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4 Healthy Men http://www.4healthymen.com Health, Fitness & Nutrition Tips 4 Healthy Men Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:49:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The Science of Love http://www.4healthymen.com/the-science-of-love/ http://www.4healthymen.com/the-science-of-love/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:49:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=15 Why do fools fall in love? I’ve always considered that a kind of cynical question, for it implies that people who don’t fall in love are not fools. Or, put another way, wise people do not fall in love. As most of us know, and are reminded ad nauseam for the weeks preceding Feb. 14, people who don’t fall in love range from being merely unhappy to sociopathic. I’ll take being a fool any day.

ARE MEN more foolish — or foolish in different ways — than women in the love department? I’d have to say so. My conclusion is based on a couple of things, both vaguely scientific: The first one has to do with the only theory about love I’ve come across that makes any sense. The second has to do with how the powers of attraction work differently in men and women.

As a topic of scientific inquiry, love has long resisted serious, empirical research. We all recognize it when in the throes of infatuation or even the chummy reliable familiarity of a long marriage. But what’s actually going on?

We know this much, or this little: To maximize our genetic potential and cut down on diseases, nature has programmed us to be attracted to people whose DNA is dissimilar from our own. Studies, have found, for instance, that we are attracted to people whose odors — loosely defined as pheromones — we find pleasing, and that those people have genetic structures very different from our own.

All other social factors — Can she speak in sentences? Does she floss? — being a go, the pleasure centers in our brains are activated when our noses inform us that we’ve met an acceptable biological match. Our pupils dilate and tear ducts secrete a little moisture, producing that glistening “look of love” that is so highly appealing.

With subsequent contact, the feelings intensify. The brain releases dopamine, a pleasure chemical. Norepinephrine stimulates the production of adrenaline, causing the heart to go pitty-pat. A compound called phenylethylamine floods the brain, heightening the euphoria. This chemical cocktail, this natural love potion, accounts for the daydreaminess, loss of appetite, lack of judgment and other foolish acts that afflict a, well, fool in love.

What’s different for men in this scenario? It depends on which psychological theory of love you buy into. Though science is hard pressed to come up with some definitive answers, that hasn’t stopped theorists from cashing in on writing about humanity’s favorite subject.

I’ve come across dozens of theories of love, ranging from “limerence,” a kind of hallucinatory state that overcomes the infatuated, to “completion,” which maintains that we seek in a mate what we feel is lacking in ourselves.

LOVE MAPS

The most sensible theory, though, was advanced by Robert J. Sternberg, a psychologist at Yale, about 20 years ago. Sternberg maintained that from infancy through early adulthood we form a “love map” that will lead us to our ideal mate. The “map,” more like a collage, is a composite of the females we have encountered who have had a happy effect upon us. For most of us, Mom is in there somewhere, along with our first girlfriend, perhaps the first non-family adult female we admired as a kid, and various others, from teachers to neighbors.

When I first read Sternberg’s theory, it made enormous sense to me. But a few years later, when I met the woman who would become my wife, it took on perfect, personal clarity. I was immediately struck by her competence (like my mother), her coloring (like my childhood best friend’s mother, who I thought was ravishing), her physique (like my high school girlfriend’s). Her hobbies and interests, from raising horses to studying religion, had echoes among past loves, along with a thousand other details. I felt there was something eerily familiar about her, and now understood why.

Of course, women, too, form love maps of their own. But it’s a safe bet that their composites of future mates emphasize more heavily qualities associated with behavior — kindness, for instance, or the ability to be a good father. Why? These are the characteristics women list at the top of their wish list. At the top of men’s wish list is — surprise! — physical beauty.

It’s a wonder the system works as well as it does. But it does.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/the-science-of-love/feed/ 0 New Years Resolutions: Try Resolving Not To Resolve http://www.4healthymen.com/new-years-resolutions-try-resolving-not-to-resolve/ http://www.4healthymen.com/new-years-resolutions-try-resolving-not-to-resolve/#comments Sat, 26 Dec 2009 11:37:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=12 This year will be better than last year, won’t it? Because every year gets better than the one before, particularly when you’re the kind of person who can make resolutions and stick to them. That’s me: resolved to make a resolution and stick with it.

WHAT’S MY secret? I’ve learned to make resolutions that make sense. I’ve learned to make resolutions that are devoted to increasing my pleasure and joy in life.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Well, when you think about it, most resolutions are kind of draconian — I’ll drink less, eat less, indulge fewer vices, pinch more pennies. Resolutions are typically about having less fun, doing fewer of the things that you enjoy so much that they’ve become habits. Like eating.

A few years ago, for instance, I resolved to lose a little weight. I can’t even tell you why I decided upon this tack, it just seemed like the trendy thing to do. It seemed easy enough: exercise more, eat less. The only thing was, exercising more made me hungrier — at a time when I was supposed to be cutting back on calories. I was miserable. Talk about a resolution with an incompatible solution.

I thought hard about what all this meant and ended up totally confounded by why I’d chosen to embark upon such a silly regimen. Sure, for a few years, I’d noticed that my weight had been creeping upward — in the quarter century since I graduated college, I’d gained about 15 pounds. Every few years I had to get a new wardrobe to accommodate my expanding waistline. Some people consider this a hardship and resolve to fit into their clothes year after year. But I like new clothes.

It would have been one thing if my added poundage had been accompanied by a loss in self-esteem, a run of bad luck or social ostracization. But a lot of good things had happened during this time: I’d gotten married, had some kids, got a string of ever-more-gratifying jobs, found a nice place to live. All of this development was directly related, I believe, to my increased physical stature. That resolution to lose weight totally contravened my upward mobility.

So every year since that silly mistake, as I’ve gotten older, wiser and fatter, I’ve resolved to have as good a year as I had the year before. And being the superstitious sort, I believe that involves sticking with my game plan of gaining a pound or two a year, having as much wine as I like with dinner and eating dessert.

Perhaps you’re getting the drift. Our independent American spirit requires that we be beholden to nothing, so if a behavior becomes habitual it is labeled as bad. Habits are enslaving, the ethic goes, made to be broken. The powerful Puritan vein still runs deep. It’s time we all thought more like the French. Add a cheese course to your menu. Resolve to work less, not more. Drink wine with lunch.

If you can’t shake the urge to resolve come New Year’s, think hard about what’s motivating you. Is it guilt? Let’s say you resolve to be nicer to your nasty, truculent aged neighbor. Why would you do that? If the neighbor didn’t deserve your wrath, you wouldn’t deliver it upon him. Resolve instead to tell him what an unfun creature he is. Maybe he’ll be the one to change.

Resolutions to have more fun, eat better food, take more vacations, be less ambitious, spend more money on frivolous items, goof off more at work — those are resolutions we should all get behind. Yeah, yeah, I know, there are some resolutions that must be made. Resolve to quit smoking? Duh! Resolve to promote world peace, racial harmony, economic equality? I’m down. But resolve to cut back on (fill in the blank). Let’s all resolve not to resolve.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/new-years-resolutions-try-resolving-not-to-resolve/feed/ 0 Why Men Hate The Holidays And What They Can Do To Cheer Up http://www.4healthymen.com/why-men-hate-the-holidays-and-what-they-can-do-to-cheer-up/ http://www.4healthymen.com/why-men-hate-the-holidays-and-what-they-can-do-to-cheer-up/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:34:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=11 Holiday stress is a popular notion, bigger than Santa almost. In recent years, some shrinks began noticing a spike in requests from patients for refills for anti-anxiety medications around the holidays. And ever since, the media have been obsessed with the paradoxical notion of people being unhappy at the supposedly most joyous time of year.

NOW, further deconstructing the issue, we’re focused on how the stresses are different for men and women.

I, for one, get behind this idea. Of course, it’s in my best interests to do so. My wife, understanding that I feel a little lowly around this time of year, pretty much handles all holiday tasks except those that involve heavy lifting — my pathetic contribution. Were I able to shake off my general malaise, I might have to do more.

And that pretty much sums up the gender difference — women get stressed by the holidays, because all the shopping, cooking, decorating and prettifying become their responsibility, while men feel low. Clinically speaking, though, the two conditions are pretty much the same.

Which raises an interesting question: Why do men hate the holidays? Women at least have an excuse — they’re hassled and have to buy presents for their in-laws.

But men? The answer is complex. If control is an issue in the marital relationship, they’re going to feel a little agitated, because their spouse now holds all the cards. In order for the holidays to happen at all, men must cede all control to their wives. Not only do women get to dictate the events of the next several weeks, they’re racking up big points in the you-owe-me category. So men know that they either have to prepare for their debt coming due on Jan. 2 or provide a big-time present in the interim to offset it.

Which further deepens their misery. Men are lousy shoppers to begin with and generally have no idea what sort of present their wives would appreciate. This has actually been studied: Men buy much more impulsively and spend far more money than women do on gifts, the reason being that they have no tolerance for the experience and want it to be over in five minutes. Their lack of shopping sophistication is illustrated by the following fact: Presents men buy are returned twice as often as those women buy. So men, hoping to express their gratitude, end up paying a ton for a present their wife won’t appreciate and will have to return surreptitiously. Depressing.

Then there’s the forced intimacy of the holidays. Men prefer intimacy on their own terms — usually between the sheets — so when thrust into a family gathering, or a number of family gatherings, in which sitting around and relating to each other is at the top of the agenda, they’re going to experience some severe distress. The mere anticipation of said events is enough to get them to reach for the Prozac.

One last reason men get the holiday blues: They were boys once, and like all kids, enjoyed the holidays. Now they don’t, and that makes them sad.

GO HANG SOME LIGHTS

So what’s the antidote? Just as men’s innate incompetence interferes with their holiday pleasure, their innate desire to engage with the world can counteract it. You may be no good at decorating, buy you can hang lights, so why not hang about 40,000 of them from the eaves of your house and light up the neighborhood? That project could eat up days. If you dread sitting around the house on the national holiday thinking of others, organize a Frisbee football game, toboggan party or, hell, a snowball fight to let off a little steam.

Build your own Christmas tree. Erect a 20-foot-high menorah in the front yard. Carve the wooden figures for a crèche.

Just make sure you give all of the male figures in it plenty of SPACE.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/why-men-hate-the-holidays-and-what-they-can-do-to-cheer-up/feed/ 0 Doctors Don’t Devote Enough Effort To Preventing Disease In Men http://www.4healthymen.com/doctors-dont-devote-enough-effort-to-preventing-disease-in-men/ http://www.4healthymen.com/doctors-dont-devote-enough-effort-to-preventing-disease-in-men/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:59:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=19 My wife receives the reminder from our insurance company about twice a year: Is she aware that she’s entitled to a free annual mammogram and Pap smear? At a time when health insurers are not particularly known for their generosity, this is a welcome benefit — but why just for women? I don’t I get a similar reminder to get a PSA test for prostate cancer.

IT’S A LITTLE thing, I know. After all, my insurance will pay for an annual physical, which includes the test. But why am I not being hounded like my wife? Experts estimate that there will be 182,000 new cases of breast cancer this year and about 180,000 new cases of prostate cancer.

Is it because insurers figure that, as a man, I’m endowed with a sense of invincibility and have no interest in seeing a doctor unless I’m really sick?

Whatever the reason, the question underscores a political debate that has infused the health-care profession. Are men treated unfairly by the health-care system? Or, as popular belief has long had it, are women?

For years, it was widely assumed and, by some professionals’ standards, documented that women have been excluded from clinical research trials, leading to health-care protocols for both sexes that were based upon research on men. In the late ’80s, a flurry of interest in how heart disease affects women pinpointed profound differences between the sexes.

Because women are largely protected against the disease until menopause, most research was indeed conducted on men. As life expectancy rose, however, epidemiologic evidence emerged that women caught up to men very quickly in both risk and incidence — by 65, their chances of having a heart attack were about the same as men. Yet their treatment was based upon what had proved most effective for male heart patients, despite the fact that women were more likely to die of an initial heart attack than men.

FOCUS ON WOMEN’S HEALTH

That research and some cancer studies highlighted what many felt was a powerful gender bias in research. In response, the Society for Women’s Health Research was founded in 1990, followed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health.

There is no such comparable research office for men. Of course, women’s health advocates counter that men don’t need one, since most research is done on them anyway. This thinking persists. For instance, an article in the February issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry reported that alcoholic women show much more severe brain shrinkage and other brain deficits than alcoholic men. Yet because of the stigma attached to the disease and because they fear having their children taken from them if they seek help, many female alcoholics avoid treatment. That presents a problem for researchers, who have difficulty recruiting subjects to study.

Yet somehow this problem, which is really not researchers’ fault, filtered through an academic perspective, leads to charges of bias.

Astonishingly, an editorial in the journal accompanying the article about alcoholism decried the “exclusion” of women from such clinical trials that has created gaps in medical knowledge about the effects of the disease and treatment of women.

According to a comprehensive new study, though, the long-standing public perception that women have been underrepresented or understudied in clinical trials is not supported by the evidence. Curtis L. Meinert, director of the Center for Clinical Trials at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and his colleagues recently analyzed more than 100,000 clinical trials appearing in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1965 and 1995. Even after accounting for specific studies on prostate cancer and breast cancer, the team found no pervasive bias against women in scientific research.

The only consistent bias against women was in heart-related trials. Less than 1 percent of all heart trials were exclusively female. But the investigators also found a bias against men, who were often underrepresented in cancer research.

“The findings are important because the perception that females are underrepresented and their diseases are understudied erodes the public trust, which is essential to continued clinical research,” says Meinert.

NO MEN’S HEALTH SPECIALTY

If there is bias in the health-care system, some experts argue, it is against men. How so? Women go to doctors who deal exclusively with female health issues, while there is no comparable field of “andrology” not only to treat men but to pick up early signs of disease the way obstetrician/gynecologists do in women.

And many doctors feel there should be. The most important benefits of a male specialty would be preventive, according to Dr. David Gremillion, a specialist in infectious diseases at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “The current system of health care is not well-suited to making men feel comfortable enough to step forward and do health maintenance,” he says. “It’s well-suited to handling men who have a workplace injury or caring for them once they’ve had a big heart attack. But it’s not focused on preventive care.”

Regardless of what side you’re on, the debate about gender bias in research has indisputably advanced medical science. In attempting to prove or disprove bias, researchers have learned that some diseases do affect men and women differently and need to be studied accordingly. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences recently confirmed differences between the sexes in the prevalence and severity of a broad range of diseases, disorders and conditions. Its report, conducted over 16 months, concluded that gender differences that affect well-being occur throughout the life span, affecting behavior, perception and health.

“Sex does matter,” says Mary Lou Pardu, chair of the IOM Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender Differences. “It matters in ways that we did not expect. Undoubtedly, it also matters in ways that we have not begun to imagine.”

Enough said. It’s time to end the debate and let such research begin.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/doctors-dont-devote-enough-effort-to-preventing-disease-in-men/feed/ 0 Ignoring the Risks http://www.4healthymen.com/ignoring-the-risks/ http://www.4healthymen.com/ignoring-the-risks/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:57:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=18 There are bad habits and there are bad habits. There’s the chronic tendency to leave cupboard doors open and an inexplicable inability to carry one’s dirty socks from floor to hamper. There’s the toilet seat thing that drives women nuts. There’s eating crackers in bed and hogging the remote. And then, of course, there are the bad habits that kill you.

MEN HAVE a particularly hard time when it comes to overcoming patterns of behavior that have a negative impact on their health. Certain behavioral traits and tendencies — impulsivity, stubbornness, macho stoicism, to name a few — harden whatever slothful tendencies may plague us.

Over the past 20 years, women have been catching up to us in the bad-health department, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever surpass us.

“Women have more sensitivity to their health,” says Dr. Daniel Stettner, director of psychology at William Beaumont Hospital in Birmingham, Mich., and an expert on habits. “They go on more diets than men. They’re typically responsible for the health of their family members. They’re enmeshed in the health-care system, go to doctors far more often than men. Many men don’t see a doctor for years — until they become seriously ill. They don’t have a physician regularly telling them they’re overweight, their blood pressure is too high or they’re diabetic.”

IMPULSE EATING

In Stettner’s view, bad health habits are influenced by the culture, stress and an individual’s particular style of dealing with the latter. Men tend to suffer more stress at work than women do, for instance. Many have also been socialized to have their food decisions dictated by their mothers or wives: They make passive food choices. “As a result, men drift toward impulse eating when they’re overworked,” he says. “They don’t stop for lunch, [they] eat fast food on the run or whatever’s available.”

Men’s health blunders

  1. Avoiding the doctor
  2. Impulse eating
  3. Too much alcohol
  4. Poor stress control
  5. Not exercising

Men’s typical response — which is to say, their lack of a healthful response — to mood shifts can also be problematic. Women report more depression than men do, although they may not necessarily suffer from the disease more. Men, for a variety of social and biological reasons, simply don’t pay as close attention to their interior lives as women do.

Yet they do medicate their moods with comfort food, alcohol or other drugs. “The fact that women report more depression means they’re doing something about it,” says Stettner. “Men neither report nor treat their depression.”

Taken together, this constellation of bad habits presents a particularly difficult challenge to health-care practitioners and their male patients. Both men and women may suffer from poor diet and lack of regular exercise, but at least women are hounded by their doctors to shape up.

TAKING STOCK

What’s a fellow to do? Stettner advises men who want to embark on a healthful path to simply take stock of where they are. “They need to ask themselves, ‘How am I feeling right now? Is there too much stress in my life? Do I feel as healthy as I used to?’ Then they need to make personal evaluations and take simple, small steps to change.”

For men in particular, he says, it’s important to get at underlying problems that may manifest themselves in unhealthy activities. For instance, if you feel like you’re eating or drinking too much, it’s not necessarily a good idea to go on a strict diet or give up drinking altogether. “That will simply create a disequilibrium in your life. It’s more productive to try to understand what triggers the desire to drink or binge on unhealthful food.”

Men who want to begin exercising should do so slowly, for as little as five or 10 minutes a day, so they don’t get discouraged by trying too much too fast. Gail Marion Meyer, a fitness trainer at the Chelsea Piers Fitness Center in New York City, suggests that newcomers join a group program with a specific goal — finishing a mini-triathlon, for instance. “If you have ‘teammates,’” she says, “they’ll help keep you motivated. Dropping out would be too embarrassing.”

The first priority for men who want to pursue a healthier lifestyle, though, is to see a doctor. Virtually all other positive self-care habits begin here. Whether it’s being alerted to high blood pressure or dangerous cholesterol levels or a borderline PSA count, a doctor’s visit will help a man address his worst habit of all: thinking he’s invulnerable.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/ignoring-the-risks/feed/ 0 Male Aggression Not All Bad: Benefits Of Confrontation, Competition http://www.4healthymen.com/male-aggression-not-all-bad-benefits-of-confrontation-competition/ http://www.4healthymen.com/male-aggression-not-all-bad-benefits-of-confrontation-competition/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:53:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=17 The other day at my son’s hockey game, I watched Tom jockey for position in front of the goal with an opposing defensemen. After rapping each other’s sticks, both were called for penalties. Immediately after the game, while the kids mingled near the stands talking to their parents, Tom’s nemesis approached him, grabbed his helmet’s wire-cage face protector, shook it along with Tom’s head, then walked away. Exercising great restraint, Tom looked at me and shrugged. “You shouldn’t have let him do that to you,” I told Tom as we headed to the locker room. So sue me.

WAS I suggesting Tom retaliate in kind? Yes. He’s a boy with a generous and sensitive heart — hardly a loose cannon that needs constant muzzling. Eager to accept the challenge, he immediately turned to go find the kid, but I called him back. “You should have dealt with it when it happened, done the same thing back,” I said. “No more, no less.”

Was this the right advice? It’s the kind of thing every father worries about, particularly those of us who are actively involved in our kids’ sporting life, where coaches routinely exhort their charges to “be aggressive.” In a world in which political correctness has demonized any displays of aggression, my view is considered hopelessly retrograde and perhaps dangerous. After all, it’s beyond dispute that boys demonstrate far more confrontational behavior than girls and, as adults, are responsible for almost all violent crime. With school shootings on the rise, say the PC police, any kind of aggression must be discouraged.

But is there a relationship between a boy standing up for himself and psychopathology later in life? As most developmental experts point out, violence is not a natural or even common endpoint of aggression. In fact, Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, has repeatedly demonstrated in 40 years of research on children that aggressiveness in a young child, properly modulated and socialized, leads to what he calls assertive competence — success — as an adult.

The late Robert Cairns, a Duke University psychologist who conducted intergenerational studies on aggression until his death last fall, would have agreed. “We wouldn’t have so much of the behavior if it didn’t work not only for the individual — as a means of maintaining one’s autonomy and the integrity of one’s life — but for the species,” Cairns told me in interviews conducted not long before he died. “It’s not just a virus that’s been inserted into our behavior.”

PITFALLS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSION

In Cairns’ view, girls can be meaner — agents of a sometimes more destructive form of aggression. Around age 10, they develop a sophisticated social weaponry that, although not physically assertive, uses alienation, rumor-mongering and ostracization to vanquish a rival.

This style of passive aggression can emotionally devastate the victim, who often has no idea why, or by whom, she’s being attacked.

In a famous study of kids’ games, researchers found that girls played less competitively in smaller groups and their games were shorter, partly because they were unskilled at resolving disputes. When a quarrel began, the game typically broke up because no one made an effort, or even knew how, to resolve the problem. Boys, on the other hand, quarreled all the time, but not once was a game terminated because of a dispute, and no game was interrupted for more than seven minutes. They had learned to negotiate their differences quickly, often by physical means, and to get back to the business at hand, which usually involved competing with each other.

SECRETS TO SUCCESS?

In fact, the confrontational style that boys learn early in life serves them well later. That’s one of the conclusions of one of the most distinguished and comprehensive long-term studies of men ever conducted, the Grant Study of Adult Development. Since 1937, researchers have tracked the psychological and physical health of several classes of Harvard graduates, many of whom are still alive. Among this elite group, which includes college presidents, politicians, partners of Wall Street law firms, foundation presidents and society surgeons, psychiatrist George Vaillant, the study’s director for the past 30 years, identified a special group of “Best Outcomes” — men who enjoyed not only material success but stable relationships and mental tranquility, and sought fulfillment by helping others.

As a group, the Best Outcomes felt a compelling need to be in charge. Interestingly, their view of the world as competitive and hierarchical was directly linked to their concern for and involvement with the commonweal: The Best Outcomes gave six times as much money to charity as the Worst Outcomes, yet as a group exhibited six times as many displays of aggressive behavior as their less exalted and stingier classmates. As they grew older, they became even more active in competitive sports than they’d been in college, whereas the less successful participants avoided competition altogether.

What to make of this? Aggression, competition, hierarchy, confrontation — all are hot-button words these days, and all occupy prominent positions in a male view of the world that is at least in part biologically determined. Particularly among the best men.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/male-aggression-not-all-bad-benefits-of-confrontation-competition/feed/ 0 Men’s Food Cravings: Seduced By Salt And Spice http://www.4healthymen.com/mens-food-cravings-seduced-by-salt-and-spice/ http://www.4healthymen.com/mens-food-cravings-seduced-by-salt-and-spice/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:51:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=16 When I think of food cravings I think of the clay-eaters of the South — people who have an unusual craving to eat clay or dirt. In many regions of South America, clay-eating, or geophagy (also known as pica), is also common, particularly among religious zealots and pregnant women. Those who indulge in the practice believe they are satisfying their body’s need for the minerals and other nutrients found in earth. Me, I think I’ll stick to chocolate chip cookies.

BUT THAT would make me out of sync with my gender, according to some surveys.

Last year, a report in the journal Appetite compared the food cravings of men and women in Hispanic and American cultures. In both, researchers learned, more males (about five-eighths of those surveyed) craved salty, spicy foods than chocolate and sweets, while more females (about five-eighths) craved sweets than savories.

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association has published similar findings: Women report significantly more cravings for chocolate and sweets than men do.

The exact mechanisms behind these gender differences in food cravings remain unclear.

The term itself is awfully unscientific. One person’s cravings may be another’s idle desire and someone else’s burning obsession. If you’re like me, the eleven o’clock news stimulates a powerful desire to consume a bowl of ice cream and the aforementioned chocolate chips. This kind of craving can be thought of as the lack-of-willpower and bored-before-bed craving.

The other is not so benign and falls into the category of eating disorder. Although not all clinicians like to go that far. Some euphemistically refer to the desire to satisfy cravings as “emotional overeating” and have concocted a clever acronym, FATS, to describe the four emotions at the core of such overindulgence — fear, anger, tension and shame.

Experts say it’s difficult to explain what mechanism is responsible for cravings. Some blame a powerful psychological dynamic. If foods with pleasurable tastes — that wonderful combination of butter, sugar and salt, for instance — are used to provide comfort in childhood, they could be used to provide solace during moments when, as an adult, you’re consumed by FATS.

Others say cravings represent a physiological need that must be satisfied. “Carbohydrate cravings can simply be from hunger because your blood sugar levels are too low,” says Susan Schiffman, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center.

But Dr. Jeffrey Hampl, a dietitian and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, doubts that theory. “We don’t fully understand why people crave foods,” he says. “Some people say that it’s a nutrient deficiency that causes us to seek out that food. I don’t believe that’s true. Often the foods that we crave aren’t a good source of that nutrient.”

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/mens-food-cravings-seduced-by-salt-and-spice/feed/ 0 The Male Beauty Boom http://www.4healthymen.com/the-male-beauty-boom/ http://www.4healthymen.com/the-male-beauty-boom/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:46:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=14 A recently released book called “The Adonis Complex” says that, in increasing numbers, men are feeling pressured to achieve physical perfection in the same way that women have for centuries. Millions of men, the authors say, are lifting weights and dieting compulsively, taking steroids, jamming hair plugs into their bald pates and surgically altering themselves in the name of beauty.

ALL RIGHT. If this is true, it’s disturbing. But I’ll tell you what really gets me: Middle-aged guys who dress in slouchy, over-sized pants and a baseball cap worn backward. On a surly teen-ager, the look is questionable. On an aging suburbanite, it’s preposterous.

Are we talking about the same thing here? The authors of the book, who believe male body obsession, which often manifests as the official-sounding body dysmorphic disorder, has reached the proportion of a “silent epidemic,” certainly don’t think so. As evidence for their thesis, they point to a “landmark” survey of men done in 1997 by Psychology Today that found, for instance, that half were dissatisfied with their weight, 45 percent with their muscle tone and 38 percent with their chest.

Personally, I do think that men have taken the vanity thing a little too far. But is it correct to claim that there’s an epidemic’s worth of men who are suffering from a serious psychological disorder based on the above numbers? I don’t think so.

One big reason: More than a third of all Americans, half of whom are men, are clinically obese. If the survey cited is truly representative, then a third of the men in it are obese. And I doubt that many of them are happy with their weight, muscle tone or chest.

NIPS AND TUCKS

Of course, that still leaves another 10 or 20 percent of men who are unhappy with their appearance. But if they’re getting liposuctioned, tucked and surgically smoothed more than they did in the past, it’s because most of those procedures didn’t exist until recently. Men have always fiddled neurotically with their appearance: Just look at Louis XIV. And Popeil’s spray-on Hair in a Can has been around for decades.

The authors also look at what appears to be a rising incidence of eating disorders among men and conclude, quite sensibly, that it seems to be the latest manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Many psychiatric patients’ illnesses are characterized by cultural motifs — schizophrenics, for instance, in the 1930s were plagued by radio waves; by the 1950s they were tormented by UFOs. The arrival of AIDS in the early 80s turned many obsessive-compulsives into hand-washers (even though the disease is not spread through casual contact). Today, the authors posit, male OCD types are vulnerable to pervasive messages about ideal body type.

INCREASING VANITY

And what about the rest of us? “Men in general are becoming more vain,” says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of “Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong.”

“They used to take pride in looking like they just got out of bed,” she says.

Now guys are more likely to have their own style and they’re spending record amounts expressing it. Men’s clothing sales jumped 4.1 percent last year to $57 billion, according to NPD Group, a market research firm. Sales of men’s fragrances rose 6 percent to $960 million.

“Research shows that nine out of 10 men who wear fragrance choose and buy it themselves, a significant change from 10 years ago, when men were influenced by and reliant on women to make this decision,” reports NPD director Veronica Lawrence. “The fashion-plate absorption can be the front stage for a shaky ego.”

The collective shaky ego, the authors of “The Adonis Complex” posit, has much to do with women’s increasing power in the world. “As women have advanced,” they write, “men have gradually lost their traditional identities as breadwinners, fighters and protectors. Women are no longer so dependent upon men for these services. Accordingly, as the importance of these other identities has declined, the relative importance of the male body appears to have increased.”

MORE SPLURGING

All of this has left men with more disposable income, too. “In the ’50s, by the age of 23 or 24, a guy would be a family man,” says Lionel Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and the author of “The Decline of Males.” “He would turn over money to his wife and children. Today, men may not have responsibilities for supporting children, so they have more cash to spend on themselves.”

The male beauty boom is also related to a shifting ethnic makeup of the country from Germanic to Hispanic. “There is a different cultural pattern,” says Tiger. Men are taking more pride in how they dress, he says.

And there’s nothing wrong with that trend — as long as it doesn’t involve underwear-revealing baggy pants and backward baseball caps.

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/the-male-beauty-boom/feed/ 0 The Myth Of The Fragile Male http://www.4healthymen.com/the-myth-of-the-fragile-male/ http://www.4healthymen.com/the-myth-of-the-fragile-male/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:43:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=13 Well, it was bound to happen. America has managed to export its latest pop-psyche obsession: that there’s something inherently wrong with boys.

The British Medical Journal, in a report issued two days before Christmas (who says the Brits don’t know how to be jolly?) and titled “The Fragile Male,” have declared that the human male is on most measures more vulnerable than the female. The author of the report, psychologist Sebastian Kraemer of the Tavistock Clinic in London, says it’s time we not only start being more sensitive to the male condition but also begin raising our boys to be more sensitive themselves.

Stateside, the spate of books in the past couple years on American boyhood have created their own publishing genre. The message: Boys suffer many more developmental, emotional, learning and other disorders than girls and attention should be paid.

The message, both here and in Britain, is a good one. However, the suggestion that boys’ fragility might be helped were they to deepen their emotional capacities misses the point.

Kraemer first details the biological fragility of the male fetus. At conception there are more male than female embryos. External stress around the time of conception evens out the ratio, suggesting that the male embryo is more fragile than the female. Thereafter, as Kraemer puts it, “it is downhill all the way.”

The male fetus is at greater risk of death or damage from almost all obstetric “catastrophes” that can happen before birth, including brain damage, cerebral palsy, congenital deformities of the genitalia and limbs, premature birth and stillbirth. And when he emerges from the womb — if he makes it — he is developmentally behind his sister — four to six weeks, in fact.

As a boy, the guy suffers more developmental disorders than girls — reading delay, hyperactivity, autism, stammering and Tourette’s syndrome occur three to four times more often. As a teen, he is far more likely to suffer a non-fatal or fatal accident, perpetrate a violent crime, and commit suicide.

The trend continues later in life. Circulatory disorders, diabetes, alcoholism, duodenal ulcer and lung cancer are all commoner in men. And if they do become ill, they’re less likely to see a doctor.

Kraemer rightly suggests that the more developmental problems there are, the more care is needed. He also points out that precisely because difficult babies are difficult to look after they often receive less good care. On this point he and his American counterparts are dead on the money: Boys’ problems, often because of their difficult nature, are commonly ignored.

EMOTIONAL DEFICIENCIES?

But Kraemer goes awry when he begins to explore what he obviously thinks of as boy’s inferior emotional abilities. When exposed to the stress of others — a crying infant, say — boys seem less sympathetic than girls. And studies of effects of early bereavements and separations, he says, have found that boys dismiss the experiences as of little concern.

Is their apparent lack of sensitivity just another dimension of their “genetic disorder”? That’s the implication and it fits in neatly with the raft of other evidence cited by people who believe that men’s emotional talents are vastly inferior to women’s and that, furthermore, if men could just become more like women the world would be a better place.

Different, yes. Inferior … well, let’s stick with different. CT scans show that fewer areas of the brain light up when men experience happiness, sadness and other feelings. They also have less serotonin, which is known to mediate emotions, than women. Human life probably wouldn’t have made it this far if men felt as deeply as women do. So to think of men’s emotional style as deficient and inferior misses the point: It’s simply different.

I mean, just think: Women suffer far more bouts of serious depression than men do. The case could be made that they feel too much.

Does anyone ever suggest that they model their emotional life more on the order of men’s?

]]> http://www.4healthymen.com/the-myth-of-the-fragile-male/feed/ 0 Testosterone Is Not So Bad After All http://www.4healthymen.com/testosterone-is-not-so-bad-after-all/ http://www.4healthymen.com/testosterone-is-not-so-bad-after-all/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:32:00 +0000 admin http://www.4healthymen.com/?p=10 Isn’t it gratifying (if you’re a man) to witness the rehabilitation of good old aggressive behavior? All of these years we’ve heard so much about testosterone-poisoning, how the evils of the world can all be traced back to the male propensity for in-your-face behavior.

THEN, of course, women discovered that to survive in the male-dominated workplace they had to memorize a page from the masculinity handbook and many became more aggressive than men. Now comes the greatest endorsement for fundamentally forward behavior: It’s good for your health.

In a recent study, researchers from the University of Nebraska and Pennsylvania State University found that moderately aggressive men had higher levels of T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes, immune cells commonly called “helpers” and “suppressors,” than more reserved fellows. Both lymphocytes are involved in controlling immune response.

Loose translation: Real men don’t need flu shots.

The study, reported in Psychosomatic Medicine, was based on an analysis of 4,415 men between the ages of 30 and 48. To determine how aggressive they were, the researchers first asked the men a range of questions, from how often they skipped school when they were younger to whether they had ever fought with weapons. They then measured the men’s immune response by taking blood samples.

The researchers could find no association between higher testosterone levels and immunity, but that’s hardly surprising: Testosterone is a notoriously elusive target. In men it fluctuates on hourly, daily and seasonal bases. It spikes and dips depending on whether you feel like a winner or loser and climbs in response to just thinking about a hot date on Saturday night.

Many studies have documented a linkage between testosterone and aggressive behavior that now seems indisputable, and it seems well within the realm of scientific probability that the hormone can be credited with being involved in this latest good news, researchers say.

Yes, credited. Isn’t it nice to think of testosterone in this new, positive way?

STRONG CHIN, STRONG BODY?

The findings fit nicely with what’s known about the immune system and dominance — or at least the look of dominance. An analysis of the class of 1950 at West Point showed that the most reliable predictor of a soldier’s future rank was a formidable appearance — a muscular face, strong chin and brow, and good skeletal structure — “a gestalt kind of thing,” according to Allan Mazur, who did the study. Though the cadets’ resemblance to Stone Cold Steve Austin provided few clues as to how they’d do in mid-career, they accurately predicted who would eventually become generals.

The powerful look also predicted another Promethean quality: The generals, on average, fathered one more child than their pudgy-cheeked, weak-chinned classmates.

What does this have to do with immunity? In favoring Dick Tracy types, as they have long done, women are unconsciously choosing genetic resilience. The heavy lower face typical of the dominant male specimen is a visible record of the surge of androgens that helps morph a skinny lad with a weak chin into a meaty general.

EVOLUTIONARY INSIGHTS

Researchers theorize that the link between aggression and immunity dates to man’s early days, when guys who were best at finding food and protecting their kin were the most aggressive in the clan. In response to the injuries and infections that accompanied these high-risk behaviors, a healthy immune system evolved.

But not, as it turns out, as healthy as women’s. In the paper in Psychosomatic Medicine, Dr. Douglas Granger, who teaches biobehavioral health at Penn State, noted that in general women have stronger immune systems than men.

In studying that page from the masculinity handbook, they’ve apparently really done their homework.

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