Untimely Ripped

If you’ve had a child in the last ten years or so - or rather, if you’ve seriously contemplated having a child for more than about fifteen minutes of your life - there’s one fact you’ve probably heard: Caesarean rates in the first world, especially in the US, are too high. Every few months brings along another article like this one, deploring the Caesarean rate and explaining (1) why it’s so high and (2) what doctors and patients should be doing to solve it, and aren’t. In many circles, unmedicated natural childbirth is held to be the best possible birthing experience — “our birthright” according to one midwife — and women who end up having a Caesarean for causes which aren’t immediately and obviously life-threatening for the baby (for instance, prolapsed cord) quite often feel that they’ve somehow been denied a good birth, or that they have let themselves or the baby down. On Plans, we were discussing how “birth is not a competition”, but human nature is such that some people will inevitably regard it as one; to have had an unmedicated birth somehow gives you a head start in the Good Parenting Stakes, and to have had a Caesarean shows lamentable weakness.

Who’s the Bigger Liar?

The New York Times reported last week on the impossible discrepancy between the reported numbers of sexual partners by men and women. The short of it is men report up to twice as many partners as women, a finding that is logically unsupportable. (That is to say, whom else could they possibly be sleeping with?)

They cite a number of possible theories for the difference, noting that this obvious lie has largely been ignored by researchers and their analysis. So the question remains then, who’s the bigger liar: men or women? Further, I wonder how this plays out for non-heterosexuals of both genders — do they find the same over-/underreporting here as well?  Any burgeoning sex researchers among our readers who might shed light on the issue?

Green Tea Allergy?

I heard something the other day that I’d never heard before. We were talking about the purported benefits of jasmine tea, and green tea in general, at work the other day, and one of my coworkers said that she can’t drink green tea, because she has a horrible reaction to it. She said it made her jittery, anxious, and have big mood swings all day. After her first experience drinking green tea, she had no inclination to do so again. But with all the news about the health benefits of green tea, she tried something with green tea extract in it. Same reaction. No more green tea for her. She said she also had a friend that this might have happened to as well.

Now, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data. And I certainly drink a lot of green tea, as do many of the people I know, with no ill effects. But I was curious to see if this was an acknowledged phenomenon, given how widespread green tea and its extracts are becoming. I’m sure people can develop a food allergy to pretty much anything, but usually it’s to a certain thing in the food, and what would it be in green tea? Is it in other stuff, too?