Few people would chose to be bald; we all assume that it makes you less attractive. This consensus has been around at least since the Bible was written and certainly since then. It isn’t just Western culture either. Native American Indians tried to cure baldness with herbal remedies. It is surprising how often generally held beliefs like this turn out not to be true. But not this one. Continue reading
There’s no doubt about it, a personal recommendation from somebody you know and trust is the best possible advert. If I am anything to go by, a good recommendation will actually overrule my own personal experience. If someone tells me something is good, if I don’t find it works for me I’ll often blame myself rather than the product or its fan. Continue reading
Does The Way You Sleep Cause Wrinkles? It doesn’t sound like an unreasonable proposition in principle. Your skin is in contact with cotton, which is quite a hard and abrasive material, for many hours each night. You might well expected to have a detrimental effect on the Quality of your skin. Dr. Jaime Davis is in no doubt about it. He attributes the fact that many women have more wrinkles on one side of their face and that the other to the fact that they sleep on that side of their face. This doesn’t happen with men apparently. We are supposedly more likely to sleep on our stomachs. So we get our wrinkles on our foreheads. Continue reading
Glorious as it is, the Sun is the skin’s worse enemy.
There is no doubt about it. The biggest thing that makes your skin look old is sunlight. There is plenty of academic backup for this suggestion, but most of us can prove it simply by looking at ourselves. Areas of skin that are routinely exposed to light always look older than parts that don’t. In my case I have the habit of rolling my sleeves up in summer and the skin just below the join is rougher, darker and more hairy than above. Continue reading
Everyone loves bubbles
I don’t generally trust the Daily Mail, and in fact usually try to avoid it. But I couldn’t miss a fascinating story about falling shampoo sales. It seems that last year some of the big brands lost as much as 11% of their sales. What is going on? The Mail of course is never short of opinions and is quick to form judgements. The headline was that women who work from home don’t bother to wash their hair. Right. It must be the lazy trollops. What else could it be? Continue reading
Orange juice is a good source of AHAs and microbes
I don’t like the Daily Mail. There are a number of reasons. There’s their support for the fascists prior to the second world war. There’s their campaign against the MMR vaccine which led to a major public health problem. And there’s the general nastiness of their columnists. But I am also a bit worried that if I look at some of the pictures of very young female celebrities that they have on their sidebar all the time I might end up on the sex offenders register. Continue reading
In July 2014 I decided it was about time to do something about being overweight. I weighed in the region of 91Kg, but for my height the NHS recommended range only goes up to 84Kg. I had 7 more kilograms than I wanted. But how should I go about it? Continue reading
I have written several times on this blog that I can’t make sense of all the diverse and often contradictory information out there about health. I am a great believer in the scientific method, but it has to be admitted that it isn’t good for everything you would like to know. A good example is ‘healthy’ food and beneficial exercise. What do these terms even mean? Eating a salad is supposed to be healthy, but if you ate nothing but salad it would kill you. Exercise is generally regarded as a good thing. But you can definitely overdo it. If I were to set out to run a marathon this morning I would probably end up in hospital. Okay if I got into shape so I could run a marathon, I would probably be healthier than I am now by most measures. But even that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the actual running of the marathon was a necessary part of the process. The first person who ever ran a marathon, just after the battle of Marathon, famously died shortly afterwards. Continue reading
There is so much contradictory advice around in the health field, even if you stick to the stuff that has some science behind it, that it is impossible to know what the best thing to do is. My approach is to give things a try and see how they work for me. When I started on the 2:5 diet I didn’t have any particular expectations. It didn’t seem like it was especially different to any other strategy and I was basically just trying to find the optimum one that enabled me to shed some weight with the minimum of fuss. Continue reading
Do you need your beauty sleep? It is one of the things we have all heard people talk about. But does it have any foundation in science. Well until very recently I don’t think anyone had actually troubled to investigate it. But we now have the results of a small study into whether or not getting a good night’s sleep affects the quality of your skin. Continue reading