Steady on the perfume or aftershave spray!

To my mind, perfume adds a great deal of pleasure to life – but like most things a little moderation is not a bad idea – and the fact I have one for each day of the week seems pretty moderate to me. However, we have probably all suffered in the proximity of someone who has overdone it and extends the wearing of it to everyone in a 6 foot radius. I was working in London at the time Christian Dior launched his perfume Poison, and my daily journey up the escalator at Green Park was an exercise in holding my breath and trying not to feel faint at the overpowering waves it that surrounded me.

It’s not pleasant for the passive receiver, but it may actually legally constitute at health hazard – it has just been found guilty in the USA and a case is going forward as we speak. A Judge in Detroit heard a case where city planner Susan McBride alleged that perfume from a co-worker was so overwhelming she couldn’t breathe properly. This she claims created a hazardous work environment and actually prevented her from working properly.

The city council went to court to have the claim dismissed, but the Judge agreed with McBride that her breathing difficulties had a legitimate basis and so qualified for protection under federal laws that protect the disabled from workplace discrimination. I don’t know what the court case is based on, but certainly synthetic perfume chemicals have been linked to asthma, infertility and cancer. Because they are applied directly to the skin they are absorbed into the bloodstream and then have to be processed by the liver, where they can do damage.

We are already exposed to a number of toxic chemicals in our everyday environment from air fresheners to hairspray, and the day might come when perfume in the workplace might be banned on health grounds in the same way that smoking was. You might also wonder why it went to court and they didn’t just have a quiet word with the offender, but maybe – as is often the case when wearing perfume – she (or perhaps he for all I know) was just immune to the smell and kept putting on more.

If you want to be sure you are not poisoning the atmosphere, what about switching to natural perfumes with no nasty chemicals?

Tsi~La (pronounced chee-la), is a collection of delicate, sophisticated, 100% natural perfumes with no alcohol, preservatives, artificial fragrances or colourings. Just pure, natural perfumes made from the world’s finest essential oils and plant botanicals, and if you were wondering, the name means “flower” in Cherokee.

You have a choice of six different and distinctive scents, you just have to decide which is the most appropriate – though for most women buying at least two for our varying moods would be a good idea. You will know what will suit them best: Fiori d’Arancio (flirtatious), Fleur Sauvage (alluring), Ilang Ilang (exotic), Kesu (mysterious), Kizes (spontaneous) and Saqui (sensual). Personally, as a woman of many and diverse moods, I am asking Santa for the Tsi-La mini collection because a) I get four of them, and b) they come in a handy roll on so no spillage in the dark cavernous recesses of my handbag. To have a look at these, and other wonderful natural fragrances, visit www.puresha.com

Men – Relinquish that duvet!

The nightly battle of the duvet is an unreported phenomena of sharing a bed – and women seem to come off worse. No one has yet shelled out research money to find out why even the smallest and slightest of men has the grip of a stevedore when it comes to holding onto the duvet and hauling it over to their side of the bed – and I am sure someone will manage to get a grant after I have mentioned it! Well, appealing to your better nature chaps, although there is a lot of variation in how individuals feel the cold depending on a number of factors such as age, fitness, diet and sleep pattern there is one factor that is constant. Women tend to feel the cold more than men do – although I would say menopausal women are exempt from this as hot flushes can heat an entire room never mind a double bed.

Happily there is an expert to tell us why, and according to Mike Tipton, Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Portsmouth, it’s because we evolved on the Equator which makes us creatures of the Tropics. Since we all moved out to explore the world with our cooking pots and mammoths on a string, we have learned to reproduce our hot homeland by learning how to build fires and inventing central heating.

Although we feel hot and cold throughout the day, our core body temperature – that of our vital organs – is always kept at about 37C and we must maintain that level for survival. Just a 2C drop can cause hypothermia, a 12C drop results in death. If you want to keep, and feel, warm this winter you need to concentrate on your hands and feet. This is particularly important for women as research shows that they are better at conserving heat than men because they have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs. It’s thought that women do this because they carry less fat and muscle mass than men, and so need a more efficient technique of protecting their core body temperature. Next time someone suggests you are a bit overweight try blaming your core organs, it’s much more effective that saying you just can’t resist an extra biscuit.

BUT, because women operate in this way it means that less blood flows to their hands and feet, and as a result they feel cold – certainly colder than men usually do.

There are a number of factors that can affect how cold women feel, menopause obviously is one and so are various points of the menstrual cycle where the core body temperature can often vary by more than 1C. Most of us recognise that when we are tired we are also more sensitive to changes in temperature and feel the cold more, and as our body temperature falls at night, that’s when we women feel it most as they reach their minimum body temperature quicker than men.

Can thinking make you fat?

As someone who spends at least 80% of her waking hours with the brain on full alert, I found this news item a bit worrying. Apparently a research team has demonstrated that intellectual work can lead to a substantial increase in appetite and, therefore, calorie intake. After a hard day of mental work, you can be just as physically exhausted as if you had spent the day doing physical work – just ask my cats if you don’t believe me.

A small study of 14 students were given three tasks: relaxing in a sitting position, reading and summarizing a text, and completing a series of memory, attention, and vigilance tests on the computer. Although the intellectual work required only three calories more than the rest period, the students consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests than they did after relaxing.

Blood samples taken before, during, and after each session revealed that intellectual work caused bigger fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels, effectively destabilising the levels of insulin and glucose. This in turn stimulates the appetite, apparently in response to a need to restore the body’s energy balance, though why it always has to be with chocolate biscuits (or is that just me?) science has yet to explain.

Now, if you do a lot of mentally challenging tasks it’s a good idea to eat plenty of the foods that are known to nourish your brain. From what we know about brain-boosting foods, the ideal post-thinking snack would seem to be a chicken and spinach omelette with a cup of green tea – but I don’t see many students opting for that!

Surgeons call for ban on breast surgery ads

I spotted this in the Independent, but if you didn’t see it, then it’s worth a mention. Apparently, some clinics are using models with “anatomically impossible” breasts to promote the benefits of cosmetic surgery. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) are concerned that such models – often digitally enhanced – create “unrealistic expectations” in clients and feel they should be banned in advertisements.

I don’t think it’s the ads that are the problem, more a society that thinks it’s problems can be solved by moving up several cup sizes. If you follow their logic then page 3 girls, girlie magazines and the like should also be banned – it’s not the models it’s the belief that there is one standard of acceptable and desirable beauty and that anyone can get it by going under the surgeon’s knife.

Still, I wish them luck with their campaign – perhaps they could also lay down some minimum ages for patients as well while they are about it. There are still sensible doctors, like the one who had promised their daughter implants for her 16th birthday – though doubtless they would find one somewhere who would do it after just a quick Google search.

Criminals watch your diet!

This story is irresistible to a woman who writes so often about the effects of diet on health. What I didn’t realise is that what you eat could also get you banged up! Dr John Bond, a researcher at the University of Leicester and scientific support officer at Northamptonshire Police, is the inventor of a revolutionary forensic fingerprint technique that will help put unhealthy criminals behind bars.

He claims that criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be discovered by police because their fingerprint sweat corrodes metal – just shows you what fast food does to your stomach if just the sweat can eat away an external surface like that! Apparently the police already love consumers of processed foods as they tend to be leave better fingerprints for the police to identify.

It’s down to the fact that sweaty fingerprint marks made more of a corrosive impression on metal if they had a high salt content – and processed food, fish and chips and burgers tend to be high in salt as a preservative. The body needs to excrete excess salt, which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers, and so when you touch a surface it will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods – the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.

Not sure whether I should be encouraging fast food diets in criminals, to aid their capture, or encourage them to switch to the Mediterranean diet!

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