The pill is linked to depression – and doctors can no longer ignore it | Holly Grigg-Spall

A newly published study from the University of Copenhagen has confirmed a link between hormonal contraceptives and depression. The largest of its kind, with one million Danish women between the ages of 15 and 34 tracked for a total of 13 years, it’s the kind of study that women such as me, who have experienced the side-effects of birth control-induced depression first hand, have been waiting for.

Researchers found that women taking the combined oral contraceptive were 23% more likely to be diagnosed with depression and those using progestin-only pills (also known as “the mini-pill”) were 34% more likely. Teens were at the greatest risk of depression, with an 80% increase when taking the combined pill, and that risk is two-fold with the progestin-only pill. In addition, other hormone-based methods commonly offered to women seeking an alternative to the pill – such as the hormonal IUS/coil, the patch and the ring – were shown to increase depression at a rate much higher than either kind of oral contraceptives.

In recent years we’ve seen efforts from the NHS and family planning organisations to encourage teens to use these so-called LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), primarily because they eliminate the need to remember to take a pill every day, but also due to the fact they’re commonly believed to have less severe potential side-effects than the pill. The new research suggests this practice is misguided. We already know that those with pre-existing depression may find the pill worsens their symptoms, and if teens were at greater risk of depression, then continuing this practice would be negligent.

The researchers note that, because GPs are less likely to prescribe the pill to women who already have depression and because women who do experience depression on the pill are more likely to stop taking it, this study probably underestimates the potential negative affect that hormonal contraceptives can have on mental health. They speculate, in view of the rate at which hormonal contraceptives are prescribed (there are 3.5 million users in the UK alone), that these medications might be responsible for a fifth of all cases of depression.

Having spent the past eight years researching and writing on the emotional and psychological side-effects of hormonal birth control, I initially felt elated to read this study. Not just for myself, but for the hundreds of women I’ve interviewed over the years. Mood changes are one of the top reasons many women discontinue using the pill within the first year. Finally, here was the kind of large-scale, long-term study I’d been told was necessary before we could seriously talk about this issue or make a change in how we prescribe hormonal contraceptives.

Sweetening the pill: could some birth-control methods kill you?

However, I was naive, because it seems that no study will ever be good enough for the medical community to take women’s experiences seriously. As soon as this research dropped, the experts lined up to deliver their usual mix of gaslighting and paternalistic platitudes. We’re told not to be alarmed, concerned, or deterred from continuing to use our hormonal contraceptives, mostly by men who have never and will never take them themselves (partly because the long-term, large-scale study undertaken by WHO on the “acceptability” of the male pill revealed it would negatively impact their emotional wellbeing).

This “pillsplaining” is specific to discussions of research into the side-effects of hormonal birth control. Usually, when the research is on the pill alone, we’re quickly informed there are many other hormone-based methods to choose from, but unfortunately this new study says those alternatives are even worse. One expert even tried to dismiss the link with depression in pill-taking teens as more likely the result of “teen heartbreak”.

So, why is it that we’re not supposed to take this study seriously? Considering that women are fertile just six days per menstrual cycle and men are fertile every single day, that the burden of avoiding unwanted pregnancy falls to us, regardless of the burden that might have on our health and wellbeing, is nothing short of sexism. After all, there are certainly effective alternatives to hormonal contraceptives –the copper coil, diaphragm, condoms and new technology that’s making it simple for women to practice the fertility awareness method, not to mention, of course, vasectomy and the promise of Vasalgel, a contraceptive injection for men.

Yet, we’re reminded with one medical professional’s response to this new research that “an unwanted pregnancy far outweighs all the other side effects that could occur from a contraceptive.” If that’s true, why bother researching the side-effects at all?

It is important to remember that women are twice as likely to experience depression as men

It is important to remember that women are twice as likely to experience depression as men, reportedly due to “the fluctuation of progesterone and oestrogen levels”, in other words our biological femaleness. It’s apparently acceptable to blame women’s depression on the fact that they’re women, but it’s not OK to claim a powerful medication formulated from synthetic hormones could be at fault.

To me, and many other women, these Danish researchers are heroes and criticism of their methods (such as, they should have tracked those women using condoms or the copper IUD as well – even though these options were not available to them; or that women were likely depressed because of menstrual cramps – which the pill is supposed to prevent), only highlights the incredible knots the medical establishment will twist itself into in order to deny there’s a problem with the pill.

One of the study’s authors, Øjvind Lidegaard, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, also brought attention in 2011 to the increased risk of blood clots associated with newer, and supposedly “improved”, hormonal contraceptives such as the ring, the patch and drospirenone-containing pills. Lidegaard plans to focus next on researching the possible “association between taking hormonal birth control and attempting or committing suicide”. Researchers originally flagged up this potential link back in 1970 at the Nelson Pill Hearings, but the topic has not been touched since.

Depression and anxiety from hormonal contraceptives may not be the experience of every woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the experience of your friend, your daughter or your partner, and of many women out there, who, in reading about this could have their lives changed for the better.

The pill is linked to depression – and doctors can no longer ignore it | Holly Grigg-Spall

The nanotechnology in your sunscreen | Holly Cave

Nanoparticles of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide absorb UV light and scatter noticeable light, rendering them transparent on the skin. Photograph: Getty

The Buyer Goods Stock lists in excess of one,600 items which are recognized by the producer as containing nanoparticles – particles in between one and one hundred nanometres (among one particular and a hundred billionths of a metre) across. So let’s take a search at what’s within your household items. This week: sunscreen. Last month in this series on nanotech in household objects, we looked at clothes. This month: sunscreen.

There are two types of nanoparticles already being extra to sunscreen titanium dioxide (TiO2) and zinc oxide (ZnO).

Why use them?

Bulkier particles of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide have been used in sunscreens for decades to reflect or soak up cancer-causing ultraviolet light. The cause classic sunscreens search white when you rub them onto your skin is since particles of this size reflect visible light. But when these sunscreen elements are manufactured into nanoparticles – generally 25 to 50 nanometres broad – they behave in a different way.

In spite of clumping with each other when mixed into sunscreen, nanoparticles of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide not only retain their very powerful UV light-absorbing capability, but also absorb and scatter noticeable light, rendering them transparent on the skin. And in comparison to other UV filters, they are much more secure – requiring less reapplication – and are reduced irritant and lower allergen resources.

“Yet another advantage is that, at the nanoscale, ZnO and TiO2 come to feel ‘lighter’ on the skin,” says Megan Osmond-McLeod, researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Analysis Organisation (CSIRO), “rather than heavy and cakey.”

So in the battle towards skin cancer, nanoparticle formulations are onto a winner. You’re far more most likely to slather by yourself in it, greater protecting your skin from sun damage.

Are they risk-free?

The potential for metal oxide nanoparticles in sunscreens to result in harm mostly depends on the potential of these objects to penetrate the skin. The current weight of evidence suggests that this kind of nanoparticles do not do this. “There is a negligible penetration of sunscreen nanoparticles,” says Paul Wright, toxicology specialist at RMIT University. “They don’t get past the outermost dead layer of human skin cells, of which hundreds of thousands are shed every day.”

Simon James, research fellow at the Australian Synchotron, recently showed that immune cells collect and break down zinc oxide nanoparticles. “Our review demonstrates that the human immune system has the appropriate ‘equipment’ to get rid of any nanoparticles that somehow make it by means of the skin – assuming some do at all,” he explains. James is conscious that their operate so far only appears at cells in the lab, and ‘raw’ nanoparticles rather than a sunscreen formula. “These concerns are crucial when contemplating the greater image,” says James. “Far more work is essential ahead of we understand the details of how this method happens inside the entire body, but we at least now know the immune program has the capability to degrade zinc oxide nanoparticles.”

Osmond-McLeod and researchers at CSIRO are carrying out related work, hunting at biological responses to metal oxides in the two the quick- and long-term. “It is always important to emphasise the crucial level that we know the unfavorable results of prolonged publicity to the sun with out some kind of protection,” stresses Osmond-McLeod. “And that have to be factored into the argument.”

Wright reiterates that sunscreens are safe to use, despite the fact that hunting at whether or not there is likely to be any difference in skin penetration for folks with skin ailments or naturally thinner skin would be worthwhile. “Even so,” he says, “the minimum volume of zinc that could finish up in the body is still a negligible fraction of its standard levels in the blood and tissues of a healthy man or woman.”

The nanotechnology in your sunscreen | Holly Cave

It"s time to kick the higher-protein diet program habit – before it kills you | Holly Baxter

‘Burger me: I’ve constantly had the notion that meat does not do the human physique much discernible great.’ Photograph: Andrey Armyagov/Alamy

Each time I buy a veggie burger, the query comes up. A member of the group will lean above among tearing meaty chunks out of their double-beef specific, and make a concerted effort to feign benevolent curiosity as they inquire: “So, you’re a vegetarian, are you? Is that simply because you favor it or for, effectively, ethical motives?”

Here, the questioner is offering the questioned a polite way out. It is phrased so you can apologetically gesticulate towards your halloumi and mutter something self-deprecating about a weak stomach and a delicate constitution. You can chow down quietly on your balls of fried falafel and then scuttle off with your quiet private views about factory farm circumstances, international warming and antibiotic overuse like somebody who secretly believes in a especially suspect 9/eleven conspiracy concept. Both that or you can admit that your meals selections are, yes, “technically for ethical causes”, and then endure the 212th exhaustive conversation about precisely why you stick to them. Inevitably, this will finish up with some effectively-informed carnivore telling you all about how you are a hypocrite for consuming cheese while bacon excess fat drips slowly down his chin.

Personally, I am fully on board with the concept that most of my views are hypocritical although I nevertheless purchase butter and enjoy mozzarella. I accept that my position on food is complex, as properly as everybody else’s, and I couldn’t care significantly less about the bacon unwanted fat or the spaghetti bolognese or the rare steak becoming consumed next to me. Like the bulk of people in Sudbury, Suffolk, I do not consider that butcher’s retailers need to have their dead animal displays censored when all they do is really rightly draw consideration to the reality of exactly where meat comes from. And to be perfectly trustworthy, a sizeable chunk of my reasoning for vegetarianism comes from a selfish spot: I have always had the vague notion that meat – and, in specific, red meat or processed meat – does not do the human entire body much discernible very good.

According to the most recent research into protein consumption, it turns out that this theory may nicely have anything to it. The Nationwide Health and Nutrition Survey has been collating information on 6,381 folks across the US, and identified that diet programs wealthy in animal protein (as opposed to protein routinely taken from plant sources) could be as damaging to wellness as other vices such as smoking. These beneath the age of 65 who routinely eat a whole lot of meat, eggs and dairy are 4 occasions much more most likely to die of cancer or diabetes – even though it really is really worth noting that, if you make it to 66, starting to eat a large-protein diet for your remaining many years is a far better shout than sticking with the steamed kale.

Probably you would accuse me of perpetuating the “every little thing gives you cancer” agenda. But it really is not only sensationalist carcinogenic claims that deserve interest in light of these findings. Take into account the diet plans endlessly touted in women’s magazines and the most effective self-support books of the late 20th and early 21st century: the Dukan diet plan, for instance the internationally renowned Atkins prepare and of program “going paleo”. All of these emphasise a drastic minimize in carbohydrate intake and a regular protein overload. All of them declare to base their guidance on medicine (and, in the case of the paleo diet regime, sketchy pseudo-scientific claims about what we are “naturally intended” to eat if we are to “mimic the diet programs of our caveman ancestors”.) Now it turns out that losing all that excess weight for your wellness may be backfiring spectacularly, taking months of your daily life off with each and every spare tyre you shed.

Do not dread the hummus. Photograph: J Shepherd/Getty Images

Possessing been raised in a vehemently anti-veggie northern English city on a regular diet plan of chicken nuggets and turkey dinosaurs, many years just before Jamie Oliver began to propose there was something incorrect with feeding kids the elements of puppy food, I do not count on to reap the advantages of a lifelong healthy diet regime anytime soon, either. But if it really is accurate that 39% of girls report becoming on a diet regime “most of the time”, and that the regular female spends 31 many years on a diet program, then we in particular are setting ourselves up for significant middle-aged falls.

Where protein shakes for “bulking up” and adverts that demand to know whether or not or not a passerby is “guy ample” to eat a five-tiered burger have remained masculine domains since time immemorial, the high-protein dieting phenomenon is pretty new for women. The prolonged-term results have not emerged in ample numbers to draw definite conclusions, but this most current discovering shouldn’t be ignored. It is a credible warning about a society at present obsessed with protein and fat reduction, operating in meat manufacturing hyperdrive with some of the most available quick foods that ever existed.

In the end, it makes no big difference whether you did it for the enjoy of fluffy lambs in spring or deep-seated narcissism mixed with a fierce survival instinct: the fact is you must probably eat less meat. You may nicely have to encounter a couple of awkward questions in excess of a bowl of hummus, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear. And so, for the adore of the NHS, please consign your effectively-thumbed paleo guide to the dustbin. Because it turns out that you might be taking its simpering promises to make you thinner virtually at your very own peril.

It"s time to kick the higher-protein diet program habit – before it kills you | Holly Baxter

The difference between naked boys and naked ladies | Holly Baxter

‘Women get toilet and altering cubicles, gowns at the doctors’ surgical treatment … Guys get told: guy up, pants down.’ Photograph: Roberto Melchiorre/zefa/Corbis

An write-up in the US magazine the Atlantic this week described a single man’s childhood horror of boys’ open altering rooms and naked school swimming lessons. It felt like an injustice, he explained, compared with the privacy that the girls had been afforded – and this sense of injustice was only compounded in later daily life by public medical examinations in the army and in depth coaching on preserving a patient’s modesty in health care school, which mysteriously left out the wants of guys. The message was clear all through his existence, says the writer: girls get toilet and changing cubicles, gowns at the doctors’ surgery and separate examination rooms. Males get told: man up, pants down.

It is a severe concern, and a single that should not be swept under the carpet with the vague protest that females have to “place up with a lot more”. The dreaded charade of undressing in front of your peers of the very same intercourse is something most of us will have encountered at some stage, no matter whether in college or that a single time you pledged to do “a yr of rigorous physical exercise” and then went to the gymnasium for a single twenty-minute workout. It really is true that girls do enjoy services catering for modesty a lot more frequently than their male counterparts. But it would be doing us all a disservice to neglect to inquire why.

A single of the causes for the difference is that age-outdated expectation of feminine modesty. Women’s bodies are covered so significantly far more simply because they are usually regarded as a lot a lot more sexual than men’s bodies. Most incidences of female nudity in mainstream movie will be sexual, while most cases of male nudity are comedic. Think the perpetually naked Hodor in Game of Thrones, or the schoolgirls in Really like Truly giggling at photos of naked men although Andrew Lincoln’s character protests feebly, “In fact, they’re not humorous – they’re artwork.” It truly is heavily implied that the joke is on him.

We have noticed some thing of a move toward comedic female nudity in the final handful of years, which is progress even if women’s bodies only turn out to be comedic when they deviate from the young, slim, nubile excellent (consider the perpetually horny Megan in Bridesmaids telling the air marshall that he ought to be able to “really feel the heat from my undercarriage”.) This isn’t a million miles away from the treatment of males, who have in the previous been presented as naked figures of fun due to the fact of their own imperfect bodies.

Until finally quite recently, however, Hollywood was pretending that females who weren’t a particular sexy stereotype didn’t exist at all, lest it wreck the delicate constitutions of the audience forever. Assortment in female nudity remains a ridiculously revolutionary notion: you only have to glance at the worldwide news coverage concerning American Apparel’s new 62-yr-old underwear model, Jacky O’Shaughnessy, or the rage accompanying Lena Dunham’s typical baring of “imperfect” breasts to realise just how unusual it really is – even harmful.

And yet there is anything even far more hazardous than a 62-yr-previous female proclaiming that “attractive has no expiry date” on a billboard: the humble boner. We all know they are there, we are reminded of its existence day-to-day by the spreadeagled “barely legal” models on the covers of specified magazines and such quality literature as the Buzzfeed “definitive ranking of boners from worst to ideal”. And nevertheless, movie and Television classification techniques have always assiduously protected the erect penis, routinely categorising it as “obscene” while vaginas usually, er, slip by way of the net. What is it that tends to make us balk most of all at a willy that’s becoming utilized really naturally for intercourse rather than an elaborate comedy program? When 50% of the population have them, what is the massive deal?

Amid all this politicised discussion about what takes place when folks forgo their clothing, we often fail to remember that the correct to bare your entire body must go hand-in-hand with the appropriate to cover it up. It is clear that if we ever hope to have a wise discussion about naked bodies, the enjoying discipline needs to be levelled for each sexes. Men need to have changing room partitions and a much more delicate approach to healthcare examinations. Women’s bodies need to have to be less policed by that tiresome Madonna/whore dichotomy that demands the hyper-sexualisation of curvy twentysomethings and severe modesty from everyone else.

Meanwhile, if we could see some boners and stop calling vaginas frou-frous, then we’ll probably make some progress. I have far more than one particular pal who genuinely confided throughout puberty that they’d turn into afraid to seem down in the shower. For me, this represents the biggest social oppression: getting advised that your entire body is monstrous, rather than the most valuable tool you are going to ever own. Guy or girl, that is the variety of thinking we require to do away with, as quickly as humanly achievable.

The difference between naked boys and naked ladies | Holly Baxter