Comfort Foods

Men lose weight more easily than women

Well, yes. We knew that, didn't we? We knew it anecdotally, at least. There can't be many women in North America who've watched their male friends decide to lose weight and suddenly drop impressive numbers of pounds. Whether that's even remotely healthy is a separate question, of course.

What I find interesting in this article, though, is the little paragraph about comfort foods:

Gender differences in preferred comfort foods may also play a role in weight loss success. Research shows that men find comfort in foods associated with meals prepared by their mothers such as meat and potatoes. Women, however, crave foods that don't involve preparation such as breads, prepackaged sweets and chocolate – foods that are quite accessible and easy to overeat.

I'd love to know more about the "research" they're referring to here (the whole article suffers from an appalling inability to cite sources, but that's another post). Intuitively, though, it makes sense: men tend to crave food that involves extensive preparation ("like Mom used to make"), and women crave food that... doesn't. Which makes sense, because who craves something when they're going to be the ones putting in all the effort to make it? I wonder if men who do all the cooking are as likely to crave meatloaf as those whose wives cook for them?

From the "good grief" files

Of all the stupid things to study. (scroll down to the last item)

I'm so glad that we now know that breastfeeding doesn't contribute to saggy breasts! Now we can berate women for not living up to the beauty ideal without worrying about whether or not they lived up to the breeding motherhood bit of patriarchal expectations.

I suppose it's important for plastic surgeons to know their target demographics.

Religion, the HPV vaccine, and the squick factor

The Catholic school boards' fretting about the HPV vaccine might seem to suggest some of the perils associated with publically-funded religious schools. The vaccine's a sensible public-health measure, right? Religion's interfering with the public good. That's a bad thing.

Except people see this vaccine as being about teenagers having sex.

It's not, of course. Or at least, not entirely. The whole point of the vaccine is that, for it to be effective, you have to be vaccinated before you're exposed to the virus -- ideally, before you're having sex. So a girl vaccinated at 13 or whatever will be protected when she's 18 or so and getting involved in her first sexual relationship. Or when she's married at 25. Or whenever she becomes sexually active. But people have an incredibly strong squick factor when it comes to my daughter having sex, and I think it kind of short-circuits the logic centers. I seriously doubt any girl who wasn't going to have sex is suddenly going to run out and become promiscuous just 'cause she's protected from cervical cancer. Let me assure you that cervical cancer is the last thing on the mind of any girl contemplating her first sexual relationship. It's not going to be a deciding factor. I'm not sure why that's so hard to get.

So I don't think anyone's associating the Catholic boards' jitters with John Tory opening the religious-schools can of worms. Which is a shame, because they should. If a religiously-run school can impede one public health measure, what about others? We're bound to have Jehovah's Witnesses schools receiving public funds while preventing kids from being vaccinated for all kinds of things. And that's just the first example that came to mind.

Full disclosure: I went to a catholic school. And as you can probably tell, the indoctrination didn't stick. Heck, it didn't stick at the time. We used to joke about being the school with the highest birth rate in the city.

But just because I don't think it's always effective doesn't mean I think publically-funded religious education should be accepted. School should be about school. Religion should be separate. And I know that it's not, now. Lots of schools, especially in smaller towns, are de facto protestant. That's not good either. Nor do we need to avoid mentioning religion -- we just need to avoid endorsing it.

Church and State, right? It shouldn't be so hard.

It's all about the berries

One more from the annals of "identifying possible biological gender differences and coming up with bullshit evo-psych explanations for them": women like pink... er, slightly redder blues.

Let me first express how impressed I am that someone (whether the reporter or the writer of the press release, I don't know) took the finding that women apparently prefer slightly redder blues than men, and declared that:

more women than men really do prefer pink — or at least a redder shade of blue

Because if you've done a study about colour preferences and gender, you've just gotta get pink in there somewhere, right?

But it's the explanation for this apparent difference in preference that just kills me -- women must prefer reddish blue because of all those bright red berries they had to gather 'way back in the mists of time.

Of course, if it turned out men's preferences were on the red end of the spectrum, we'd be talking about how men evolved to like the red blood of the animals they hunted or something. But since it's women, it must be all about the berries -- oh, and "healthy, reddish faces".

Why this preference (so far evident in only the one study, as far as I can tell) has to be explained through evo-psych, I don't know. Couldn't it just be a slight difference in visual processing? Or something culturally influenced (sure, they tested a "small group" of Chinese people, but that's hardly conclusive)?

ETA: And Bad Science reveals that the results for the Chinese population were... not similar at all. The absurdity! It grows!

Disclaimer: I do think breastfeeding is a good thing

I must admit, when I first saw this story about adoptive moms breastfeeding, my immediate reaction was a gee-whiz "isn't that neat" reaction. I also, of course, immediately wondered if they'd be able to extend this induced lactation to men, à la Woman at the Edge of Time.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is really just one more addition to the cult of Perfect Parenting. Or rather -- let's be honest here -- Perfect Mothering. It's not enough, any more, to adopt a child, bring hir home, and love hir. Now you have to take all kinds of hormones and pump your breasts for weeks, in the hopes of producing enough breastmilk to "give your child the best start in life".

Listen to what's involved:

The 32-year-old municipal engineer started a rigorous pumping routine - every three hours, around the clock - even darting home from work on a sewage project to keep up the routine.

After four weeks, with the help of a drug to promote lactation and some supplemental formula bottles, Ms. Baird was able to breastfeed her newly adopted daughter.

This is not a minor effort. This is something that takes serious commitment, a willingess to take lactation-promoting drugs (with side effects? most drugs do have 'em), and a co-operative employer (who won't mind you 'darting home from work'). And I hear pumping isn't exactly pleasant for a lot of women.

I mean really, isn't it just one more thing for mothers to feel guilty about? If you can't breastfeed for whatever reason -- medical, work-related, whatever -- now there's another counterexample of women going to extreme lengths to do what you can't. And if you're an adoptive mom, and you're not willing/able to put in the kind of effort induced lactation calls for -- and it does sound like a pretty serious effort to me -- are you now an inferior candidate? Will people who'd make great parents start getting rejected because they can't or won't put their bodies through this?