Latest snippets of Health and Beauty news and advice

Burning issue DOCTORS writing in the British Medical Journal’s Open Sport and Exercise concluded that golf was good for the health and “probably” better than Nordic walking.

Shortly afterwards, more experts described ways to burn calories without leaving the home.

Their recommended cold shower might not prove popular during Spain’s current cold snap and few women need to be told that housework is one way of working up a sweat.

Meanwhile, eating celery burns more calories than those consumed and chewing gum uses an extra 11 calories an hour, the investigators found.

Take a break SPAIN’S siesta, a tradition still practised by those with the opportunity to take an afternoon snooze, now has academic backing.

University of California professor, Gloria Mark, said that brain slumps are real.

“The antidote to this mid-afternoon mind sludge isn’t muddling through,” she declared.  “It’s the opposite: You should take a break.”

A review published in 2022 also found that short breaks of no more than 10 minutes helped to diminish mental fatigue and improved the ability and willingness to produce quality work.

These breaks improved performance when performing creative tasks, the experts found, rather than activities like basic arithmetic.

Long Covid answers A HARVARD study suggested that Long Covid rates could drop by half if people ate healthily and exercised.

Using data from more than 32,000 female nurses, scientists wanted to determine how far underlying health dictated a person’s risk of fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath.

Those living healthily were nearly half as unlikely to suffer lingering symptoms after overcoming Covid, they discovered.

They also found that sleeping less than seven hours a night and a body mass index below 25 were the greatest risk factors.

Not a solution CALAMINE LOTION, an old-fashioned but effective treatment for chicken pox in children, is hard to find at present.

The culprit is a TikTok influencer who recommended using it as a makeup base for skins prone to spottiness.

Doctors warned that calamine lotion is a medicine, not a cosmetic. “Using it every day not only strips the skin of moisture, but thanks to its phenol content, it can worsen rosacea, eczema and spots,” health professionals said.

Women are winners ANYBODY who normally has only one or two mild respiratory illnesses each year clearly has an efficient immune system.

And that lucky person is likely to be a woman.

During the Covid pandemic, men were 60 per cent more likely to die if they were infected than women.  That was because the genes responsible for immunity are found on the X chromosome, of which women have two and men just one.

Women also win out because the hormone oestrogen strengthens the immune system, while the male hormone, testosterone, weakens it.

When women’s oestrogen levels fall with the menopause, so does their defence against infections, suggesting that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) could also help to reverse damage to the immune system.

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