How to Use Topical Estrogen Cream For Aging Skin
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Dr. Sam Ellis, dermatologist, explains:
Tackling the cause
Estrogen is important for very many aspects of health beyond the sexual aspects. When it comes to skin, a drop in estrogen (usually because of menopause) leads to changes like collagen loss, dryness, reduced elasticity, and slower wound healing. Applying estrogen creams to the skin can reverse these changes.
If your estrogen levels are already within normal pre-menopausal female ranges, by the way, there isn’t so much science to indicate its benefit when used topically. If you are already on systemic HRT (i.e., you take estrogen already to raise your blood estrogen levels and affect your body in its entirety), you may or may not gain extra benefits from the topical cream, depending on factors such as your estrogen dose, your route of administration, your cardiovascular health, and other factors.
For those with lower estrogen and not currently on HRT, you may be wondering: can topical estrogen cream affect systemic estrogen levels? And the answer is that it mostly depends on the dose. In other words: it’s definitely possible, but for most people it’s unlikely.
As ever, if thinking of taking up any hormonal treatment, do consult an endocrinologist and/or gynecologist, and if you have an increased breast cancer risk (for example genetically or prior history), then an oncologist too, just to be safe.
That sounds like a lot of scary things, but mostly it’s just to be on the safe side. The dose of estrogen is very low in topical creams, and even then, only a tiny amount is used per day.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- “Why Does It Hurt When I Have Sex?” (And What To Do About It) ← because topical estrogen is not just for your face! Yes, you can use it down there too and it’s commonly prescribed for exactly this use.
- Hormones & Health, Beyond The Obvious
- The Hormone Therapy That Reduces Breast Cancer Risk & More
Take care!
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Pineapple vs Passion Fruit – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pineapple to passion fruit, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
Both are certainly great, and both have won their respective previous comparisons! And this one’s close:
In terms of macros, passion fruit has about 4x the protein, nearly 2x the carbs, and more than 7x the fiber. So, this one’s a clear and overwhelming win for passion fruit.
Vitamins are quite close; pineapple has more of vitamins B1, B5, B6, B9, and C, while passion fruit has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, and choline. So, a 5:4 marginal win for pineapple.
When it comes to minerals, pineapple has more calcium, copper, manganese, and zinc, while passion fruit has more iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium. Superficially, this would be a 5:5 tie, but looking at the numbers, passion fruit’s margins of difference are much greater, which means it gives the better overall mineral coverage, and thus wins the category.
Looking at polyphenols, pineapple wins this category with its variety of lignans, while passion fruit has just secoisolariciresinol, of which pineapple has more anyway. Plus, not a polyphenol but doing much of the same job of same, pineapple has bromelain, which is unique to it. So pineapple wins on the phytochemicals reckoning.
Adding up the sections and weighting them for importance (e.g. what a difference it makes to health) and statistical relevance (e.g. greater or smaller margins of difference) makes for a nominal passion fruit win, but like we say, both of these fruits are great, so enjoy both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More
Take care!
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Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?
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Does It Come In A Pill?
For any as yet unfamiliar with the Mediterranean diet, you may be wondering what it involves, beyond a general expectation that it’s a diet popularly enjoyed in the Mediterranean. What image comes to mind?
We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way, and if you’re not getting lycopene, you’re missing out), but what else?
- Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
- Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
- Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
- Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?
In fact, the Mediterranean diet is quite clear on all these questions, so to read about these and more (including a “this yes, that no” list), see:
What Is The Mediterranean Diet, And What Is It Good For?
So, how do we get that in a pill?
A plucky band of researchers, Dr. Chiara de Lucia et al. (quite a lot of “et al.”; nine listed authors on the study), wondered to what extent the benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from the fact that the Mediterranean diet is very rich in polyphenols, and set about testing that, by putting the same polyphenols in capsule form, and running a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical intervention trial.
Now, polyphenols are not the only reason the Mediterranean diet is great; there are also other considerations, such as:
- a great macronutrient balance with lots of fiber, healthy fats, moderate carbs, and protein from select sources
- the absence or at least very low presence of a lot of harmful substances such as refined seed oils, added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and the like (“but pasta” yes pasta; in moderation and wholegrain and served with extra sources of fiber and healthy fats, all of which slow down the absorption of the carbs)
…but polyphenols are admittedly very important too; we wrote about some common aspects of them here:
Tasty Polyphenols: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
As for what Dr. de Lucia et al. put into the capsule, behold…
The ingredients:
- Apple Extract 10.0%
- Pomegranate Extract 10.0%
- Tomato Powder 2.5%
- Beet, Spray Dried 2.5%
- Olive Extract 7.5%
- Rosemary Extract 7.5%
- Green Coffee Bean Extract (CA) 7.5%
- Kale, Freeze Dried 2.5%
- Onion Extract 10.0%
- Ginger Extract 10.0%
- Grapefruit Extract 2.5%
- Carrot, Air Dried 2.5%
- Grape Skin Extract 17.5%
- Blueberry Extract 2.5%
- Currant, Freeze Dried 2.5%
- Elderberry, Freeze Dried 2.5%
And the relevant phytochemicals they contain:
- Quercetin
- Luteolin
- Catechins
- Punicalagins
- Phloretin
- Ellagic Acid
- Naringin
- Apigenin
- Isorhamnetin
- Chlorogenic Acids
- Rosmarinic Acid
- Anthocyanins
- Kaempferol
- Proanthocyanidins
- Myricetin
- Betanin
And what, you may wonder, did they find? Well, first let’s briefly summarise the setup of the study:
They took volunteers (n=30), average age 67, BMI >25, without serious health complaints, not taking other supplements, not vegetarian or vegan, not consuming >5 cups of coffee per day, and various other stipulations like that, to create a fairly homogenous study group who were expected to respond well to the intervention. In contrast, someone who takes antioxidant supplements, already eats many different color plants per day, and drinks 10 cups of coffee, probably already has a lot of antioxidant activity going on, and someone with a lower BMI will generally have lower resting levels of inflammatory markers, so it’s harder to see a change, proportionally.
About those inflammatory markers: that’s what they were testing, to see whether the intervention “worked”; essentially, did the levels of inflammatory markers go up or down (up is bad; down is good).
For more on inflammation, by the way, see:
How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
…which also explains what it actually is, and some important nuances about it.
Back to the study…
They gave half the participants the supplement for a week and the other half placebo; had a week’s gap as a “washout”, then repeated it, switching the groups, taking blood samples before and after each stage.
What they found:
The group taking the supplement had lower inflammatory markers after a week of taking it, while the group taking the placebo had relatively higher inflammatory markers after a week of taking it; this trend was preserved across both groups (i.e., when they switched roles for the second half).
The results were very significant (p=0.01 or thereabouts), and yet at the same time, quite modest (i.e. the supplement made a very reliable, very small difference), probably because of the small dose (150mg) and small intervention period (1 week).
What the researchers concluded from this
The researchers concluded that this was a success; the study had been primarily to provide proof of principle, not to rock the world. Now they want the experiment to be repeated with larger sample sizes, greater heterogeneity, larger doses, and longer intervention periods.
This is all very reasonable and good science.
What we conclude from this
That ingredients list makes for a good shopping list!
Well, not the extracts they listed, necessarily, but rather those actual fruits, vegetables, etc.
If nine top scientists (anti-aging specialists, neurobiologists, pharmacologists, and at least one professor of applied statistics) came to the conclusion that to get the absolute most bang-for-buck possible, those are the plants to get the phytochemicals from, then we’re not going to ignore that.
So, take another list above and ask yourself: how many of those 16 foods do you eat regularly, and could you work the others in?
Want to make your Mediterranean diet even better?
While the Mediterranean diet is a top-tier catch-all, it can be tweaked for specific areas of health, for example giving it an extra focus on heart health, or brain health, or being anti-inflammatory, or being especially gut healthy:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean
Enjoy!
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Laugh Often, To Laugh Longest!
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Putting The Abs Into Absurdity
We’ve talked before about the health benefits of a broadly positive outlook on life:
Optimism Seriously Increases Longevity!
…and we’re very serious about it, but that’s about optimistic life views in general, and today we’re about not just keeping good humor in questionable circumstances, but actively finding good humor in the those moments—even when the moments in question might not be generally described as good!
After all, laughter really can be the best medicine, for example:
From the roots
First a quick recap on de-toothing the psychological aspect of threats, no matter how menacing they may be:
Hello, Emotions: Time For Radical Acceptance!
…which we can then take a step further:
What’s The Worst That Could Happen?
Choose your frame
Do you remember when that hacker hacked and publicized the US Federal no-fly list, after already hacking a nationwide cloud-based security camera company, getting access to more than 150,000 companies’ and private individuals’ security cameras, amongst various other cyber crimes, mostly various kinds of fraud and data theft?
Imagine how she (age 21) must have felt, when being indicted. What do you suppose this hacker had to say for itself under such circumstances?
❝congress is investigating now 🙂
but i stay silly :3 ❞
…the latter half of which, usually rendered “but I stay silly” or “but we stay silly” has since entered popular Gen-Z parlance, usually after expressing some negative thing, often in a state of powerlessness.
Which is an important life skill if powerlessness is something that is often likely.
It’s important for many Gen-Zs with negligible life prospects economically; it’s equally important for 60-somethings getting cancer diagnoses (statistically the most likely decade to find out one has cancer, by the way), and many other kinds of people younger, older, and in between.
Because at the end of the day, we all start powerless and we all end powerless.
Learned helplessness (two kinds)
In psychology, “learned helplessness” occurs when a person or creature gives up after learning that all and any attempts to resist a Bad Thing™ fail, perhaps even badly. A lab rat may just shut down and sit there getting electroshocked, for example. A person subjected to abuse may stop trying to improve their situation, and just go with the path of least resistance.
But, there’s another kind, wherein someone in a position of absolute powerlessness not only makes their peace with that, but also, decides that the one thing the outside world can’t control, is how they take it. Like the hacker we mentioned earlier.
Sometimes the gallows humor is even more literal, laughing at one’s own impending death. Not as a matter of bravado, but genuinely seeing the funny side.
But how?
Unfortunately, fortunately
The trick here is to “find a silver lining” that is nowhere near enough to compensate for the bad thing—and it may even be worse! But that’s fine:
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do the dishes before leaving for my vacation. Fortunately, I also forgot to turn the oven off, so the house burning down covered up my messy kitchen”
Writer’s personal less drastic example: today I set my espresso machine to press me an espresso; it doesn’t have an auto-off and I got distracted and it overflowed everywhere; my immediate reaction was “Oh! I have been blessed with an abundance of coffee!”
This kind of silly little thing, on a daily basis, builds a very solid habit for life that allows one to see the funny side in even the most absurd situations, even matters of life and death (can confirm: been there enough times personally—so far so good, still alive to find the remembered absurdity silly).
The point is not to genuinely value the “silver lining”, because half the time it isn’t even one, really, and it is useless to pretend, in seriousness.
But to pretend in silliness? Now we’re onto something, and the real benefit is in the laughs we had along the way.
Because those worst moments? Are probably when we need it the most, so it’s good to get some practice in!
Want more ways to find the funny and make it a life habit?
We reviewed a good book recently:
The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain To Stress Less, Laugh More, And Achieve More’er – by Paul Osincup
Stay silly!
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Growing Young – by Marta Zaraska
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This one will be a slightly mixed review, but we think the book has more than enough of value to make it a very worthwhile read.
The premise of the book is that, as the subtitle suggests, positive social qualities increase personal longevity.
Author (and science journalist) Marta Zaraska looks at a lot of research to back this up, and also did a lot of travelling and digging into stories. This is of great value, because she notes where a lot of misconceptions have arisen.
To give one example, it’s commonly noted that marriage (or as-though-marriage life partnerships) is generally* associated with longer life.
*Statistics suggest that marriage-related longevity is enjoyed by men married to women, and people in same-sex marriages regardless of gender, but is not so much the case for women married to men.
However! Zaraska notes a factor she learned from Gottman’s research (yes, that Gottman), that what matters is not the official status of a relationship, so much as the sense of secure lifelong commitment to it.
These kinds of observations (throughout the book) add an extra layer beyond “common wisdom”, and allow us to better understand what’s really going on. The book’s main weaknesses, meanwhile, are twofold:
- The author is (in this reviewer’s opinion) unduly dismissive of physical health lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, because they “only” account for a similar bonus to healthy longevity.
- Like many, she does not always consider where correlation might not mean causation. For example, she cites that volunteering free time increases healthspan by 22%, but neglects to note that perhaps it is having the kind of socioeconomic situation that allows one free time to volunteer, that gives the benefit.
Bottom line: the book has its flaws, but we think that only serves to make it more engaging. After all, reading should not be a purely passive activity! Zaraska’s well-studied insights give plenty of pointers for tweaking the social side of anyone’s quest for healthy longevity.
Click here to check out Growing Young, increase your healthspan, and take joy in doing it!
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Why does alcohol make my poo go weird?
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As we enter the festive season it’s a good time to think about what all those celebratory alcoholic drinks can do to your gut.
Alcohol can interfere with the time it takes for food to go through your gut (also known as the “transit time”). In particular, it can affect the muscles of the stomach and the small bowel (also known as the small intestine).
So, how and why does alcohol make your poos goes weird? Here’s what you need to know.
Diarrhoea and the ‘transit time’
Alcohol’s effect on stomach transit time depends on the alcohol concentration.
In general, alcoholic beverages such as whisky and vodka with high alcohol concentrations (above 15%) slow down the movement of food in the stomach.
Beverages with comparatively low alcohol concentrations (such as wine and beer) speed up the movement of food in the stomach.
These changes in gut transit explain why some people can get a sensation of fullness and abdominal discomfort when they drink vodka or whisky.
How long someone has been drinking a lot of alcohol can affect small bowel transit.
We know from experiments with rats that chronic use of alcohol accelerates the transit of food through the stomach and small bowel.
This shortened transit time through the small bowel also happens when humans drink a lot of alcohol, and is linked to diarrhoea.
Alcohol can also reduce the absorption of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in the duodenum (the first part of the small bowel).
Alcohol can lead to reduced absorption of xylose (a type of sugar). This means diarrhoea is more likely to occur in drinkers who also consume a lot of sugary foods such as sweets and sweetened juices.
Chronic alcohol use is also linked to:
- lactose intolerance
- overgrowth of small bowel bacteria and
- reduced absorption of fats from the pancreas not producing enough digestive enzymes.
This means chronic alcohol use may lead to diarrhoea and loose stools.
How might a night of heavy drinking affect your poos?
When rats are exposed to high doses of alcohol over a short period of time, it results in small bowel transit delay.
This suggests acute alcohol intake (such as an episode of binge drinking) is more likely to lead to constipation than diarrhoea.
This is backed up by recent research studying the effects of alcohol in 507 university students.
These students had their stools collected and analysed, and were asked to fill out a stool form questionnaire known as the Bristol Stool Chart.
The research found a heavy drinking episode was associated with harder, firm bowel motions.
In particular, those who consumed more alcohol had more Type 1 stools, which are separate hard lumps that look or feel a bit like nuts.
The researchers believed this acute alcohol intake results in small bowel transit delay; the food stayed for longer in the intestines, meaning more water was absorbed from the stool back into the body. This led to drier, harder stools.
Interestingly, the researchers also found there was more of a type of bacteria known as “Actinobacteria” in heavy drinkers than in non-drinkers.
This suggests bacteria may have a role to play in stool consistency.
But binge drinking doesn’t always lead to constipation. Binge drinking in patients with irritable bowel syndrom (IBS), for example, clearly leads to diarrhoea, nausea and abdominal pain.
What can I do about all this?
If you’re suffering from unwanted bowel motion changes after drinking, the most effective way to address this is to limit your alcohol intake.
Some alcoholic beverages may affect your bowel motions more than others. If you notice a pattern of troubling poos after drinking certain drinks, it may be sensible to cut back on those beverages.
If you tend to get diarrhoea after drinking, avoid mixing alcohol with caffeinated drinks. Caffeine is known to stimulate contractions of the colon and so could worsen diarrhoea.
If constipation after drinking is the problem, then staying hydrated is important. Drinking plenty of water before drinking alcohol (and having water in between drinks and after the party is over) can help reduce dehydration and constipation.
You should also eat before drinking alcohol, particularly protein and fibre-rich foods.
Food in the stomach can slow the absorption of alcohol and may help protect against the negative effects of alcohol on the gut lining.
Is it anything to worry about?
Changes in bowel motions after drinking are usually short term and, for the most part, resolve themselves pretty efficiently.
But if symptoms such as diarrhoea persist beyond a couple of days after stopping alcohol, it may signify other concerning issues such as an underlying gut disorder like inflammatory bowel disease.
Researchers have also linked alcohol consumption to the development of irritable bowel syndrome.
If problems persist or if there are alarming symptoms such as blood in your stool, seek medical advice from a general practitioner.
Vincent Ho, Associate Professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How Are You, Really? And How Old Is Your Heart?
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How Are You, Really? The Free NHS Health Test
We took this surprisingly incisive 10-minute test from the UK’s famous National Health Service—the test is part of the “Better Health” programme, a free-to-all (yes, even those from/in other countries) initiative aimed at keeping people healthy enough to have less need of medical attention.
As one person who took the test wrote:
❝I didn’t expect that a government initiative would have me talking about how I need to keep myself going to be there for the people I love, let alone that a rapid-pace multiple-choice test would elicit these responses and give personalized replies in turn, but here we are❞
It goes beyond covering the usual bases, in that it also looks at what’s most important to you, and why, and what might keep you from doing the things you want/need to do for your health, AND how those obstacles can be overcome.
Pretty impressive for a 10-minute test!
Is Your Health Above Average Already? Take the Free 10-minute NHS test now!
How old are you, in your heart?
Poetic answers notwithstanding (this writer sometimes feels so old, and yet also much younger than she is), there’s a biological answer here, too.
Again free for the use of all*, here’s a heart age calculator.
*It is suitable for you if you are aged 30–95, and do not have a known complicating cardiovascular disease.
It will ask you your (UK) postcode; just leave that field blank if you’re not in the UK; it’ll be fine.
How Old Are You, In Your Heart? Take the Free 10-minute NHS test now!
(Neither test requires logging into anything, and they do not ask for your email address. The tests are right there on the page, and they give the answers right there on the page, immediately)
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