Males of All Species are Becoming More Female

Various studies are indicating that unregulated chemicals released into the environment are causing male animals and humans to take on feminine characteristics. Read more

Rejection of Gay Teens Linked to Later Troubles

(HealthDay News) — Gay young adults whose families rejected them when they were younger are more likely to have histories of unprotected sex, illegal drug use and suicide attempts, new research suggests.
The findings don’t prove that a family’s negative reaction to a child’s sexuality directly causes problems later in life. But it’s clear that “there’s a connection between how families treat gay and lesbian children and their mental and physical health,” said Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University and lead author of a study released in the January issue of Pediatrics. Read More

Why moms get jealous of dads

Moms say they want their spouses to be do-it-all dads. After all they ARE forward-thinking women of the 21st century. Besides, if they did less, we couldn't possibly juggle our busy lives without going nuts. "But we don't want them to take over," says Pyper Davis, a mother of two in Washington, D.C. "We don't ever want to be pushed off that throne of being Mommy." Read on for more on the struggle. full story

Is Your Church Making You Fat?

By Andrea Useem

Plenty of studies have looked at whether being religious improves your health (in the U.S. at least, the current answer is a qualified yes), but Purdue University sociologist Ken Ferraro took a serious look at a different question: How does being religious affect your body mass index (BMI)?
In a 2006 study, Ferraro discovered that Baptists, including Southern Baptists, were most likely to be obese, even when geographic factors were controlled for (i.e., it wasn’t just the southern cookin’). “[Conservative] Protestants tend to have the highest BMIs,” he told me when I called him last week. The explanation? Ferraro has several guesses. Read More

5 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism and Lose Weight

Magnesium, interval training, and other tricks to burn more calories
by Ross Weale

Health magazine contributor Samantha Heller shows how to burn more calories, during an interview on the Today show, March 10.



SAMANTHA HELLER
Samantha Heller, RD, is the nutrition coordinator at the Fairfield Connecticut YMCA. A certified dietitian/nutritionist and exercise physiologist, Heller earned her master's degree in nutrition and applied physiology from Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She served as the senior clinical nutritionist and exercise physiologist at NYU Medical center in New York City for almost a decade and created and ran the outpatient nutrition program for the NYU Cardiac Rehabilitation Program. She has also been a fitness instructor for 15 years. Heller specializes in nutrition, wellness, stress management, and fitness for people who are fighting heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

A contributing editor to Health magazine, her writing has also appeared in numerous other magazines, including Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health, and Glamour, as well as sites such as Fitness.com.

Male Contraception: Progress Slow but Steady

(HealthDay News) -- For now, men who want to do their part for birth control have meager choices: A vasectomy -- meant to be permanent -- and condoms.

For years, experts have predicted that male contraception is under development and that more choices will be here soon.

But when? Experts agree it's still a ways off, but it's getting closer.

"It has been slow," said Dr. Ronald Swerdloff, a researcher in the quest to find feasible male contraceptive methods. But there are good reasons for that slow pace, added Swerdloff, an endocrinologist and chief of the division of endocrinology at Harbor-UCLA and professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to take on a new product quickly because of untested liability issues, he said. And "one of the biggest single issues has to do with the fact that contraception in general is a difficult area it would be used by large numbers of healthy individuals." The safety threshold, he noted, is high. Still, he added, more options are moving closer.

"If we really focus on studies, with funding, it could be four or five years" before more options might be available, said Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project, a San Francisco-based organization.

The problem, she added, is that the research has been scattergun. "If we [continue to] do a study here, a study there, as we have for the last 20 years, it could take forever."

At a "Future of Male Contraception" conference, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Seattle, a variety of methods were reviewed, including:

• Hormonal therapy and testicular warming -- Swerdloff and his team found that giving men testosterone and another hormone with testicular warming helped suppress sperm. "The transient testicular warming [like sitting in a spa] causes the suppression to occur much earlier [than the hormones alone]," he said.
• Transdermal gels -- In another study by Swerdloff's team, 140 men applied either a progestin gel called Nestorone or a testosterone gel, or both. The researchers studied various doses and then drew blood samples to measure hormone levels. They reported on the 119 men who complied and finished the study, concluding that the combination worked better to suppress sperm.
• "Intra Vas Device," or IVD -- An alternative to a vasectomy, this method involves inserting silicone plugs into the vas deferens, the tube sperm move through and the same tube cut in a vasectomy. "The sperm can't get past the plugs," said Joe Hofmeister, president of Shepherd Medical Company in St. Paul, Minn., the IVD developer.
• "Preliminary six-month data show that 90 percent of 60 men [tracked to date] have zero motile sperm," he said. More study is needed to track the IVD for reversibility, Hofmeister said.
• Vitamin A blocker -- Columbia University researchers tested a drug abandoned by a pharmaceutical company because it interferes with vitamin A receptors in the testes, lowering fertility. It worked well in animal studies; whether it will do the same in human studies is not yet known.

These approaches, if successful, will take several more years to get market approval, all the researchers agreed.

More informationTo learn more about all available contraception methods, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.