How You Look in Pictures Tells a Lot About You

You only get one chance to make a first impression, right? How about the impression given by all those pictures you share on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr? I'm not talking about those unflattering snapshots we all have with food halfway to our mouth, or learning to snowboard, or dancing silly. Instead, think of pictures taken at networking events, while you're leading a meeting, or even giving a toast. How can we use science to help us give the best, most authentic impression of ourselves?

-Excerpted from Voice of America News Transcript of radio broadcast: 23 November 2009

Many people have learned as children that first impressions are important. Parents and other adults often say that people judge you by the way you look.

In a study to be published next month, American and British researchers have confirmed that judgments based only on how someone looks can be very accurate. They found that appearance tells a lot about your personality - the traits or qualities that make you the person that you are.

The study asked a group of people, referred to as "judges", about pictures of123 people. In one "controlled" set of pictures, people had been told how to stand. In another set, they were allowed to choose their own posture and facial expression. Then the "judges" were asked to decide what the people were like.

The judges looked for 10 traits in the people in the pictures. One quality judges were asked to identify was extroversion versus introversion. Another trait was self-esteem: Does the person feel good about himself or herself?

The judges also looked for signs of likeability, openness, and agreeability. Other traits considered in the study were loneliness, and religious and political beliefs. Other considerations were emotional control and conscientiousness - the quality of being guided by a sense of right and wrong.

The researchers said the judges could recognize traits like extroversion and self-esteem, even in the controlled positions. But it was hard for the judges to decide about most other traits under the controlled conditions.

When the people smiled and stood looking natural and energetic, however, judging their personalities was easy. Then the judges' choices were correct for nine of the ten personality traits.

Researcher Laura Nauman noted that we live in a time of social media, and personal photographs are everywhere. She says it is important to understand how appearance communicates personality.

*Study available December, 2009 at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

I'll want to review the entire study when it is published, by my take so far:

Good News: People can tell if you are an extrovert and have high self-esteem, most likely even when you've got bad posture and a frown.

Bad News: Important aspects of your personality can be misinterpreted if you slouch or don't smile. How important is it to you to be seen as conscientious, likable, and emotionally stable?

Of course, I must mention that posture can improve dramatically with chiropractic care, yoga, pilates, and stress reduction.

Sickness Empire vs. Wellness Marketplace

Jay Parkinson's blog post from a few weeks ago sprang from the notion that "brand tags", or words the public associated with your company, are really what your brand is. Mayo Clinic, for example, was brand tagged with Cancer and Health. Not shocking that consumers associate two opposing terms with Mayo. It turns out both describe a split in health care quite well. Is Health Care about Health, or is it about Disease?

I chose chiropractic school instead of medical school in large part because the DCs in my life were really teaching and living a healthy lifestyle. Some well-rounded practitioners are doing this today, and I consider myself proud to be their colleague. BUT, as much as our profession wants to identify with the Wellness, Holistic, Complimentary and Alternative Health models, consumers mostly brand us Pain Relief.

The prevailing sickness care model relies upon doctors seeing an ever increasing number of sick people in order to earn the same amount of money. Chiropractors have stepped up and joined that mainstream paradigm. The prime example is our hard won right of insurance participation. Many plans cover chiropractic treatment. For injury care. All specifically exclude preventitive care. You have 12 visits a year on your plan, you say? Read the fine print; it doesn't mean you get an adjustment once a month. No sickness, no payment.

Over the past 10 years, I've been backpedaling out of that paradigm. It feels a bit like re-inventing the wheel sometimes. My practice is still straddling the fence a bit between insurance covered care and consumer driven care. Check out Jay Parkinson's proposed model of wellness vs. sickness care. Long excerpt below, but here's my favorite bit:

"Wellness brands will arise and look and feel more like the Apple Store than an ER. Over 80% of people in America do not actually use $5,000 per year of healthcare, therefore, this is a market that will cater to 4 out of 5 people in America."

That's the majority of my practice! Those people who spend less than $5,000 a year on adjustments, yoga, pilates, massage, medical check ups, and feel great. Most have a mild to moderate chronic condition that is well managed when they stick to their heatlhy lifestyle. Sure, they'll get an infection or have an injury now and then, but they spend their money up front for resources and treatments that significantly increase their vitality and make them feel great.

Jay's proposed model...

"The sickness industry is rapidly becoming unaffordable. The wellness industry will replace it which I believe will lead to two different industries:

1. The wellness industry that caters to the consumer and is focused on maximizing your health for the first $5,000 per year you spend out of your own pocket. This industry will do everything it can to retain your business by keeping you well and out of the sickness industry. This will include management of acute problems (broken arms, sinusitis, etc) and chronic problems (depression, asthma, diabetes, etc). The goal of this new market will be to cost-effectively deliver efficient, affordable healthcare (for under $5,000 per year) to keep you out of the sickness industry. Because once you leave, it’s likely you won’t ever come back due to some expensive, chronic illness you’ve developed. They’ll want you back. They’ll cater to you. They’ll want to be found by you. This is the section of healthcare where we can innovate because it’s unregulated, cash-based, and deals with simple transactions. Wellness brands will arise and look and feel more like the Apple Store than an ER. Over 80% of people in America do not actually use $5,000 per year of healthcare, therefore, this is a market that will cater to 4 out of 5 people in America. It currently doesn’t exist simply because people haven’t known that it could exist and thrive against the traditional healthcare industry. But now that the traditional healthcare industry is essentially unaffordable to so many Americans, this wellness industry will disrupt much of what the sickness industry is currently doing badly.
2. Once you spend over $5,000 (or if you are covered by Medicaid) you will enter the sickness industry. That will continue to look and function the way it does— an ever-increasing money pit. As we’re witnessing, the industry is not able to be top-down regulated due to all the special interests chasing these massive profits.

That’s just a theory, but I think it’ll come true."

I second that!

Ralph Lauren Aplogizes, Kinda.

Here's another great example of what Ralph Lauren believes is an acceptable representation of a human female. Now, I know that not all of my readers have attended years of anatomy classes, but GET REAL! There's no way that represents even the skinniest of women. She appears to be made of putty, rather than flesh and bone. It's not the worst I've seen...

To catch y'all up, Ralph Lauren took responsibility this week for a poster in which the model Filipa Hamilton was retouched into a stick insect. You gotta see it to believe it. "Dude, her head is bigger than her pelvis." What crazy train are these people riding? Multiple fashion professionals made multiple decisions that resulted in this ad going to print.

A couple of blogs posted and mocked the image: PhotoshopDisasters and then BoingBoing. RL wanted those posts taken down right away. After filing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint against the blogs, Ralph Lauren got even more bad press, increasing web traffic to the blogs, of course. Great summary here on Yahoo of the events as they unfolded. Eventualy, a sort-of apology:

"For over 42 years we have built a brand based on quality and integrity… we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman's body…"

The company's apology, when it came, seemed sincere — but today, Ralph Lauren sought to distance itself from its decision to create and run the ad:

"The image in question was mistakenly released and used in a department store in Japan and was not the approved image which ran in the U.S."

Oh, OK. Warping the minds of girls and women in Japan is fine then? Adding insult to the Public Relations injury was the susequent news that Filipa Hamilton had recently been fired by Ralph Lauren for being too fat. She's a US size 4, and 5 feet 10 inches, at 120 pounds. That's actually underweight according to the Body Mass Index.

Sigh.

Is Beauty Bones Deep?

Christy Turlington. Extra super symmetrical, as it turns out. And a big fan of yoga.

I consider myself a bit of a geek about historical fashion and art history. It always tickles me therefore, when an article about modern beauty standards references the 1950's ideal of an hourglass, the flapper era's preference for boyish bodies, or the Elizabethan obsession with ankles. This post by Latoya Peterson in Jezebel.com discusses cross-cultural definitions of beauty and highlights the top hits of changing beauty ideals.

New to me was the study about Brazilian vs. North American preference for nose heights. Did you know that Brazilian women prefer a nose lower on the face? Good to know, if you plan to partake in the vibrant Brazilian plastic surgery tourism industry.

Beauty is defined by many things, and is supposed to be more than skin deep. Latoya puts it this way:

beauty is a highly subjective thing to quantify. We develop our own individual standards of beauty, taking cues from our families, society, our peer group, and pop culture. In addition, we take into account the shifting standards of beauty over time..

Then she references research about animals preferring symmetrical in mates. What if truly universal beauty is all about symmetry? Actually, it is all about love, but that's another post.

This symmetry idea is appealing to chiropractors, of course, since we help people who are out of balance get and stay balanced. But the fashion geek and art history lover in me finds it all fascinating.

Obesity May Or May Not Become Leading Cause Of Cancer In Women - Obesity cancer - Jezebel

Go read Kate Harding's article on Jezebel.com about the conflicting evidence about obesity and cancer. Required reading for women who want to understand the media whirl around "fat panic". Also a few great pointers about reading health news with healthy skepticism.

Aspirin Cuts Colon Cancer Risk?

Researchers in Europe have announced findings that taking an 2 aspirins a day halves the chance of colon cancer in people with a rare genetic condition. Sounds fantastic, right?

Here are my biased, "natural medicine practitioner", concerns about the findings:

1. The genetic mutation, Lynch syndrome, only causes about 5% of all colon cancers.
2. Aspirin shreds the stomach lining and intestines and often causes major bleeding.
3. Scientists don't know why or how cancer is reduced by aspirin.

1. I am happy about this breakthrough for those who have this genetic mutation. The researchers aren't making the connection between this group and any aspirin benefit for the general population. Neither should you.

2. Because so many people take aspirin daily for many reasons, the costs of surgeries to repair all that bleeding have been studied extensively. In this study focused on aspirin and colon cancer, the authors perform an interesting analysis:

Chemoprevention of colorectal cancer by aspirin: A cost-effectiveness analysis
Gastroenterology, Volume 122, Issue 1, Pages 78-84
S. Suleiman, D. Rex, A. Sonnenberg
[...]
Conclusion:As compared with colonoscopy once per 10 years, the use of aspirin to prevent colorectal cancer saves fewer lives at higher costs. The high complication cost and the lower efficacy of aspirin render screening colonoscopy a more cost-effective strategy to prevent colorectal cancer.

3. There are theories about how aspirin may "chemoprevent" colon cancer due to an effect upon enzymes or correcting "genetic spelling mistakes" in cancer stem cells. But we don't really know for sure. I'm going to advance my own theory at this point, and point the growing understanding of how inflammation affects cancers of all types.

Inflammation is a normal response to tissue injury or infection, but can spiral out of control and result in serious complications, including colon cancer. It has been implicated in many disease processes like allergies, heart disease, and on and on.

There are many great resources for how to reduce inflammation with diet and lifestyle changes.
Daphne Miller's excellent book, The Jungle Effect http://amzn.com/0060886234
Dean Ornish's record breaking program, Reversing Heart Disease http://amzn.com/0804110387
Drs. Roizen and Oz, You: Staying Young http://amzn.com/0743292561


The abridged version of these is about what you'd expect. There are some small differences in their suggestions:

• Eat very little sugar (or none at all)
• Eat only whole grains, and have a great variety of them
  
• Eat lots of veggies and fruits (theories about which ones and how many vary a bit)
• Eat good fats, eliminate bad fats
• Have a stress reduction program: exercise, mediation, yoga, community, prayer, etc
• Have a glass of wine a day OR Have no alcohol at all

Patients who've adopted a lifestyle that focuses on reducing inflammation have consistently excellent results. Other benefits pop up too: better skin, more energy, increase libido, quicker healing from injuries, and on and on.

Feel free to comment about your experiences!

What's Inside a Slim Jim?

In an earlier post I addressed the price difference between healthy food and unhealthy food. Choosing veggies, fruits, and nuts for snacks is a great start. To avoid the chemical landmine in packaged snacks, reading labels is especially important. Or, make snacking even easier and choose food with no labels at all! For example: instead of a soy protein bar, try edamame, baby soybeans in the pod.

As this post's title points out, I'm picking on one particular snack product because of this article on Wired.com, but I encourage you to look at the shockingly similar ingredients in most packaged snacks:

Beef
It's real meat, all right. But it ain't Kobe. The US Department of Agriculture categorizes beef into eight grades of quality. The bottom three—utility, cutter, and canner—are typically used in processed foods and come from older steers with partially ossified vertebrae, tougher tissue, and generally less reason to live. ConAgra wasn't exactly forthcoming on what's inside Slim Jim.

Mechanically separated chicken
Did you imagine a conveyor belt carrying live chickens into a giant machine, set to the classic cartoon theme "Powerhouse"? You're right! Well, maybe not about the music. Poultry scraps are pressed mechanically through a sieve that extrudes the meat as a bright pink paste and leaves the bones behind (most of the time).

Corn and wheat proteins
Slim Jim is made by ConAgra, and if there are two things ConAgra has a lot of, it's corn and wheat.

Lactic acid starter culture
Although ConAgra refers to Slim Jim as a meat stick (yum), it has a lot in common with old-fashioned fermented sausages like salami and pepperoni. They all use bacteria and sugar to produce lactic acid, which lowers the pH of the sausage to around 5.0, firming up the meat and hopefully killing all harmful bacteria.

Dextrose
Serves as food for the lactic acid starter culture. Slim Jim: It's alive!

Salt
Salt binds the water molecules in meat, leaving little H2O available for microbial activity—and thereby preventing spoilage. One Slim Jim gives you more than one-sixth of the sodium your body needs in a day.

Sodium nitrite
Cosmetically, this is added to sausage because it combines with myoglobin in animal muscle to keep it from turning gray. Antibiotically, it inhibits botulism. Toxicologically, 6 grams of the stuff—roughly the equivalent of 1,400 Slim Jims—can kill you. So go easy there, champ.

Hydrolyzed soy
Hydrolysis, in this instance, breaks larger soy protein molecules into their constituent amino acids, such as glutamic acid. Typically, the process also results in glutamic acid salt—also known as monosodium glutamate, a familiar flavor enhancer.