Beauty & Fashion-How to be a natural beauty

With more and more organic and natural beauty products now available in the UAE, Charlene Stubbs investigates why it’s a good idea to go green

With people opting for an all-round healthier lifestyle, it makes sense that the same rationale is applied to cosmetics.

Last year I received one of the best pieces of nutritional advice I’ve ever had. If you don’t understand the ingredients on the packaging, don’t eat what’s in it. Sounds obvious but I’d never looked at it like that before. Now, I check the ingredients and if it has more than three, back on the shelf it goes.

My new-found food philosophy hasn’t yet found its way into my beauty cabinet. Twice a day, I perform my daily ritual of applying at least ten different beauty products – from shampoo to SPF – and each product contains at least 20 ingredients that I can’t even pronounce, let alone understand what it is or does.

I’m not alone when it comes to my consumption of beauty products. According to a recent survey by QVC Beauty, British women spend an average of Dh248,000 on cosmetics in their lifetime and even the economic downturn has done little to curb our beauty obsession. In fact, if anything, it’s made us more discerning and demanding.
I, for one, have started questioning every product I buy. I want to know exactly what it can do for me, how I can get the most benefit from of it (is there a cream I can use under my eyes and on cracked heels?) and what exactly is lurking in my little pot of moisturizer.

Being aware of the ingredients in your beauty products can be a real eye opener. In a recent Aquarius poll, a worrying 34 per cent of readers admitted to not knowing what’s actually in their cosmetics.

Lifestyles-Smile away your worries

 

Research finds that smiling speeds up recovery from stress

Feeling good usuallymakes us smile, but does it work the other way around? Yes, smiling during episodes of stress can help to reduce its intensity regardless of whether a person actually feels happy or not, according to research.

Psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas investigated the potential benefits of smiling by looking at how different types of smiling, and the awareness of smiling, affects individuals’ ability to recover from episodes of stress.

“Age old adages such as ‘grin and bear it’ have suggested smiling to be not only an important non-verbal indicator of happiness but also wishfully promotes smiling as a panacea for life’s stressful events,” says Kraft.

“We wanted to examine whether these adages had scientific merit, whether smiling could have real health-relevant benefits,” Kraft said.

Smiles are generally divided into two categories: standard smiles, which use the muscles surrounding the mouth, and genuine or Duchenne smiles, which engages the muscles surrounding both the mouth and eyes, the journal Psychological Science reports.

Previous research shows that positive emotions can help during times of stress and that smiling can affect emotions; however, the work of Kraft and Pressman is the first of its kind to experimentally manipulate the types of smiles, people make in order to examine the effects of smiling on stress, according to a Kansas statement.

The researchers recruited 169 participants from a Midwestern university. The study involved two phases: training and testing. During the training phase, participants were divided into three groups, and each group was trained to hold a different facial expression.

The results suggest that smiling may actually influence our physical state: compared to participants who held neutral facial expressions, those who were asked to smile, and in particular those with Duchenne smiles, had lower heart rate levels after recovery from the stressful activities.

These findings show that smiling during brief stressors can help to reduce the intensity of the body’s stress response, regardless of whether a person actually feels happy.

“The next time you are stuck in traffic or are experiencing some other type of stress,” says Pressman, “you might try to hold your face in a smile for a moment. Not only will it help you ‘grin and bear it’ psychologically, but it might actually help your heart health as well!”

Health-Exercise, meds both help depressed heart patients

 

People with heart disease who are also depressed may get as much relief from their depression symptoms with regular exercise as with medication, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers writing in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that of 101 heart patients with signs of depression, those who exercised for 90 minutes per week and those who started taking Zoloft both improved significantly compared to participants assigned to drug-free placebo pills.

Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer supplied the Zoloft, known generically as sertraline, and placebos for the study, but researchers said the company was not involved with any other part of it.

Alan Rozanski, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said exercise can be thought of as another “potent tool on the shelf” to fight depression in heart patients.

“The attractiveness of exercise is that it has so many other physical benefits and it ought to be something very highly considered,” said Rozanski, of St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals in New York.

According to the study authors, up to 40 percent of heart patients have symptoms of depression, and depression itself has been linked to a higher risk of further heart trouble.

Past studies have produced mixed results on whether or not antidepressants or other established treatments may ease depression in heart patients, but there is a growing body of research that suggests exercise may help.

On Tuesday, researchers published a separate study of over 2,300 people with heart failure randomly assigned to exercise or usual care, which found the extra activity led to modest reductions in depression symptoms.

“We wanted to evaluate exercise and antidepressant medications in patients with heart disease and elevated depressive symptoms,” said James Blumenthal, the lead researcher on both the current study and the earlier report.

Blumenthal, a clinical psychologist at Duke University medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, recruited 101 heart patients with depression between June 2006 and September 2010.

Those patients were separated into three groups. 37 went to supervised exercise sessions three times per week for a total of 90 minutes, 40 were given Zoloft and 24 took a placebo, with each intervention lasting four months.

The researchers analyzed participants’ depression scores on a standard scale from 0 to 68, where 0 to 8 is considered normal and higher scores reflect more severe depression.

Before the start of treatment, each group’s average score ranged from about 13.5 to 14.5.

Depression symptoms improved across the board over time, but participants in the exercise and medication groups saw a bigger benefit than those on the placebo.

Scores fell by 6.1 points in the Zoloft group, by 7.5 points among exercisers and by 4.5 points in the placebo group.

Exercisers were also less likely to be tired or report sexual problems than people on antidepressants, the researchers said.

Health-Kids who drink soda may not drop milk

Kids who drink sugary beverages are not necessarily switching to them and away from milk, according to a new study whose results contradict earlier evidence that sodas and other sweetened drinks are displacing more nutritious ones in kids’ diets.

Instead, based on surveys of more than 7,000 middle-schoolers, researchers found that some kids may drink less milk as they grow older, but their consumption of soda and other sweetened drinks remains fairly steady. Sugary drink intake did not appear to be rising to replace milk.

The findings were “kind of surprising,” said Solveig Cunningham, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor at Emory University. “Kids have a tendency to drink more of everything or less of everything.”

On the one hand, it’s good news that kids aren’t ditching milk for less healthy drinks.

But on the other hand, Sara Bleich, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “It suggests to me that when people drink calories in liquid form, they don’t compensate for that. It doesn’t fill you up, and they are just adding those calories on top” of what they’re already eating and drinking.

Earlier studies had pointed to a tendency for kids to replace milk and pure juices with sugar-sweetened drinks.

Cunningham and her colleagues looked to a large survey of nearly 7,500 school children who were followed between 2004 and 2007 to see whether that is the case.

In the fifth and eighth grades, the kids filled out questionnaires about what they typically drank and how much.

They found that kids did drink less milk as they got older.

For instance, about 53 percent of fifth graders drank milk daily compared to 46 percent of eighth graders.

At the same time, the percentage of kids who drank sweetened beverages on a daily basis in fifth and eighth grade held steady, at around 27 to 29 percent.

The researchers determined that the change in how much milk kids drank was unrelated to the change in how many sweetened drinks they consumed.

“This pattern indicates that sweetened beverages did not displace other caloric beverages from children’s diets,” Cunningham and her colleagues write in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Dr. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the findings are interesting, “but I wouldn’t say this is conclusive evidence.”

The nature of the survey makes it a challenge to be sure that kids are reporting what they drink accurately, she pointed out.

They have to recall how many glasses of each type of drink they had in the past week.

“Even for an adult it’s a pretty difficult task,” Wang told Reuters Health.

The study had some strengths too, she added, given that it was large and nationally representative.

Whether the result truly reflects kids’ drink choices or is a consequence of how drink consumption was measured “it provides us with some really interesting questions to answer,” she said.

Cunningham said one of the elements missing in the study that she would like to explore is how much water the kids drank.

Among the kids who continued to drink a lot of milk and sugary beverages, it’s possible that they are not drinking water, and instead are encouraged to drink milk, juice or soda.

Bleich said kids need to be taught that water is a good option.

“Kids are taking in a lot of calories in liquid form,” said Bleich. “We should get kids to drink fewer calories from any sort of liquid, so we should get them to drink more water.”