Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (167 page)

Eliminating caffeine may be a step in the right direction for you. Certainly you will want to do this if you are planning a pregnancy.

Can I Have Diet Soft Drinks
or Other Foods with Aspartame?

Aspartame is a combination of two naturally occurring amino acids (aspartic acid and glutamic acid) that can be toxic when combined. These amino acids trigger nerve cells to fire, and although some nerve cell firing is needed for alertness, too much overstimulates them and causes them to release free radicals. This causes brain cell death. Aspartame consumption has been linked to headache, blurry vision, slurred speech, and memory loss. Some people are particularly susceptible to the toxic effects of aspartame. They include people who have the following conditions (or family histories of these conditions): neuropsychiatric challenges including depression, anxiety attacks, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, manic-depression, or schizophrenia; a history of head injury; blurred vision; memory loss; chronic fatigue syn drome or fibromyalgia; tinnitus (ringing in the ears); spasms, shooting pains, or numbness; attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder; spinal cord injury; multiple sclerosis; Lou Gehrig’s disease; migraine headaches; spinal disc problems; Parkinson’s disease; or Alzheimer’s disease. Many are reporting adverse effects from Splenda (sucralose) as well as aspartame and also saccharin. There’s no need to use any of these anymore. The best noncaloric sweetener currently available is stevia, an all-natural sweetener from the stevia plant. I like NuStevia by NuNaturals (
www.nunaturals.com
). But stevia is also widely available as Truvia, which is also being used to sweeten noncaloric sodas. I predict that stevia will soon replace all other noncaloric sweeteners. I certainly hope so.

Can I Drink Alcohol?

Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with increased risk of breast cancer, menstrual irregularities, osteoporosis, and birth defects. I ask women who drink alcohol regularly to become conscious of why and how they are using alcohol. If they feel the need to have two or more drinks every single night “to relax” (whether at home or out), I seriously question that behavior. Meditation, listening to music, making love, or taking a long bath are good alternatives.

I point out that two drinks of alcohol per night effectively wipe out rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the type of sleep associated with dreaming. Dreaming is part of your inner guidance system. Why wipe it out with alcohol? Having two drinks per night also increases the risk of breast cancer. In the Nurses’ Health Study, for example, researchers found that the risk of breast cancer was 60 percent higher in those who had one or more drinks per day compared with those who didn’t drink.
¹¹⁵

The amount of alcohol a woman takes in has very little to do with whether she has a problem with alcohol. What determines an alcoholic is her relationship to alcohol. One of my patients realized that she felt much more comfortable when she had her bottle of sherry by her bedside. She rarely drank it, but she realized that if it wasn’t there, she’d feel agitated. For that reason, she checked out a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and found that she did indeed have a tendency toward alcoholism. (Note: Alcohol abuse is common and begins early. The latest data from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study shows that 32 percent of twelfth graders get drunk once a month. This gets worse in college.)

Many women hold the “cocktail hour” as a sacred ritual. When I suggest that they drink spring water or sparkling cider as an alternative, in order to see what effect the alcohol is having on them, the reaction I get gives me a few clues about their relationship to alcohol. One woman said, “But my husband and I look forward to this hour. We have such fun we often forget to eat dinner.” (!) Another said that she couldn’t substitute a nonalcoholic drink for herself because if she did, “everyone else would start to look stupid.” (Hmmmmm.)

Please be good to yourself. Examine your relationship to alcohol and make adjustments if necessary. If you feel you can’t go without your evening wine or cocktail, you have a problem.

Note also that when you take in enough B vitamins, decrease sugar, and increase protein, you may find that your craving for alcohol decreases.

CAGE SCREEN FOR DIAGNOSIS OF ALCOHOLISM

Doctors typically use the following screening tool to diagnose alcoholism. Two or three positive responses indicates a high suspicion, while four positive responses is considered diagnostic.
¹¹⁶
Have you ever:

C
Thought you should CUT back on your drinking?

A
Felt ANNOYED by people criticizing your drinking?

G
Felt GUILTY or bad about your drinking?

E
Had a morning EYE-OPENER to relieve hangover or nerves?

A WORD ABOUT SMOKING

I know I should stop smoking . . .

I don’t lecture smokers because they generally want to quit anyway. But sometimes a few facts help them to make the decision. The next time you start obsessing about something like swine flu, for example, think about these statistics:

More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from HIV, illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined, according to CDC statistics.
¹¹⁷

Tobacco companies have targeted adolescent girls as their number one market for cigarettes because this group has been found to have the lowest self-esteem and is therefore the most likely to start smoking as a result of peer pressure. In fact, the monthly rate of cigarette smoking for eighth-grade girls rose by more than 40 percent between 1991 and 1996, thanks in part to the effectiveness of the tobacco companies’ advertising combined with girls’ vulnerability . . . not to mention the desire to be thin! (Fortunately, that number has steadily declined since then, with the rate for 2008 down by two-thirds over its recent peak in the mid-1990s.)
¹¹⁸

While the number of teens who smoke has declined recently (in 1996, 49 percent of eighth graders reported having tried smoking, compared to 21 percent in 2008), the number is still unacceptably high. The latest data from the Monitoring the Future study shows that 7 percent of eighth graders and 20 percent of twelfth graders reported smoking in the last month.
¹¹⁹

While the leading cause of death among all Americans remains heart disease, cancer is the leading cause of death among women ages forty through seventy-nine—and the leading cause of cancer deaths for women is lung cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

People who smoke are up to four times more likely to suffer blindness later in life from age-related macular degeneration than nonsmokers, according to a 2004 study published in the
British Medical Journal
.

Tobacco costs the American public more than $193 billion a year, including $97 billion in lost productivity and $96 billion in direct health care expenditures (an average of more than $4,000 per adult smoker).
¹²⁰
One out of every five deaths in the United States is related to to bacco, which is the leading preventable cause of death in this country.
¹²¹
Smoking increases the risk of stroke by 300 percent.