthalmology. By some estimates, by the end of the decade, 2.5 billion people—a third of the world’s population—will have some degree of myopia. In the United States, the numbers are even worse; myopia affects half of the country’s young adults.
Some ophthalmologists believe that screens are to blame, but correlation isn’t the same thing as causation, and the scientific community is still searching for conclusive evidence. In the meantime, Heiting recommends limiting eyestrain wherever possible, especially during extended reading or gaming sessions.

“Take breaks frequently, look across the room, and follow the 20-20-20 rule,” Heiting says. That rule is simple: Every 20 minutes, take a 20 second break and focus on something at least 20 meters away. That helps to relax the muscles you use to focus on nearby objects. After 20 seconds, you’re free to look back at the screen.
“The focusing muscle needs to be used when we look up close, but it relaxes when we look far away, so the fatigue of that muscle can be easily alleviated,” Heiting says.

4. Carrots make your eyesight better.

Adults commonly tell children this myth in order to get them to finish their veggies. Alas, there’s no truth to it. While eating like a rabbit might be good for your overall health, the benefits are limited.

“[Carrots] do contain some nutrients that are healthful to the eye, but if you’re eating a balanced diet, there’s really no need to bulk up on carrots,” Heiting says. “Doing so won’t give you any superpowers.”
Carrots contain beta-carotene, which the body uses to produce vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency eventually causes xerophthalmia, a condition characterized by night blindness. However, the human body can only metabolize so much vitamin A, and most people get plenty. Besides, that “night blindness” indicator is key; vitamin A only improves our vision in low-light conditions.

Oh, and not that it matters, but rabbits are typically farsighted, so they might not be the best role models.

5. Cataracts grow back.

This might seem like an obvious possibility, given that some people get multiple cataract surgeries. However, that’s not due to the cataract “growing back.”
“There’s a lot of people who are confused about that,” Heiting says.

He clarifies for us: “The cataract is a clouding of a lens in the eye, and during cataract surgery, that lens is removed and replaced with an intraocular lens—a man-made lens. Clouding of the lens cannot come back.”
So, why do some cataracts patients need multiple surgeries to restore their vision? A lens capsule in the eye can sometimes become clouded after surgery. To simplify their explanations, some doctors will call this a “second cataract,” but the more accurate term is posterior capsule opacification, or (PCO).
“The lens capsule is left in the eye on purpose, and in a limited number of cases, months or years after cataract surgery, that can get a little hazy,” Heiting explains. “Now, if that happens, since there’s now an interocular lens inside the eye, all they need to do is a laser procedure, usually done in-office, and [the patient’s] vision will be restored.”

The operation is nowhere near as involved as a primary cataract surgery. Nevertheless, since the symptoms are similar, patients frequently confuse the two conditions.

6. Crossing your eyes will cause them to stay like that.

“That’s an easy one,” Heiting says. “No, that won’t happen.”
Your eyes are controlled by six muscles, and when you move your eyes around, you’re simply flexing those muscles. Excessive strain will cause soreness—as would be the case with any other muscle—but no permanent damage.

Crossing your eyes certainly won’t cause esotropia, a condition where one or both eyes turn inward. Esotropia often occurs in early childhood, and it sometimes spontaneously corrects itself, but it’s not caused by eye strain. Most commonly, it’s linked with genetic disorders and premature births.
In any case, the science is clear: There is, quite simply, no evidence whatsoever that crossing your eyes will cause any sort of damage (other than perhaps some moderate discomfort).
“It is, however, a great way to annoy your parents,” Heiting suggests.

Tags 50036521, care, hemingway

Nosh

Toss Or Keep? The Truth About Expiration Dates On Food

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 2, 2017

In September 2013, environmental advocacy group the Natural Resource Defence Council (NRDC) lobbed a bombshell into the heart of the American food system.
The NRDC’s targets were tiny lines of print on packaged foods. They say things like “use by,” “sell by,” and “best before.” These date labels on food were—as they remain—super-confusing. They even include “enjoy by,” which seems a little presumptuous, like naming an apple Red Delicious. We’ll be the judge of that, thanks.

Forty percent of the food supply in the U.S. ends up in a landfill or a garbage disposal.

Consumers tend to interpret these disparate food labels in just one way, according to the NRDC: If there’s a date printed on a can or a box or a package, that’s the date the food inside becomes unfit for human consumption. So it goes into the trash—even though most of it remains totally safe to eat.

According to that explosive NRDC report, The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America, about 40 percent of the food supply in the U.S. ends up in a landfill or a garbage disposal—not in the bellies of, say, the 15 percent of U.S. households that were food insecure in 2011. (The United States Department of Agriculture [USDA] places the food-loss rate at a still-whopping 30 percent.)
Either way, the authors of the NRDC report are clear about a major reason we waste so much food: “confusion around food expiration dates,” they write.

Locked in an Expiration Date Stalemate

That bombshell the NRDC tossed in 2013 has yet to detonate. Things haven’t improved much since the report’s release, at least not in terms of solid legislation. Admittedly, the situation isn’t all gloomy; two powerful industry groups, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute, recently recommended that manufacturers adopt common language for these labels. Ultimately, though, the decision remains in the hands of the companies that sell the food.

More importantly, we’re still waiting for a cultural shift that diminishes our fear of past-date foods.
“Here in America, we’re a little crazy about it,” nutritionist Vanessa Rissetto tells HealthyWay, describing the American propensity to throw out food based solely on sell-by and use-by dates.
There’s definitely something unique at work in the American hurry to ditch food. The average consumer in the U.S. wastes 10 pounds of food for every 1 pound trashed by the average Southeast Asian consumer, according to The Dating Game report.

On the Other Hand…

Around the same time as the NRDC researchers were putting together their report, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that every year, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from the U.S. food supply. Of those estimated 48 million victims of food poisoning, 128,000 end up in the hospital, and 3,000 lose their lives.

We’re not saying that all (or even any) of these cases involve a package of something past its sell-by date. But clearly there’s a balancing act to maintain. On the one hand, we must stop wasting food. On the other, consumers must feel safe with their supermarket choices.
The tightrope between these gulfs is where regulatory agencies should work to create fair, safe, coherent, and legally binding food-dating rules. But they haven’t, and it doesn’t appear that they will anytime soon.
H.R. 5298, the Food Date Labeling Act of 2016—which would standardize both quality dates and safety dates on packaged food from sea to shining sea—went to committee on May 19, 2016. That was the day Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced it. The bill has languished ever since.

The fate of that bill isn’t even the most bonkers thing about the issue, which lies at an unlikely and volatile intersection between health, ecology, and commerce. Here’s the truth about food expiration dates in the U.S.:

1. “Expiration dates” are chosen by manufacturers with little to no oversight.

So, surely the Food and Drug Administration or the USDA are on this issue, right? Not really.

Expiration dates are entirely made up.

“Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by Federal regulations,” says the USDA’s FAQ about the situation. That agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) did recently come out in favor of “best if used by” labels, but without legislative backup, that remains just a friendly suggestion.
Dr. Michelle Davenport, who holds a PhD in nutrition, is co-founder of Raised Real, a start-up that supplies parents with organic, unprocessed baby foods and the means to prepare them. She reiterates that expiration dates are completely controlled by the companies that sell the food.
“Expiration dates are entirely made up,” she says.
The FDA backs up her claim. The agency states on their own site that, “[Use-by dates are] entirely at the discretion of the manufacturer. There are no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open dating in the United States. As a result, there are a wide variety of phrases used on labels to describe quality dates.”

2. A lot of these labels mean the same thing.

Despite the USDA’s support of a common “best if used by” label, that wide variety of phrases remains in use. You’ve still got your “expires on” and your “use by” and your “enjoy by.” But according to FSIS, these are all measures of food quality, not of food safety. These are two separate issues, as you’ll realize the next time you get hungry with nothing delicious lying around.

“The quality of perishable products may deteriorate after the date passes,” reports FSIS. “However, such products should still be safe if handled properly. Consumers must evaluate the quality of the product prior to its consumption to determine if the product shows signs of spoilage.”
Food processing companies have a vested interest in being conservative with their quality dates. After all, their brand is at stake—you might think twice about Nabisco’s quality control if you opened a package of stale Oreos.
“[Expiration dates are] all about the brand, protecting the brand,” says Rissetto. “You can eat eggs like three weeks after the sell-by date.”
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources agrees. On the UNL Food blog, Alice Henneman and Joyce Jensen write, “For best quality, use eggs within 3 to 5 weeks of the date you purchase them. The ‘sell-by’ date will usually expire during that length of time, but the eggs are perfectly safe to use.”

Thirty-two percent of freshwater usage in the U.S. goes toward growing the crops we may toss out with the kitty litter. And yet we’ve just learned that the sell-by date is often just a means to protect a brand—not consumers’ safety. Is that branding really worth such an epic waste of the total food supply?
When we confuse food quality dates with safety dates, the question only gets thornier.

3. …Except when those labels mean something different.

The only real difference in the current crop of expiration labels is that between “use by” and its analogues and “sell by.” The latter tells grocers when they should stop trying to sell a given product, because it might not be in the shape consumers have come to inspect if they sell it much later—see the above discussion of brand protection.

Like “sell by,” though, “use by” is not an indication of food safety. It’s just the manufacturer’s best guess about when the quality of the product might start to dip.
And there’s a reason companies don’t put food-spoilage dates on their products (with the possible exception of meats). For most of the items on the grocery store shelf, it’s just impossible to tell.

4. Many factors play into food spoilage, so there’s no one date on which a product becomes unsafe.

Manufacturers can’t predict how you’ll handle food once you buy it, so there’s no real way for them to tell you when it will become actively unsafe to eat. After all, spoiled food usually doesn’t taste good, but it won’t always make you sick.
“There are two types of bacteria that can be found on food,” reports a USDA fact sheet on food product dating, available for download here.

According to the fact sheet, those types are “pathogenic bacteria, which cause foodborne illness, and spoilage bacteria, which cause foods to deteriorate and develop unpleasant characteristics such as an undesirable taste or odor making the food not wholesome, but do not cause illness.”
The report goes on to note something that seems fairly obvious: “Food spoilage can occur much faster if it is not stored or handled properly.”
The most important factor in food safety is exposure to pathogens, which can happen even to the freshest food products in your grocery cart. Beyond that, there’s how you treat the product on a day-to-day basis. Take milk, which is kind of infamous for curdling on you just before you take a giant gulp from the carton.
“There are a lot of factors there,” says Bryan Roof, a host of Cook’s Country and executive food editor at Cook’s Country Magazine. “Were you on vacation and the refrigerator door was closed the whole time so there were no temperature fluctuations for five days? Or was [the milk] out on the counter every day with the cereal?”

Two cartons packaged and shipped on the same day could go to two households, with two very different results regarding food safety. You just can’t nail down a single, true expiration date that tells you when a product will definitely start making you sick.

5. Your senses tell you way more about food safety than any label ever could.

It doesn’t much matter what the labels say, at least not yet. The best way to determine when food is no good to eat is to do what animals have done since they crawled out of the primordial ooze: Trust your senses.

If this looks or smells like poison, do not eat it. If it’s just a bit stale, well, how hungry are you?

“Spoiled foods will develop an off odor, flavor or texture due to naturally occurring spoilage bacteria,” states that USDA fact sheet. “If a food has developed such spoilage characteristics, it should not be eaten.”

Rissetto recommends the same sniff-test to her clients when they worry about food spoilage.
“The smell is going to tell you if it’s good or not,” she says. “And if you get chicken and it’s gray, you shouldn’t eat it … I would tell people to use their brains. You’ve got noses. You’ve got eyes.”
We’d feel a lot safer if there were also very clear guidelines on packaged foods. Maybe not a label that says “This will definitely become poisonous in 16 minutes,” but something—even if it’s just “Check for rot before consuming.”
A great first step would be to differentiate between quality and safety when putting expiration dates on foods.
But until that happens, we have a suggestion that should cover every situation: just one label that reads, “If this looks or smells like poison, do not eat it. If it’s just a bit stale, well, how hungry are you?”

Tags 50036216, fuel, hemingway