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When I was growing up, I went through a two-year-long chubby stage right as I entered middle school. It was partly due to a lack of growth spurt, but it was also due in part to a lack of exercise. In retrospect, I wonder why my parents didn’t step in and encourage me to be more active. The weight came off when I started to play sports and grew a few inches, but my parents didn’t know that was going to happen and I could have been headed for some real health issues. At the same time, I really appreciate that my parents were supportive of me and didn’t try to make me feel bad about my weight.

This month's Oprah magazine has an interesting essay on this very topic, written by a mother and her now-grown daughter. The mother, concerned that her daughter was gaining weight, imposed strict rules about dieting on her daughter and also made comments like, “Are you sure you really want seconds?” More Here...

Starting in high school health class, women are taught certain guidelines for maintaining their breast health. Women have long been encouraged to perform breast self-exams each month. The idea behind this is that if you know your breasts, you can recognize any potentially hazardous changes and have them examined. There has also been a long-standing rule about mammograms: have your first mammogram at 40 and make it an annual check-up for the rest of your life. Now, a recently released study is completely reversing this common wisdom. What gives?

The taskforce of scientists and doctors who ran this study found that breast self-exams are of no value in detecting cancer. They also found that women are getting mammograms too early and too often. Because mammograms are not as effective on dense breast tissue, this taskforce found that women should not have mammograms until age 50, when breast tissue begins to lose some density. Mammograms performed before age 50 often lead to false alarms, not to mention painful and unnecessary procedures, while doing very little to improve women’s chance of survival. The panel also recommends having the screening every two years, rather than every year. In most women, tumors are slow-growing, so the longer gap between screenings supposedly won’t impact the effectiveness of the test.

These new recommendations were met with mixed reactions. The American Cancer Society has strongly challenged this advice, arguing that the benefits of testing far outweigh the risks and that the taskforce is looking at this like a numbers gain. Dr. Otis Brawley, the ACS’s chief medical officer, wrote that this study “is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40-49 saves lives, just not enough of them.”

What do you think about these new recommendations?