Month: March 2019

March 20, 2019 at 07:35AM by CWC Even if your kitchen is full of healthy snacks, sometimes there’s no denying the desire for a handful of potato chips. Or popcorn. Or French fries from your favorite fast-food place. Whatever it is, it better be salty. Salt isn’t “bad” per se, says integrative medicine physician Pooja Amy Shah, MD. “It’s one of the most important components in our bodies,” she says. Sodium, the primary component of salt, helps maintain healthy fluid levels in your body, ensures proper muscle function, and transmit nerve impulses throughout the body. There’s even a theory that we’re hard-wired to like salty foods because they often contain important minerals for growth and development. The problem, Dr. Shah says, is that most people already get too much salt (more than the recommended 2,300 milligrams per day) because many foods in the American diet are loaded with it. Many of those foods don’t necessarily taste salty because of the other ingredients used, she says—leading people to seek out even more salt to satisfy the cravings that come up. Salt in excess, of course, can lead to bloating, dehydration, and in some people, increased blood pressure. Plus, Dr. Shah adds that when you’re craving salt, it’s often your body telling you something else that may have nothing to do with food. This matters because once you understand what’s behind that seemingly-urgent need, Dr. Shah says you can be a bit more intentional about choosing whether or not to indulge. Here are some of the

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March 20, 2019 at 06:43AM by CWC “We were both too alpha for this to ever really work, anyway,” my ex tells me mid-breakup. Given that our relationship was fraught with roughly, oh, 12,800 issues, my first reaction to this alpha/beta pain point was of the ??? variety. But after we parted ways, I wondered whether there was any truth to the notion that two alphas are too many, and a healthy relationship requires the oppositional pull of both an alpha and a beta. As a reminder, alphas are basically the leaders of the pack—the Oprahs, AOCs, and Emily Gilmores of the world, if you will. “They’re competitive, outgoing, aggressive, and domineering,” says psychotherapist Aimee Barr, LCSW. Betas, then, are more of a laid-back support system. “They’re relationship-focused, play a supporting role, make good friends, are nurturing, and are usually more insecure and nervous-minded than alphas.” At its most simplified, the alpha-beta dynamic is when one person calls the shots while the other follows along and submits. While this describes a complementary relationships of sorts (à la opposites attract), experts say it can create the exact opposite of a healthy partnership. “These personality types exist on a continuum. They’re not stagnant. We might exhibit more beta characteristics in X area and more alpha characteristics in Y area.” —therapist, Kathryn Smerling, PhD According to the pros, a relationship doesn’t require one alpha and one beta, but rather healthy communication and mutual respect. “The most important elements in a relationship are how you treat

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March 20, 2019 at 05:00AM by CWC Whether you’re looking for a $7 facial toner or the best damn vitamin C serum money can buy, Amazon has got you covered. From luxury skin care to budget beauty buys, there is very little that you can’t find on the site.  Except, that is, for a line of ingredient-forward, affordable beauty products created by Amazon itself. Well, that’s about to change, because as of today Amazon is launching its very own line of clean skin-care products. Called Belei, the 12-SKU line is free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and fragrance, and none of the products are tested on animals. In addition to being void of all the stuff you don’t want in your skin-care products, Belei is formulated with the buzzy ingredients that dominate most of our beauty cabinets, like retinol, hyaluronic acid, and vitamin C. Featuring everything from a Charcoal Balancing Mask ($18) to a Tri-peptide Eye Cream ($22), the brand has pretty much everything you’d need to revamp your entire routine. Photo: Amazon “Our goal is to help customers spend less time and money searching for the right skin-care solutions,” Kara Trousdale, Head of Beauty for Private Brands on Amazon.com. “We took a simple, no-nonsense approach when creating Belei, developing products with ingredients that are both proven to deliver results and also offer customers great value for the quality.” Belei’s products target acne, dark spots, fine lines, and dehydration—AKA all of the things I curse my face for on a daily basis. The full line goes

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March 20, 2019 at 04:00AM by CWC When you think of an ordinary volcano, you probably picture fiery red lava spewing from a collapsed mountaintop or perhaps oozing down the slope with a dull glow. Far from ordinary is Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen volcano, which awes with a stunningly blue illumination. Kawah Ijen displays one of the world’s most mesmerizing natural wonders, but you need to hike the crater before dawn to see it. “The blue glow is due to sulfur burning, a common volcanic product that makes a blue flame. If you had a piece of sulfur sitting on your desk and you touched a match to it, it would turn blue,” says James E. Quick, PhD, a volcanologist who spent 25 years with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). “When magma is approaching the surface, it contains gases, the most common being CO2, H2O, and sulfur. As the magma comes to the surface, it starts to boil off these gases. When the sulfur is released from the magma, if it encounters a lot of water beneath the surface, it will be absorbed by the water and won’t escape. But if it has a dry pathway to the surface, it will come to the surface and be released.” In the rare case of Kawah Ijen, the deposits of sulfur are “produced by releases of sulfur that are quite hot, and they’re hot enough that when they come to the surface, they ignite,” says Dr. Quick. “In some cases, the sulfur is flowing down

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March 20, 2019 at 03:00AM by CWC At this point, there seems to be a health-care startup to meet almost every basic women’s health need. We can consult apps like Maven Clinic for a UTI prescription or a lactation consultant session, get a read on fertility with services like Kindbody, and score birth control pills, emergency contraception, and HIV prevention drugs from Nurx. But there’s still one subset of women who haven’t been directly targeted by the fem-tech revolution: those seeking menopause treatment. This is absurd, considering that the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) says an estimated 6,000 US women reach menopause, or the permanent end of their menstrual cycles, every day. And that’s not even counting the tens of millions who are experiencing symptoms of perimenopause—the transitional phase in which a woman’s ovarian function starts to decline and periods become irregular during her late 30s and early 40s. “When we started speaking to women who were experiencing the symptoms of menopause, what we heard over and over was I feel alone, I didn’t feel prepared for this, I don’t feel educated about what’s happening to my body.” —Rachel Blank, co-founder of Rory Not only is there a huge market for menopause support, there’s also a huge need for it. Starting during the perimenopause phase, which lasts an average of four years, it’s not uncommon to notice a tanking libido, mood swings, weight gain, hair loss, insomnia, vaginal dryness, and hot flashes—serious symptoms that can dramatically affect a woman’s quality of

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