So Baby Boomer: Life Tips

Gluten-Free Products

Last July, General Mills released a gluten-free version of its Chex cereal and the company received thousands of grateful emails and phone calls.  Gluten is a key protein in wheat, but many people react badly to it.

Doctors increasingly are diagnosing Celiac disease--in which ingesting gluten causes the body to damage the digestive system.   Moreover, a diet fad is focusing on reducing gluten consumption...and...many quality restaurants today offer a gluten-free menu when requested.

Although only about 1% of the U.S. population has Celiac disease, General Mills says its research shows about 12% of U.S. households want to eliminate or reduce their gluten intake, although some doctors say it's nutritionally important for those who aren't sensitive to it.

The company's Betty Crocker brand is rolling out gluten-free mixes for cookies, brownies and cakes.  The mixes are the first gluten-free offering from a major, mainstream brand in the cake-mix aisle.  Currently, mostly small food companies supply gluten-free products.

Ann Simonds, General Mills' president of baking products, says the company decided to pursue gluten-free products last year after its customer-relations department noticed that customer inquires about food allergies and sensitivities most frequently centered on whether items contained gluten.

Even though retailers have been focusing on trimming products from their shelves recently, the new gluten-free products could get a welcome reception.  "Gluten has increasingly become an area of dietary focus and concern for consumers, and we want to ensure our stores are able to meet their needs," says Haley Meyer, a spokeswoman for grocery giant Supervalu Inc., some of whose stores are now carrying the new Betty Crocker products.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2009

Boomers Beware of Gluten Sensitivity

Gluten is a vegetable protein--most commonly known as wheat protein.  It is found primarily in wheat, rye and barley.  Today, grains (even organic) are genetically engineered to have a high gluten content.  With a high gluten content, you can bake wonderful bread that is crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.  But gluten has a dark side.  Many people are allergic or sensitive to it.

If you are completely allergic to it, the diagnosis is usually Celiac disease.  If you are sensitive to it, you will just be chronically sick and disabled.  And if you are like most people, you will go through life never knowing the connection; your doctors will never discover the connection; you will endure endless, useless medical treatments, your life will be impaired in one of a myriad of ways; and no one will ever be able to cure you.

Girl Talk is a De-Stresser

Girl talk is good for a woman's health according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan who examined progresterone levels in the saliva of 160 female college students.

When a woman feels emotionally close to a girlfriend, levels of the hormone progesterone increase, helping to boost mood and alleviate stress.

The progesterone levels in the women who participated in emotionally close tasks remained the same or increased, while those in the emotionally neutral task group tended to decline.  In the study, progesterone was used as a marker for oxytocin, a hormone linked to relationship trust and bonding.  Oxytocin itself can be measured only through spinal fluid or brain scans.

The study supports a concept in evolution that is gaining momentum--that the hormonal basis of social bonds enables people to suppress self-interest when necessary to promote the well-being of another person.  The research also helps explain why social contact appears to lead to improved health.

The study is published in the June 2009 issue of the journal "Hormones and Behavior."

Source: Los Angeles Times and Ann Arbor News, June 5, 2009

Boomer Women: Friends Matter

The research is clear about the positive implications of friendship.

There was, for instance, a 14-year project at Flinders University in Australia that tracked 1,500 women as they aged.  The study found that close friendships---even more than close family ties---help prolong women's lives.  Those with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest friends.

Linked by 40 years of experiences and memories, 10 women from Ames, Iowa, are a lesson in the power and lifelong benefits of friendship.  Born at the end of the Baby Boom, their memories are evocative of their times.  Their story is universal, even common, and on that level, it can't help but resonate with almost anyone who has ever had a friend.

In their adult lives after Ames, the women found newer friends.  But these more recent friendships are built mostly around their kids, jobs or current neighborhoods.  The bonds are limited to the here and now.

Boomer Beauty

Boomer women in New York's Upper East Side, Florida's Palm Beach and the Hills of Los Angeles could be collectively dubbed, dermatologically speaking, "exfoliation nation."  Because the average boomer woman there, stripped of makeup, most likely has about 300 percent less dead skin on her face than her less aging-averse middle-American counterpart.

She's probably been doing it for years---and perhaps he has, too.  Exfoliating, that is.  First, as a teenager to prevent large pores, because any girl with a pulse knows that regular facial scrubbing keeps blackheads at bay.  Later, because everybody was on some form of low-dose, time-release Retin-A acid swab.  Then in the last 10 years, it became common knowledge that without biweekly microdermabrasions you risked sporting visible wrinkles.

According to some scientists, regular dead-cell-buildup-ridding encourages cell renewal and makes your skin act younger.

Source: Beauty in the Buff, The Wall Street Journal magazine, May 2, 2009

For more about the life and times of beautiful Baby Boomers, please visit this week's Blogging Boomer Carnival #114 hosted by Wendy Spiegel at Gen Plus Reinvent 50 plus.

 

No Flu Fever, No worry

Many hospital emergency rooms are becoming overloaded by people concerned about the spread of the swine flu.  Here is why the swine flu isn't so scary--abstracted from a 'counterpoint' article in The Wall Street Journal on May 2nd  by Peter Palese, chairman of the department of microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY USA.

"As swine flu continues to spread, concerns are mounting about a serious pandemic.  Yet, based on history and what we know about the flu virus, the threat is not as bad as it may seem.

Regular (seasonal) influenza is bad enough.  These viruses come in three flavors: two kinds of influenza A (name H1N1 and H3N2, after their surface proteins) and one influenza B. 

There are several concerns over the current flu.  It belongs to the same H1N1 group as the 1918 pandemic virus, which killed more than 50 million people world-wide.  It is readily transmitted from human to human.  The swine flu virus also shows an unusual robustness in emerging outside the normal seasonal period for the virus. 

Still, there is more evidence that a serious pandemic is not imminent.  It lacks an important molecular signature (the protein PB1-F2) which was present in the 1918 virus and in the highly lethal H5N1 chicken viruses.  If this virulence marker is necessary for an influenza virus to become highly pathogenic in humans or in chickens--then the current swine virus doesn't have what it takes to become a major killer.

Since people have been exposed to H1N1 viruses over many decades, we likely have some cross-reactive immunity against the swine virus.  While it may not be sufficient to prevent illness, it may very well dampen the impact of the virus on mortality.  Finally, we have a vastly improved infrastructure to deal with novel emerging diseases, including influenza.

It is prudent to prepare against swine influenza, but equally important to keep a balanced outlook and an awareness of our current capabilities."

Time to Legalize Drugs?

The drug-fueled murders and mayhem in Mexico bring to mind the Prohibition-era killings in Chicago.

Although the Mexican violence dwarfs the bloodshed of the old bootleggers, both share a common motivation: profits.  These are turf wars, fought between rival gangs trying to increase their share of the market for illegal drugs.

Seventy-five years ago, we sensibly quelled the bootleggers' violence by repealing the prohibition of alcohol.  The only long-term solution to the cartel-related murders in Mexico is to legalize the other illegal drugs we overlooked when we repealed Prohibition in 1933.

Many boomers believe that decriminalizing the possession and use of marijuana would raise billions in taxes and eliminate much of the profits that fuel bloodshed and violence in Mexico and those U.S. states close to Mexican border.  If we taxed the marijuana agribusiness at rates similar to that of tobacco and alcohol, we would raise about $10 billion in taxes per year.

We can try to deal with the Mexican murderers as we first dealt with Al Capone and his minions, or we can apply the lessons we learned from alcohol prohibition and finish dismantling the destructive prohibition experiment. 

Should we begin by decriminalizing marijuana now?  Let us know your thoughts by making a comment below.

Source: Steven B. Duke, professor of law at Yale Law School, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2009

 

Boomers and Eldercare

In 1946, the year the first Baby Boomer was born, life expectancy was sixty-seven.  So, what's the meaning of the extra twenty or thirty years we have attained since the first boomer's birth?

Life remains mortal and finite. 

With all the recent longevity gains, aren't we just prolonging the human agony?  A look at the life our parents are living in their last years can give us some clues as to what we boomers will be facing in our later years.

Today, two million parents of boomers are residents of the eighteen thousand nursing homes across the U.S.  Two million out of a population of three hundred million may seem like a small number, but the nursing home experience will touch almost all.  If you are a boomer approaching sixty-five, your lifetime chances of spending time in a nursing home are 43 percent.  If not you, it could be your parents. 

As you age, your chances increase.  Only 12 percent of people between sixty-five and seventy-four are in nursing homes, compared to one-third of those between seventy-five and eighty-four.  If you live to eighty-five, your chances are better than one in two.

The Prostate Puzzle for Boomer Men and their Love Partners

Prostate cancer poses some of the most vexing questions in medicine, and one out of every six men in the U.S. will confront them at some point in his life.

Two big studies in the New England Journal of Medicine found that screening for PSA--prostate specific antigen--doesn't save many lives.  Should you keep checking it?

PSA testing revolutionized detection of the disease in the late 1980s.  But PSA screening can flag tumors almost too early, leading to unnecessary surgery or radiation.  Of the 185,000 U.S. men diagnosed with the disease each year, an estimated 85% would likely die of something else long before their cancer caused problems.  Other prostate cancers are aggressive, each year killing some 28,000 men in the U.S. who weren't treated in time.  That makes it the second most deadly cancer in men, after lung cancer.  As of now, it's difficult to tell in a cancer's early stage which patients have which kind of tumor.

Another problem with screening is that PSA levels fluctuate for many reasons, sometimes sending false alarms.  A PSA level is cause for concern if it's higher than usual for the man's age or rising rapidly.  If so, the next step is usually a biopsy.

Most doctors believe that men over 40 with a family history of prostate cancer should have annual PSA testing, along with African-American men, for whom the death rate from prostate cancer is twice as high as for whites.  For others, "you probably don't have to get it tested every year," says Al Barqawi, a urologist at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  "If there's a change, then do it more often."

Source: Health Journal, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2009

Anger and Sadness are Bedfellows

Your feelings of extreme displeasure, hostility or exasperation toward someone or something is simply an expression of the pain of your inner sadness coming out of your mouth in words spoken or in written communication.

Barbara C. Fisher, Ph.D., author, neuropsychologist and administrative director of United Psychological Services  www.unitedpsychologicalservices.com, says, "Anger and sadness are the same energy.  When we are angry, we feel the loss of something and we are mad about it, as well as sad.  Anger is sad, anger is loss.  Women are not allowed to be angry, whereas men are.  Women are taught to swallow anger and move on.....making things better and people happy....as the emotional caretaker of the family."

Steps that help you control anger begins when you can identify what you are sad about.  Then reframe your sadness to see it differently; think about a comment someone has made and why he or she made it...or...something we wanted but did not get...or...what is the big picture we are not seeing?  

Dr. Fisher says, "When you go to bed with anger, you wake up with anger.  Anger begets anger.  People do evoke anger in us but it is up to us to stand back and not pick up the anger by seeing their contorted face differently." 

Moving away from anger by seeing or listening to what is behind the angry words spoken can be the foundation for a hopeful future.  When we hope for something, it matters not that there are good reasons or justification for attaining our manifestation.  Having a hopeful manner is more than an attitude or belief.  It is the purpose, process and spiritual energy that drives us forward toward "connecting the dots" and living a passionate life, in good times or bad.

Hope can effectively battle depression

Hope is different from optimism which is a generalized expectancy that good things will happen.  Hope is something that can be taught and developed in many of the people who need it---like those who suffer from depression.  A growing body of research suggests that there is a potent way to fight symptoms of depression--one that doesn't involve getting a prescription.  "We're finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression," said Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.