Who needs hair anyway?

YOu are wrong. Hair indicates sign of health. By the way body hair is
different from scalp hair and there is absolutely no indication that
humans evolved towards less scalp hair. (BOdy hair yes Ape – Man)

Unfortunately this is one among the many feel good attitudes that
impedes real scientific scrutiny

Do you have any evidence (other than anecdotal or your opinion) to
support that male pattern baldness is an indication of the person’s
state of health? State some sources.

No sources are needed, just a knowledge of human development. Up til about
a thousand years ago, the average life span for a human was 33 years. For
men who lose their hair, loss starts in the late 20s/early 30s. In other
words, baldness occurs just before the man dies of old age (i.e. *not* in a
state of health).

People are just going on cultural knowledge and perceptions gleaned over the
centuries.

The best evolutionary explaination I have heard for balding is an
extension of Desmond Morris’ “Naked Ape” theory for why humans are
relatively hairless. Relative hairlessness makes sweating more effective as
a means of dissipating heat. So, humans can run down faster animals by
making them overheat. The price is that sweating is very profligate of
water. But uniquely, humans can carry their water with them. Hair was
left on the top of the head for both cosmetic reasons and becuase it gives
insulation and sun protection for an upright human at mid-day in the tropics.
Kind of like our own pith helmet.

But about one quarter of all heat production happens in the head, so
the evolutionary pressure still operated to keep the baldness gene in the
population.

BTW, the incidence of balding is one of only two things that are
lineraly related to aging in humans. The other is vital capacity. E.g.,
at age 35, about 35% of males show pattern loss, at age 60, about 60%, etc.
BTW, the incidence stops increasing after age 70, perhaps because of
selective dying off of people with severe pattern loss. So, it is not too
surprising that people associate baldness with being older.

As for health and longevity: severe pattern baldness is associated
with over a three-fold higher incidence of heart attack. This may be because
it signifies damage to the lining of blood vessels, which produce a
minoxidil-like substance, nitric oxide. Moral: take care of you arteries
and you will take care of your hair.

AltaVista now has both a men’s
and a women’s directory page. They have scrapped their
old women’s site. The new links are:

AltaVista “For Men” Directory Page:

http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=dir&tp=Library/Societ…
r_.26_Sexuality/For_Men

AltaVista “Men’s Health” Directory Page:

http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=dir&tp=Personal/Healt…
7s_Health

Alta Vista Directory Pages Related to “Men”
http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=men&pg=dir

Women:

AltaVista “For Women” Directory Page:

http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=dir&tp=Library/Societ…
r_.26_Sexuality/For_Women

AltaVista “Women’s Health” Directory Page:

http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=dir&tp=Personal/Healt…
.27s_Health

AltaVista Directory Pages Related to “Women”
http://looksmart.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=women&pg=dir

Although there could be more balance in the number
and type of topics in those pages (they are slanted toward
women with a feminist attitude), it is an improvement
over last year.

The Director of Behavioral Health Services for San Francisco County,
Dr. Robert Cabaj, has told Rolling Stone magazine that at least
one-quarter of newly infected gay men may have sought out the fatal
disease.
There are no hard numbers to back up his estimate, Cabaj said, but men
known as “bug-chasers” are alarmingly common in the gay
community–both men who consciously seek the virus, and those who are
in denial about their wish to become HIV-positive.

According to Rolling Stone, Cabaj charged that gay organizations are
actively covering up about the problem because “it’s a difficult issue
that dredges up some images about gay men that they don’t want to have
to deal with.”

Some gay men say being HIV-positive “opens the door to sexual Nirvana”
because they need no longer worry about safe sex, Rolling Stone noted,
while others say they can’t stand the idea of being different from
their HIV-infected lover.

The newly published magazine article, entitled “In Search of Death”
(February 6th) tells the story of Carlos, a man who considers
HIV-transmission “the most erotic thing I can imagine.”

Carlos estimates that he has already had several hundred sex partners;
he eagerly awaits the day when he tests HIV-positive–at which time
his erotic interest, Carlos says, will then turn toward infecting
another person–which is known as “gift-giving.”

“As sick as it sounds,” Carlos said, “killing another man slowly” is
exciting.

The thrill of unsafe sex is further heightened for Carlos by his own
duplicity as a volunteer at the offices of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis
(GMHC), where he teaches other men how to protect themselves with
condoms.

At the GMHC, an assistant director of community outreach, Daniel
Castellano, admitted that “bug chasing” does exist. But Castellano
told Rolling Stone that although he would try to “work with” a
counselee who said he wanted to get infected, if that’s a decision a
man wants to make, he would ultimately respect that decision.

The Director of the office of HIV/AIDS at the Miami-Dade Department of
Health confirmed that deliberate HIV infection is a “definite problem”
in the Miami-Dade area as well.

The author of the Rolling Stone article, Gregory Freeman, said
representatives of some gay organizations “actively dissuaded” him
from writing the article.

In a follow-up to the Rolling Stone report, the Sunday Herald
(www.sundayherald.com) described internet sites dedicated to
bug-chasing, where “conversion parties” are celebrated, in which
HIV-positive and HIV-negative men gather with the goal of having the
HIV- positive men infect the others.

The Sunday Herald mentioned that a new documentary film, “The Gift,”
is to be shown at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival
this February. It features Doug Hitzel, a 21-year-old gay man from San
Francisco who chose to become infected with the “gift” of his fatal
infection. Dealing with the day-to-day reality of illness, Hitzel now
says he regrets his decision.

Before we throw up our hands and decide that no conclusions can be made
about diet and health in China, let us turn our attention to the mixed
peoples of Okinawa, situated equidistant from Hong Kong and Tokyo. The
average lifespan for women in Okinawa is 84 (compared to 79 in American),
and the island boasts a disproportionately large number of centenarians.
Okinawans have low levels of chronic illness–osteoporosis, cancer,
diabetes, atherosclerosis and stroke–compared to America, China and Japan,
which allows them to continue to work, even in advanced years. In spite of
Okinawa’s horrific role in World War II, as the site of one of the
bloodiest battles of the Pacific, Okinawa is a breezy, pleasant place,
neither crowded nor polluted, with a strong sense of family and community
and where the local people produce much of what they consume.

And what do Okinawans eat? The main meat of the diet is pork, and not the
lean cuts only. Okinawan cuisine, according to gerontologist Kazuhiko
Taira, “is very healthy–and very, very greasy,” in a 1996 article that
appeared in Health Magazine.19 And the whole pig is eaten–everything from
“tails to nails.” Local menus offer boiled pigs feet, entrail soup and
shredded ears. Pork is cooked in a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, kelp and
small amounts of sugar, then sliced and chopped up for stir fry dishes.
Okinawans eat about 100 grams of meat per day–compared to 70 in Japan and
just over 20 in China–and at least an equal amount of fish, for a total of
about 200 grams per day, compared to 280 grams per person per day of meat
and fish in America. Lard–not vegetable oil–is used in cooking.

Okinawans also eat plenty of fibrous root crops such as taro and sweet
potatoes. They consume rice and noodles, but not as the main component of
the diet. They eat a variety of vegetables such as carrots, white radish,
cabbage and greens, both fresh and pickled. Bland tofu is part of the diet,
consumed in traditional ways, but on the whole Okinawan cuisine is spicy.
Pork dishes are flavored with a mixture of ginger and brown sugar, with
chili oil and with “the wicked bite of bitter melon.”

Weston Price did not study the peoples of Okinawa, but had he done so, he
would have found one more example to support his conclusions–that whole
foods, including sufficient animal foods with their fat–are needed for
good health and long life, even in the Orient. In fact, the Okinawan
example demonstrates the fallacy of today’s politically correct
message–that we should emulate the peoples of China by reducing animal
products and eating more grains; rather, the Chinese would benefit by
adding more strengthening animal foods to their daily fare.

19. Deborah Franklyn, “Take a Lesson from the People of Okinawa,” Health,
September 1996, pp 57-63

The diet of Man today is much different than that of ancient Man.
As a whole, we eat much more meat than did ancient Man, and we eat
different parts of the animal.

Virtually all meat we eat is striated muscle tissue, the type of
muscle in the arms or legs which does the running and heavy lifting.
But there are three types of muscle: striated, smooth, and cardiac.
Most people eat _no_ smooth or cardiac muscle in their diet.

Ancient Man ate not only all three types of muscle, but organ meats and
skin as well. Eating only striated muscle might make sense for an
athelete like a runner or weight lifter, but for the average person
this is a diet far different from that of your ancient ancestors.

In addition to eating whole animal meat, it is also important to
eat mature animal meat. Virtually all meat sold in supermarkets is
from young animals, only a year or two old. It costs too much money
to keep the animals alive until maturity. The flesh of these young
animals is packed with the hormones and enzymes of young growing
animals, which is great if you’re going to feed it to children,
but can be highly stressful to feed to an adult. Too many people
continue the eating habits they learned as children into adulthood,
where it causes many of the problems associated with middle-age.

But there is one meat which combines all three types of muscle tissue
plus various organs and is made from mature animals, retired dairy
cattle which have already given birth and produced life-giving milk.
This meat is bologna (pronounced ba-LO-ney), and is widely available
at fine delicatessens and meat markets.

Unfortunately, there is a conspiracy among the big drug companies
to suppress this information. They know they would be put out of
business tomorrow if everybody were eating bologna for health.

Just in posting this to the net, I’m taking a chance that they might
send out a hit man to kill me. So you’d better save a copy of this
file because you might never see it again!

I started thinking about ‘early man,’ back in cave days. Humans evolved
(perhaps) from the earlier ape-like life forms and developed into what
we today call ‘modern man.’ At the beginning, as well as through most of
the process, man was a hunter-gatherer, taking what foods he could as he
found them, and eating them on the spot due to lack of containers (very
earliest man,) or at least that same day due to lack of food
preservation knowledge (later man.) Typically, a meal would be of a
single food, eaten until either finished, or he was satiated and the
remainder eaten later the same day. Usually, a single food type would be
consumed each day. And yet mankind developed and evolved. It wasn’t
until MUCH later in the development of mankind that we began to
differentiate breakfast foods from dinner foods. And is this done more
because of taste or energy requirements at certain times of the day,
than health?

No one disputes the need for eating all of the food groups, but is
there ANY scientific proof that man needs to eat ALL of the basic food
groups EVERY day to maintain good health, or can single groups be
consumed on different days within a short time of each other and produce
the same results?
And about these food groups….. in the west we break them down into 4
groups. (Seven if you add caffeine, nicotine, and chocolate.) But in
Asia, the groups are very different. One must eat foods from; the
mountain, sea, field, and forest. And at least 7 different foods must be
consumed at each meal to maintain good health. Now, I realize that
scientifically, we are eating the basics, (protein, carbohydrates, fats,
etc.) and getting the vitamins and minerals that the body requires
regardless of which system we follow. But my question is, do we really
need to eat these ALL AT THE SAME TIME? Have any studies ever been done
on this question?
Also, science aside, what are YOUR opinions?

Morality is not innate, morality is about the choices YOU make to
sustain YOUR life.

A choice you make is deliberate and calculated action, morality, ie
those choices, therefore must be discovered and learnt by each and
every single living human individual. That is because life is a
“process of self-sustaining self-generating action,” “life is a
conditional form of existence”, it is as simple to understand as that.

The conditions required for your life can NOT be in contradiction with
each other, and niether can they be in contradiction of reality eg the
environment around you, including especially, they can not be in
contradiction of another human being’s life and values. If YOUR values
are in contradiction of another human being’s choices, then your life
WILL and DOES becomes a matter of chance.

Only YOU exist as the entity capable of living YOUR life, only YOU can
digest YOUR food, only you can breath your air, you only have a right
to YOUR life, only you can make the choices for your life, the use of
ONLY YOUR energy can keep you alive (context being, normal health)

Arguing from point that morality is instictual or innate implies that
Homo Sapients have concepts of good and evil as insticts, or rather
manifestation of instictual. Let me elaborate; Sex is manifestation of
instict that ensures procreation of species.
Love is rationalisation of that instict.
We think something is good because on some instictual level it ensures
our survival. How you may say? Well, humans requires acceptance from
other humans because it increases probability of survival.. Acceptance
increases probability of surviving by 1. ensures no one will atttack
you and kill you. 1a. is someone does group will defend you. 2. ensures
that you will meet other females. 3. ensures there will be off spring.
4. ensures increased probability of off spring survival.
Bad or evil arguing from instictual point of view naturally is
something that does not ensure your survival. Thus murder is immoral.

My idea is based on objective reality, which means based on that which
exists independent of man man thinks is real, my idea is, that morality
is the guide to the choices you (as a human individual) make and the
guide to the values you choose to live by, which means, morality MUST
have a standard that ideas and actions are measured against as being
moral or immoral good or bad right or wrong true or false.

Quite the idea, since i never go to a gym actually. Does anybody have
experiences with these blokes they might want to share? If you do and I
like ’em, I’ll name you my referrer : Free month 4 you.

All I need to do right now ist STILL get more weight -for my dumbells,
not myself, obviously- (I just hit 178 lbs today, SO close to my goal of
180, but I need to rid myself of some fat, too, esp. around the waist
and buttocks – why oh why does fat always collect in those spots first?
🙁 ) to compensate for my upcoming diet – just when I started to get the
hang of cooking…

So there. I am also wondering whether I actually need a trainer – I have
never dieted before but it can’t be that complicated now can it?

Then again it’s only a monthly fee of a few quid for – so i assume –
professional treining support.

Well, I’ve pondered enough. What does the man in the street have to say
to this (apart from “Hello”, or “Well speaking as Conservative candidate
I just drone on and on and on…never letting anyone else get a word in
edgeways, until I start foaming at the mouth and fall over backwards.”)

A few quid?? Depending upon where you live, prices for private personal trainer’s
(not the gym-type personal trainer, thats different) can range from $30 an hour to
$100 an hour! During the summer break (im currently at uni full time)
I personal trainer and offer nutritional advice (I have done several courses with
Future Fit Ltd, and am NVQ 2 qualified and registered with REPs), and i
wouldnt charge anything less than $40 an hour – a price which is very
reasonable compared to alot of the competition in my area.
You really need to weigh up the pro’s and con’s – if you can invest the
time to research it and plan out your diet and training you dont need a
personal trainer.

Oh, i only just noticed you’re referring to this Mens Health personal trainer thing.
You aint gonna get PRIVATE personal trainer for a few quid – only the crap that you
get in gyms where you get some inqualified gimp just stand next to you
with you on a treadmill going “yeah, keep it up .. “. Private personal trainer
invovles lots of planning, research, and close monitoring with a
technical understanding of exercise from a QUALIFIED personal trainer.
Private personal trainer and gym personal trainer are totally different.

The Biblical Origins of our Health Problems (or Satan gets the last laugh!)

God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And Satan said, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God said, “Let
the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree
yielding fruit,” and God saw that it was good.

And Satan said, “There goes the neighborhood.”

And God said, “Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness, and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air
and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that crept upon the earth.” And so God created Man in his own image; male
and female created he them.

And God looked upon Man and Woman and saw that they were lean and fit.

And God populated the earth with broccoli and
cauliflower and spinach, green and yellow vegetables of all kinds, so Man
and Woman would live long and healthy lives.

And Satan said, “I know how I can get back in this game.” And Satan created
McDonald’s. And McDonald’s brought forth the 99-cent double cheeseburger.

And Satan said to Man, “You want fries with that?”

And Man said, “Supersize them.” And Man gained 5 pounds.

And God created the healthful yogurt, that woman might keep her figure that
man found so fair.

And Satan brought forth chocolate. And Woman gained 5 pounds.

And God said, “Try my crispy fresh salad.”

And Satan brought forth Ben and Jerry’s. And Woman gained 10 pounds.

And God said, “I have sent thee heart-healthy
vegetables and olive oil with which to cook them.”

And Satan brought forth chicken-fried steak so big it needed its own
platter. And Man gained 10 pounds and his bad cholesterol went
through the roof.

And God brought forth running shoes and Man resolved to lose those extra
pounds.

And Satan brought forth cable TV with remote control so Man would not have
to toil to change channels between ESPN and ESPN2. And Man gained another 20
pounds.

And God said, “You’re running up the score, Devil.” And God brought forth
the potato, a vegetable naturally low in fat and brimming with nutrition.

And Satan peeled off the healthful skin and sliced the starchy center into
chips and deep-fat fried them. And then he created sour cream for dip.

And Man clutched his remote control and ate the potato chips swaddled in
cholesterol.

And Satan saw and said, “It is good.” And Man went into cardiac arrest.

And God sighed and created quadruple bypass
surgery.

And Satan created HMO’s.