Maggie Koerth-Baker explores the ins-and-outs of the teen sex scene over at Boing Boing. Like us, she's pretty sick of hearing about slutty teens and their dangerous behavior, but a study published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health suggests that people who have casual sex are just as happy and healthy as those who have sex within a committed relationship. The study, which surveyed 1,300 Minnesotans in their late teens and early 20s, also found that most young people were having sex within a committed relationship, yet many of them had, at some point or another, engaged in casual sex.

According to the University of Minnesota study, only 8% of respondents reported their last sexual partner as being of the "casual" type, and just 12% who were having sex in a non-exclusive relationship. Is this shocking? Not exactly. As an early-twenty something person myself, this sounds just about right. American teens, and twenty-somethings, have always dated, and hooked up, and the members of the older generations have always had some curmudgeon-y phrases to describe the slow decline of morality among the youth. However, Koerth-Baker points out that the media often makes it sound like teens today are going wild with hormones, rampantly humping each other and spreading STDs all over the place. This is partially because questions phrased "have you ever..." on a survey often get misinterpreted, reported as though a single incident were the norm, not the exception. Koerth-Baker spoke with several experts on teen sex, who generally agreed that the teen-sex panic is vastly overblown:

"I think people stereotype teenagers sometimes," said John Santelli, M.D., a pediatrician and adolescent health specialist who chairs the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. "I don't think hookup situations are the norm for young people. Serial monogamy is very common among youth. The 20% in this study who weren't in committed relationships, I'd be willing to bet that many were between relationships, or in the process of forming one."

So, to recap, most teens aren't having loads of random hook ups, but the kids that have engaged in casual sex are generally pretty normal. Well, just as long as you're of a certain age. Sexually active teens between the ages of 14-17 are more likely to engage in other risky behavior, but this probably isn't caused by sex:

"Young people who are risk takers, more non-conventional, or challenging of social norms, they're more likely to have sex between the ages of 14 and 17. They're also more likely to smoke cigarettes, try alcohol, use drugs, be less attached to school, drop out, etc.," [adolescent sexuality researcher Dr. Douglas Kirby] said. "Again, it's not the case that sex leads to all those things. It's that these people who are less connected to family and school are engaging in a wide variety of risk-taking behaviors and sex is just a part of that."

Stop the presses: casual sex doesn't cause kids to turn to drugs or alcohol, nor does it make them particularly depressed! It's easy to blame everything on sexual activity, but for many teens, sex is just part of a much larger picture. The emphasis we place on sex has turned it - wrongly - into a barometer for everything that is wrong with a person, or even within a relationship. Sexual habits and proclivities may be part of our identities, but it is in no way the most meaningful piece, and this is true for both adults and teens. The youth of Generation Y are much like that of Generation X, some are risk takers, some are purity-vow makers, but despite widespread panic, most of them are doing just fine.

Sex, Science, And Statistics [Boing Boing]

Researchers from the UK have found that some people actually feel physical pain in response to viewing images of other people's suffering. British psychologist Dr. Stuart Derbyshire showed 123 university students videos and pictures of athletes in painful situations. The videos included clips of a soccer player breaking his leg, a tennis player twisting his ankle, and a patient getting an injection in their hand. While every student reported feeling an emotional response to the videos, a third of the participants said they actually felt twinges of pain in their own bodies.

The video that elicited the most painful responses showed a man running on a racetrack with a clearly broken leg. Students reported anything from tingling to a harsh, stabbing pain, usually in the corresponding region of the body. 10 of the "hypersensitive" students were then asked to view similar images while undergoing a functional MRI. When compared with scans from students who reported just emotional pain, only the "responder" brain scans showed activity in the region associated with handling pain. "We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain," Derbyshire said.

The twinges of phantom pain experienced by a third of Derbyshire's subjects could be the most primal version of empathy. According to the Daily Mail, some scientists believe the ability to feel another person's pain evolved millions of years ago as a way to help bond and "encourage our prehistoric ancestors [to] work more closely with each other."

People Who Say They "Feel Your Pain" Really Do [Daily Mail]
The Brain May Feel Other People's Pain [Reuters]

Dig it: Daniel Kruger, a researcher at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, has found that there's an evolutionary basis for the discrepancy between the sexes' skill at shopping. Explains ScienceDaily,

From an evolutionary perspective, it all harkens back to the skills that women used for gathering plant foods and the skills that men used for hunting meat. The contrast emerges because of the different foraging strategies for hunting and gathering used throughout human evolution.

Hunting versus gathering, if you will. And, as he puts it, "Evolved foraging psychology underlies sex differences in shopping experiences and behaviors." Women are good at taking the time to find the right stuff; men, not. Your stereotypical woman lives to shop; her husband holds down the "husband chair" and leafs through Teen Vogue.

Interesting as this is, it poses a major dilemma for Payless Shoes: for the past few years, they've advertised their BOGO sale with nature-documentary style narration about women "hunting" for shoes and deals. What will they ever do now?

Male And Female Shopping Strategies Show Evolution At Work In The Mall [ScienceDaily]

Reading Bering's article feels a bit like watching monkeys masturbate at the zoo: you want to look away, but there is something grossly fascinating about the single-mindedness with which they play with themselves. It also brings me back to the first time I discovered balls, complete with the whole huh, those reaction. After years of hearing about how important they are - including many "you have no idea how much this hurts!" moments - the actual thing was, to be blunt, a little underwhelming. Bering even notes that, in contrast to the much-idolized penis, balls are sort of the ugly little brother. But still, he is fascinated with them. And, it seems, for good enough reason: unlike the penis, balls are complicated.

Drawing from an article published in this month's issue of Evolutionary Psychology, Bering answers many of his own questions about human testicles. First of all, why are balls so dangly? Apparently, it's not because women like it, although the authors of the recent testicle study do consider this idea:

Gallup and his coauthors jog through several possible theories of our species' testicular evolution by descent. One of the more fanciful accounts—and one ultimately discarded by the authors—is that scrotal testicles evolved in the same spirit as peacock feathers. That is to say, given the enormous disadvantage of having your entire genetic potential contained in a thin satchel of unprotected, delicate flesh and swinging several millimeters away from the rest of your body, perhaps scrotal testicles evolved as a sort of ornamental display communicating the genetic quality of the male... Although descended scrotal testicles do satisfy the obvious criterion of being counterintuitively costly, the authors conclude that handicapping is an unlikely explanation. If it were true, we would expect to see scrotal testicles becoming increasingly elaborate and dangly over the course of evolution, not to mention women should display a preference for males toting around the most ostentatious scrotal baggage.

Having settled that, we learn that the key to understanding balls lies in getting a grip on the "activation hypothesis." Bering describes the theory of descended testicles serving as a "cold storage" for sperm, which keep best at lower temperatures. The "activation" part occurs when heat from the vagina (or we suppose, any kind of body heat) fires up the sperm, getting it ready to make the mad dash toward reproduction. However, this is not the only time when the cremasteric muscle is active. The cremasteric muscle, for those of you unfamiliar with Matthew Barney, is the thing that draws the balls up and down, thus regulating their temperature through proximity to the body. Or, as Bering describes it:

Fortunately, human scrota don't just hang there holding our testicles and brewing our sperm, they also "actively" employ some interesting thermoregulatory tactics to protect and promote males' genetic interests. I place "actively" in scare quotes, of course, because although it would be rather odd to ascribe consciousness to human scrota, testicles do respond unintentionally to the reflexive actions of the cremasteric muscle. This muscle serves to retract the testicles so they are drawn up closer to the body when it gets too cold—just think cold shower—and also to relax them when it gets too hot. This up-and-down action happens on a moment-to-moment basis, thus male bodies continually optimize the gonadal climate for spermatogenesis and sperm storage. It's also why it's generally inadvisable for men to wear tight-fitting jeans or especially snug "tighty whities"—under these restrictive conditions the testicles are shoved up against the body and artificially warmed so that the cremasteric muscle cannot do its job properly. Another reason not to wear these things is that it's no longer 1988.

Aside from the fashion advice, I think the most important thing we should take away from this is that while balls may not be conscious, they are very smart. They're so smart that they work independently:

In fact, the temperature regulating function governed by the cremasteric muscle can account even for the most lopsided, one-testicle-above-the-other, waffling asymmetries in testes positioning. According to a 2008 report in Medical Hypotheses by anatomist Stany Lobo from the Saba University School of Medicine, Netherlands Antilles, each testicle continuously migrates in its own orbit as a way of maximizing the available scrotal surface area that is subjected to heat dissipation and cooling. Like ambient heat generated by individual solar panels, when it comes to spermatic temperatures, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With a keen enough eye, presumably one could master the art of " reading" testicle alignment, using the scrotum as a makeshift room thermometer. But that's just me speculating.

The activation hypothesis also explains some other ball-related mysteries, like why we enjoy having sex at night. Again, this has to do with temperature. The cooler air at night make it easier for men to maintain "optimal testicular adjustments." Plus, since women tend to pass out after late-night sex, and thus remain stationary, the recently released semen have better chances of reaching their goal.

Finally, we get to the issue of pain. Why does getting kicked in the balls hurt so much more than, say, getting kicked in the shins?

If you're male, the reason that you probably wince when you hear the word "squash" or "rupture" paired with "testicle" but not with, say, "arm" or "spleen" is because testicles are disproportionately more vital to your reproductive success than these other body parts are. I, for one, had to pause to cover myself just by typing those former words together. It's not that those other body parts aren't adaptively important, but variation in pain sensitivity across different bodily regions, according to this view, reflects the vulnerability and importance different adaptations play in your reproductive success. Male ancestors who learned to protect their gonads would have left more descendants—and pain is a pretty good motivator for promoting preemptive defensive action. Or, to think about it another way, any male in the ancestral past that was oblivious to or, gulp, enjoyed testicular insult would have been quickly weeded out of the gene pool.

Interestingly, the cremasteric muscle also plays a part here. When the balls are threatened by a nearby stimuli (a pinprick to the thigh, for example) they are pulled up towards the body. This protective feature also kicks into play during sex, in order to shield them from "possible damage to too-loose testicles resulting from vigorous thrusting during intercourse." Huh. Well that doesn't sound at all pleasant, but there it is. And with that image, let's return to our regularly scheduled program of ball busting and vagina-centric news. At least until Bering publishes another article - maybe next time we'll learn all about the anus.

Why Do Human Testicles Hang Like That? [Scientific American]

Related: Science Scribe Writes Masturbatory Missive About Human Penises

Researchers asked 5,893 people, 54% of them women, to choose their present body size and ideal body size from a chart depicting nine human figures. The discrepancy between the two was used to measure how satisfied the participants were with their bodies. Two to three percent of the subjects overall chose an "above-normal" size as ideal, but close to one in 10 obese people apparently felt that their size was normal and healthy.

However, say the study authors, 35% of obese people who felt this way had high blood pressure, 15% and high cholesterol, and 14% had diabetes. Time to freak out, right? If these people only knew they needed to lose weight, they'd be so much healthier. Except according to lead study author Tiffany Powell, these problems occurred at comparable rate in obese people who did feel like they were too fat. They just occurred along with a "healthy" dose of guilt.

The study did reveal a few benefits of "knowing you need to lose weight." Those who wanted to drop pounds were more likely to have seen a doctor in the past year (and yearly checkups are smart for many people), and also more likely to exercise. But since neither exercise nor going to the doctor has been proven to result in weight loss, isn't it time we stopped using fat-shaming to force people into these behaviors? Couldn't we find some way of promoting a healthy lifestyle that doesn't start with classifying people as abnormal?

Some Obese People Perceive Body Size As OK, Dismiss Need To Lose Weight [EurekAlert]

A team from the University of Rochester tested pregnant women's urine to determine their fetuses' exposure to phthalates. They found that boys exposed to high levels were less interested in "boys' toys" like cars, trains, or guns, and less likely to engage in "rough and tumble" play. The boys were apparently more interested in "gender-neutral" pursuits like sports. The scientists found no effect on girls.

While it's nice that the reactions to the study describe sports as "gender-neutral," it's a little odd that they describe the effect of phthalates as "feminizing." Elizabeth Salter-Green, of the British anti-chemical group CHEM Trust, says of the research,

We now know that phthalates, to which we are all constantly exposed, are extremely worrying from a health perspective, leading to disruption of male reproduction health and, it appears, male behaviour too.

This feminising capacity of phthalates makes them true 'gender benders'.

The fact that phthalates can affect boys' behavior at all is disturbing, especially given that the compounds are found in common items like shower curtains and plastic furniture. Coupled with their known effect on baby boys' genital development, this new research seems like more than enough evidence to ban their use entirely (the EU already bans them from cosmetics and toys), and to study other industrial chemicals with more scrutiny. But is it true that the compounds are "feminizing" boys, perverting their "natural" male roughness and gun-love and replacing it with girlier, softer interests? Insofar as phthalates — especially the compounds DEHP and DBP, found to be harmful in the study — can mimic estrogen, it seems that sex hormones and their analogs can affect children's play. But that still doesn't mean that we need to divide children's playthings into boys' toys and girls' toys, or that we need to think of a change in male behavior as — horrors! — boys turning into girls. Any change in boys' behavior brought on by environmental toxins is cause for concern, regardless of whether it "feminizes" them.

Toxins In Plastic 'Feminise Boys' [BBC]
Chemicals In Plastics ‘Feminising' Baby Boys, Says Study [Telegraph]

Interesting item in Newsweek: Sharon Begley discusses new findings (discussed in Scientific American]that strive to determine if there's any evolutionary benefit to what we consider clinical depression, a subject much on the minds of certain brain researchers. The questions: is a little depression not just natural, but healthy? In scientific terms, is there some reason for the Black Dog? This implies a fundamentally different way of considering what's been termed a mental illness. Say the study's authors, "There is another possibility: that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. " Here's how Begley describes it:

Writing in the journal Psychological Review, postdoctoral fellow Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth University and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. of the University of Virginia present research suggesting that depression is present in the species, and in individuals, for a purpose, and we're playing with fire if we try to eradicate it. In evolution-speak, depression is an "adaptation," they argue. That is, it evolved because it made individuals who experienced it fitter, under natural selection, than individuals who did not experience it. Andrews and Thomson-who is best known for research on the psychology of religious belief, and who has also studied whether antidepressants threaten love and fidelity-offer as evidence the presence of a molecule in the brain called the 5HT1A receptor. This serves as a docking port for the neurochemical serotonin, which the Prozac/Zoloft/Paxil class of antidepressants targets. Human brains are not the only ones with the 5HT1A receptor. Rats also have it.

And said receptor's important to recognizing and dealing with stress and threat, rather than leaving us (and rats) in a perpetual state of unwary bliss. "In other words, losing the receptor that promotes depression in response to stress is something evolution thought would be a very bad move. Ergo: depression is not something to be thrown out lightly." Indeed, it's suggested that depression can lead to analysis and solutions, focused thinking, and even "negative" depressive traits - such as self-isolation or loss of libido, ie the reason we take Paxil - that may serve an adaptive function.

There are some really interesting points in here: are we overmedicated? Probably - and a little sadness, as the author says, should not be the bogeyman it's become in our times. But clinical depression - either human or rat - is a dicier issue altogether. As these researchers would surely be the very first to point out, even if depression can be proven to have en evolutionary purpose, as we all know, what's good for us as humans isn't necessarily good for us as people. Then too, it seems pretty logical that plenty of modern stimuli - to say nothing of pharmaceuticals, diet, chemicals, environment - could have a hand in that depression that Mother Nature had absolutely nothing to do with. Then there's the other elephant in the room: depression can lead to suicide - which, in the small scheme, isn't helping anyone's progress. It's both fascinating and reassuring to know that there may be an evolutionary rationale for what can feel like an unfair genetic curse, and with any luck, if true, this will be of substantial use to researchers. But as it stands, I'm not canceling that Lexapro prescription any time soon.

Depression's Evolutionary Roots [Scientific American]

The Upside Of Feeling Down [Newsweek]
The Bright Side Of Being Blue [APA]

The study was published in the European Journal of Operational Research, which makes marriage sound like a matter of bolts and widgets. And this is essentially how the research — or at least the coverage thereof — treats it. After interviewing 1,000 couples whose relationships had lasted five years or more, the researchers found that while the man being at least five years older reduced the chances of divorce, when the woman had five years on her partner, divorce was more than three times as likely. Couples were also more likely to split if they'd been divorced before, but, interestingly, the effect was less if both couples had a divorce behind them. As a model of good marital decisions, the Telegraph and the BBC both held up Jay-Z and Beyonce — he's 11 years older than her, and unlike him, she graduated from high school.

Obviously this research has some fairly big problems. For one, the scientists seem only to have studied straight partners — gay couples, good luck figuring out which one of you is supposed to be older. Also, while the researchers say that people choose their mates "on the basis of love, physical attraction, similarity of taste, beliefs and attitudes, and shared values" (awww), they also advise that using "objective factors" like age and education "may help reduce divorce." Their advice has a certain think-with-your-head-not-your-heart appeal — it's probably smart to think about, say, whether you hate each others' families and whether you're going to fight a lot about money before you get hitched. But even these semi-objective factors seem to fall into the "shared values" category, and ticking off boxes about age and educational attainment frankly seems like how a robot chooses its bride.

But some of the blame for the study's obnoxiousness rests not with the scientists, but with the way Ian Johnston of the Telegraph and an unnamed journalist at the BBC have chosen to cover their work. Pretty much every time a study on marital success comes out — and this is not the first — journalists frame it as a referendum on who readers should marry. The Telegraph is the worse offender in this case, with the headline, "Men should marry young, smart women, say scientists," and subhead, "Men should marry a woman who is cleverer than they are and at least five years younger, if they want the relationship to stand the best chance of lasting, according to new research." Both of these make it sound like the success of a relationship rests on men's choices alone, and also conflate intelligence with education — the study itself doesn't seem to say anything about who's "cleverer," just who stayed in school longer. More than that, they turn a descriptive study of what worked for some couples into a prescription of what will work for "men."

This conversion from description to prescription is a huge problem in science journalism — it also rears its ugly head a lot in relation to weight studies, which reporters frequently frame as "thinner people are healthier, so you should be thin." Some editor somewhere has clearly decided that readers like advice about their lives more than they like science, and reporters both here and in the UK have set about turning the latter into the former. I'm not one to discount the legitimate findings of scientists — as David Roberts said in response to a recent poll that found only 57% of Americans "believe" in global warming, "if peer-reviewed science has no special status, then every aspect of human or ecosystem health is partisan." But peer-reviewed science can only tell us so much — it can reveal something about what has worked for other couples, but, fortunately or unfortunately, it can't say what will work for "you."

Men Should Marry Young, Smart Women, Say Scientists [Telegraph]
'Younger Wife' For Marital Bliss [BBC]

An Ohio man has been charged with a first degree misdemeanor after he allegedly used a law-enforcement computer network to gather information on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. • North Carolina lawmakers have redefined "life sentence" to mean 80 years. According to the new definition, 20 convicted criminals are now set for release, including several men convicted of raping young girls. • According to a report released by the National Science Foundation, only 33% of people working in science are women. The scarcity of women in science is especially noticeable in the "hard sciences," including the study of radioactive elements. • This photograph, cleverly captioned "Career Choices for Girls According to Videogames" provides a single piece of the puzzle as to why many young girls feel their only options are fashion designer, cheerleader, or professional housekeeper. • John McCain has asked Obama to posthumously pardon black boxer Jack Johnson, who was imprisoned in 1913 for his romantic involvement with a white woman. • As part of an attempt to get male students to be "Renaissance men," Morehouse College in Atlanta has forbidden them from wearing baggy pants, sunglasses, do-rags and clothing "normally worn by women." • Politicians often write books to boost their careers, but Sarah Palin may be a simpler soul. Says onetime Republican spokesman Ron Bonjean, "her goal is to make a whole lot of money." •

According to Alice Park in Time, the discrepancy occurred because in their initial announcement, researchers included all the participants who had started the study. But some got infected with HIV before they had received all six shots of the vaccine, and then had to drop out. Since the point of the research was to measure the effect of all six injections, only those who received all of them should have been included in the data. And when the numbers are run this way, the result is a 26% reduction in risk — a finding that's not statistically significant, meaning it could have occurred by chance.

It's tempting to criticize the researchers, from the National Institute of Health and the US Army, for rushing to release promising results before properly vetting them. According to Park, the researchers decided to publicize their findings in a press conference before they were peer-reviewed or replicated because the government of Thailand, where the study was conducted, "wanted to inform its citizens of the positive findings as soon as possible." However, even before the announcement, a few scientists who had seen the data were expressing concerns.

Even more scientists are speaking out critically now. One AIDS researcher, who spoke anonymously to the ScienceInsider blog, says,

The press conference was not a scholarly, rigorously honest presentation. It doesn't meet the standards that have been set for other trials, and it doesn't fully present the borderline results. It's wrong.

The Army, however, says that it didn't present both the 31% and 26% numbers because that just would've been too complicated. An online statement reads, in part,

The multiple statistical analyses are all consistent with the same conclusion: that the vaccine was modestly effective at preventing HIV. However, explaining the differences between them is complex and the appropriate venue for this technical discussion of statistics is at an open scientific conference and in the scientific publication now under review at a major journal.

If truly explaining the results was only appropriate for a scientific forum, then it does seem that the researchers should have waited for such a forum before publicizing them. The statement claims that the researchers fulfilled the Thai government's request for a public statement in order to honor "our commitment to the volunteers who participated in this trial," but the volunteers would have been better honored by an accurate representation of the findings. The Army appears to be trying to have it both ways, saying that they had to publicize results quickly, but they couldn't possibly publicize the accurate ones because no one would understand them. But there are a lot of ways out of this double bind — it's really not all that hard, for instance, to explain the difference between a 26% and 31% figures. Army researcher Col. Nelson Michael says,

We tried very carefully to make sure that message was crystal clear. There's now hope. But that said, we've tried to be very careful not to oversell this.

It may not have been intentional, but overselling is exactly what they've done.

Behind The Rising Doubts About Hailed AIDS Vaccine [Time]
The HIV Vaccine And Science By Press Release [Wall Street Journal Health Blog]
Unrevealed Analysis Weakens Claim Of AIDS Vaccine "Success" [ScienceInsider]
RV 144 Update [US Military HIV Research Program]

Maybe, sorta. Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner profiles a group of human guinea pigs whose feed seems a lot less spartan than the Quorn-and-asparagus regime Julian Dibbell described in his 2006 New York article. Participants in the Calerie (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study are supposed to reduce their caloric intake by 25% for two years, so researchers can measure the effects on the aging process. But they still get to eat potatoes, pasta, even Häagen-Dazs. And most of the subjects say their biggest problem isn't hunger, but the fact that counting and reporting calories is a pain in the ass.

Then again, Gertner talks to Jeffrey Peipert, who occasionally woke up in the middle of the night because he was so hungry, and couldn't go back to sleep without a bowl of cereal. These incidents, researchers determined, were caused by his active lifestyle, and their advice was just to move around less. While calorie restriction is apparently better at increasing lifespan than exercise, it seems a lot less entertaining. And, of course, a few people had to drop out of the study because of anemia or bone loss. Everybody needed sweaters. People deemed prone to eating disorders were excluded at the outset.

This exclusion, along with a number of others, may point to the biggest problem with the Calerie study. Not only do participants have to be of "normal" weight and free of any tendency towards anorexia or bulimia, they also have to be the kind of people who are willing to restrict their diet for two years for only a few thousand dollars. In fact, those who were motivated by even this small amount of money were excluded from the study, so basically everyone participating had to kind of want to eat way less for a long time, which sets them apart from most people.

One investigator in the study, John Holloszy, says 99% of people aren't capable of calorie restriction. He also thinks the participants will quit doing it when their two years are up. And neuropsychologist Robert Krikorian says, "I don't think humans are designed to pay attention to how much they eat." Participants in the Calerie study have enviable blood pressure and cholesterol readings, and other research indicates that if they stick with it, they may enjoy longer live. But they're also the kind of people who say things like, "I've never gotten so much pleasure in my life. I'm wearing a medium shirt now. I haven't worn a medium since high school." Some people may get more pleasure out of not having to weight their potatoes.

Back in 2006, the media cliché about calorie restriction was that it was so unpleasant it wasn't worth the added lifespan. The Calerie study may be less extreme than what hard-core, arugula-counting restricters do, but its participants' diets are still pretty rigid and circumscribed. And if anything, this now seems unfashionable. Three years ago, eating next to nothing might have seemed like a cool rebellion against excess. But now excess is harder to come by, and eating like a pauper seems a lot less hip if you are one. Not only that, but the obesity crisis has been so variously trumpeted and debunked that the Times Magazine's whole Food Issue (tagline: "putting America's diet on a diet") seems a little dated. Diet is such a dirty word now that even Weight Watchers won't admit it is one, and something as, well, restrictive as calorie restriction just seems pretty passé.

This doesn't mean America isn't still obsessed with weight and weight loss, just that the buzzwords now tend to be things like "sustainable" and "lifestyle changes." And while one calorie restricter claims the practice just "teaches you how to eat normal foods but make better choices," it's pretty clear that it's not sustainable for most people. Which might be fine. American food culture is still pretty fucked up, but in the last couple of years there has been a little more emphasis on eating food you enjoy with people you like. This may not increase anyone's lifespan, but compared to a lot of recent diet fads, it seems pretty healthy, not to mention fun. Holloszy says hard-core calorie restricters are motivated by "fear of death," but someone once told me that people fear death more if they're not enjoying their lives. And except for a select few, logging every calorie just isn't enjoyable.

The Calorie-Restriction Experiment [New York Times Magazine]

MSNBC summarizes the study:

Women who have their hormone levels smoothed out by the Pill tend to seek men who look like good long-term prospects, says the new report's lead author, Alexandra Alvergne, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Sheffield. On the contrary, a woman on a normal menstrual cycle will have a burst of hormones around the time of ovulation that will drive her to lust after the hottest, sexiest guy in the room. [...]

Even the men were impacted by a woman's cycle. Studies show that women who don't take the Pill actually look different and peak in their sex appeal in the days leading up to ovulation. Their voices become deeper, their faces take on a more symmetrical appearance and they dress more provocatively. Thus, they are more attractive to men when they are their most fertile.

Damn it! No one told me taking the Pill was going to squelch my natural morphing powers! I probably could have been Mystique by now if I hadn't gotten on the Pill early.

With the Pill to smooth out peaks in hormones, researchers found that women weren't ever drawn to the macho man, says Alvergne. And the fallout from that little hormonal tweak could be very significant, she says. What if the man a woman chooses when she's on the Pill isn't the one she'd like to be with when she goes off of it - to make babies, for example?

Scientists have playfully named the two female mating strategies as a choice between the "cad" or the "dad," says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why Him? Why Her?"

So, in essence, the Pill may keep you from selecting a sexy stranger to get nasty with, but it only has your best reproductive interests at heart. WTF, is Ortho Tri-Cyclen my mom?

Also of interest, in a previous (but related study):

"One rather titillating study looked the impact of menstrual cycle on the income lap dancers bring in. Sure enough, women made the most money when they were most fertile."

The current study notes that our chemical tampering might throw a wrench into your natural biological urges:

The pill may throw a spanner in the works. It stops this cyclical release of oestrogen and progesterone, and so may interfere with women's natural choice of partner. Some studies have suggested that while women usually prefer the scent of men with immune profiles dissimilar to their own, those on the pill preferred men with similar immune profiles.

Apparently, due to the high risks of inbreeding among our smaller social tribes, this was a serious consideration. However, the research commentators ultimately conclude that the pill works well for the way we live now - as long as your life involves settling down, being responsible...and not humping the first hot thing that walks by every third week of the month.

The Pill makes women pick ‘dad' over the ‘cad' [MSNBC]
Has the pill changed the rules of sexual attraction? [New Scientist]