Women’s Health

Is Your Fat Shrinking Your Brain?

It isn’t breaking news that the majority of the US population is overweight or obese.  The situation has been spiraling out of control for decades.  Prospects for impacting this trend have been so bleak that new data indicating that US obesity rates have stabilized generated extensive news coverage, including segments on two national television networks, with many sources contrasting the high prevalence of obesity with the fact that rates are not climbing.  Should we really be celebrating that a third of adults[1] and one in six kids and teenagers[2] are heavy enough to be considered obese, even if that percentage hasn’t statistically increased since 2003?  Well, let’s consider the population.  From 2003 to 2011, the US population increased by approximately 18 million.  So that would mean about 6 million more obese adults even though the percentage did not increase.  During this same period, humans as a race set a new milestone; for the first time in history there are more overweight people in the world than underweight.[3]  Read the rest of this entry »

Does Hormone Therapy Increase Breast Cancer Risk?

Over the last decade, the safety of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been questioned in the media, in medical journals and in doctor’s offices across the country.  Unfortunately, the discussion is usually over-simplified and delivered to the public in sensationalized sound bites.  Without even getting into the scientific controversy, we can apply some rudimentary logic to the discussion.  If human hormones are the major cause of heart disease and breast cancer in women, wouldn’t you expect to see the greatest incidence when hormone levels are the highest?  For women, that would be their teens and twenties; a time when both breast cancer and heart disease are distinctly uncommon.[i]  But, when hormone levels decline at and around menopause, the incidence of both rises dramatically.  Perhaps there is more to the story than the sound bites suggest. Read the rest of this entry »

Breast Cancer Prevention – Myth or Reality

The statistics have become familiar enough to most of us: Breast cancer accounts for almost 200,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths every year. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 12.7 percent of women alive today will be diagnosed with some form of breast cancer during their lifetime. This makes breast cancer by far the leading cancer in women, accounting for almost 40% of all cancers diagnosed in women. Read the rest of this entry »

Your Heart and Your Bones

We all probably know someone who can predict the weather by the way their bones and joints feel.  And, when someone is especially committed to someone or something, they often say they “feel it in their bones”.   But we now have mounting scientific evidence linking the health of your bones to your risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD). Read the rest of this entry »

Lifestyle Changes for Fat Loss – Exercise

Starting an exercise program is a necessary part of a healthy lifestyle change.  Granted, this is no major revelation.  Burning more calories than you eat is a fairly obvious recipe for weight loss.  The question then becomes: How should you exercise for maximal fat loss and optimal long term changes in body composition? Read the rest of this entry »

Women and Heart Disease

While many women, and far too many doctors, apparently still do not know it, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one killer of women; and has been since 1984. Out of the one million individuals that die from heart disease each year in the U.S., more than half are women. Women disproportionately fear dying from breast cancer compared to heart disease, but cardiovascular disease kills nearly ten times as many women each year as breast cancer.   Read the rest of this entry »

Surprising Health Benefits of Sex

I don’t imagine there are very many people who need convincing that sex is a good thing, or that would need coaxing to engage in more sex.  Sex is extremely pleasurable and that should be sufficient reason to vigorously pursue it.  The one caveat is to avoid risky, indiscriminate sex that could potentially create very unhealthy situations, such as STD’s, AIDS or unwanted pregnancies.

What specifically constitutes “good sex”  is as variable as there are different tastes in clothing or food.   There has been quite a bit of study on this topic, though not all of it would pass rigorous scientific scrutiny.   Read the rest of this entry »

Women Need Testosterone Too!

Although estrogen remains the central female hormone most frequently used in both wellness and disease prevention, much less controversy surrounds the use of testosterone in women, though the evidence either supporting or discouraging its use is scarce. Nicknamed ‘‘the hormone of desire’’ and promoted in the popular media as the rescuer from the plight of decreasing libido in aging women, testosterone has gained rapid acceptance in the prevention and wellness arenas at a time when controversy and confusion surround estrogen and progesterone therapies. Read the rest of this entry »

Breast Cancer Risk is Influenced by Lifestyle Choices

Diet and Exercise are Cancers’ Adversaries Excluding cancer of the skin, breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women.  According to the American Cancer Society’s Surveillance and Health Policy Research, an estimated 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to occur among women in the US during 2009; about 1,910 new cases are expected among men.  Read the rest of this entry »

Low Vitamin D Levels Put Your Health At Risk

Do You Get Enough Vitamin D? Now that the long sunny days of summer are gone and winter is on the doorstep, it is even more important that you assess your vitamin D status.  The health benefits to having sufficient vitamin D levels have permeated the media in recent years.  We now know that nearly 85% of the US population are vitamin D deficient.  Read the rest of this entry »