This Doc Says Forget The Health Rules and Live A Little!
Lose weight, exercise more, get 8 hours of sleep, eat more fruits and vegetables, reduce stress, take supplements… have you grown weary of all the health rules offered by TV doctors, magazine articles and well-intentioned friends? Dr. Pauline Chen, in her New York Times column last summer, wrote about a patient’s difficulty in absorbing “a fire hose of advice.” “Thanks to some dazzling advances in preventive medicine and public health,” she wrote, “doctors in almost every specialty of medicine now have a panoply of proven preventive recommendations to keep their patients from getting sick.”
Dr. Susan Love, the well known breast cancer researcher, takes issue with many of those recommendations, or “health rules” as she calls them in a book called Live a Little!: Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health. She goes down the list of well-known “to do items for healthy living” and questions the etched-in-stone rules that seem to be guiding many of our every day decisions. She writes;
Health rules can mislead you into half way believing that if you eat only the right things, or exercise in the proper way, you can escape not just run of the mill illnesses but death itself. This way of thinking leads to a distorted set of priorities: Instead of trying to be healthy so that you can enjoy life, you squander your happiness in the pursuit of more health.
Dr. Love “studied the studies” in six areas that generate the most health rules; sleep, stress management, health screenings, exercise, nutrition, and personal relationships. While new research has added to our knowledge (and grown the list of rules) since then, her thoughts about putting research findings in context, and using common sense to guide our actions, still holds up. Here are a few examples from her book: … [Read more]
requires words like “life-giving” and “nourishing” to define it because her well-known research lab has found evidence that “love fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped.” In other words, love affects our physical health, our vitality and our overall well-being. She writes;
Barbara Fredrickson knows a lot about positivity. She’s a scholar in the field of social and positive psychology and her work at the University of North Carolina has given “scientific legs” to the field of positive emotions. In her first book, “
she made the case that we need a daily ratio of 3 positive thoughts to 1 negative emotion to step up to a whole new level of life. (See my review of this book
Dr. Mark Hyman, a practitioner of functional medicine, and the author of 
, calls this approach to medicine “a recipe for disaster,” saying it’s like trying to fix a car by listening to its sounds rather than looking under the hood. In an excellent article posted on his 
, which looks at ways to enhance libido naturally, using Western and Eastern herbs, aphrodisiacs, nutritional supplements and natural hormones.
She covers a lot of ground in this book, including ways to naturally treat “notorious sex spoilers” like vaginal dryness, incontinence, UTIs and pelvic pain. But what piqued my interest were her suggestions for nutritional supplements “that can pack an extra punch of pleasure potential.” I spoke to Dr. Steelsmith to learn how these sex-enhancers work.
