Category Archives: Health & wellbeing

Senior Islamic cleric issues fatwa against child marriage

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Deputy grand imam of al-Azhar calls for marriage based on mutual consent with minimum age set at 18

One of the world’s most prestigious centres of Islamic learning has issued a fatwa against child marriage, saying marriage should be based on the consent of both parties and “particularly the young woman”.

The deputy grand imam of al-Azhar, considered by some Muslims to be the highest authority of Islamic jurisprudence, hammered out the document with his team and young activists at the first African summit on child marriage and female genital mutilation, which took place in Senegal this week.

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Are crystals the new blood diamonds?

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Gwyneth loves them, Adele can’t sing without them and Kim Kardashian uses them to deal with stress. Many of us are lured by their beauty and promise of mystical powers, but are ‘healing’ crystals connecting us to the earth – or harming it?

Crystallisation is a transition from chaos to perfection; the evolution of the crystal industry has been less simple. Millions of years ago liquid rock inside the earth cooled and hardened, and this is how crystals formed at the twinkling centre of the earth. Piece by piece they’ve been mined to become the centre, too, of an international industry that hangs on their rumoured metaphysical healing properties. But recently something else has emerged from the rocks – a darker truth. Rather than connecting with the earth, those buying crystals are damaging it, fatally.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen gifted guests black tourmaline to keep negative energies at bay

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Germans thirsty for alcohol-free beer as brewers boost taste

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Rise in bars stocking 0% beers to meet demand of drinkers who wish to ditch the hangover

During last year’s sweltering summer in Europe, workers of the Störtebeker beer brewery stood at the doors of the bottle depot eagerly awaiting the empty returns so they could be washed and refilled as quickly as possible. A bottle shortage swept the country due to the rate at which beer was being consumed to quench the overheated nation’s thirst.

But it wasn’t the demand for their classic range of beers that surprised the brewery bosses most, rather the rate at which its alcohol-free varieties were being drunk.

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Sleep apps backfire by causing anxiety and insomnia, says expert

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Neurologist says ‘metricising our lives’ is counterproductive when it comes to sleep

Smartphone sleep-tracking apps are making people so anxious and obsessed about their sleep that they are developing insomnia, a leading neurologist has said.

Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, Dr Guy Leschziner, a sleep disorder specialist and consultant at Guy’s hospital in London, said a growing preoccupation with getting enough sleep was backfiring.

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Bluetooth your bladder: the hi-tech way to beat incontinence

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Urinary leakage affects millions of women, who have often suffered in silence. That may change with Elvie, a new way to strengthen the pelvic floor – involving an app

There are nappies in my wardrobe, but I have no children nor a sexual fetish. Instead, I have a problem shared by millions of women (and some men): I cannot always control my bladder as well as I want to, no matter how many toilet visits I have made beforehand. I have incontinence, and I am not alone: in the UK, up to 40% of women have incontinence at some point, either because they have given birth or are menopausal, because of genetics, or simply because of age. Up to 70% of expectant and new mothers experience incontinence, and a quarter of men over 40 – though, given how shameful it is thought to be, the figures are likely to be conservative. We mask, we hide, we cope.

The pelvic floor – a sling of muscles stretching from the tailbone to the pubic bone – supports the bladder, bowel and womb. These muscles are meant to contract to stopper any flow of urine. (The muscles are also sometimes referred to as a “trampoline” – a sour joke for women who know trampolining is a sure way to wet pants.)

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Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert

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Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.

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How Stockholm became the city of work-life balance

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With flexible hours the norm, and almost two years’ parental leave for every child, Sweden’s capital boasts a happy and efficient workforce. What can other cities learn?

It is 3.30pm, and the first workers begin to trickle out of the curved glass headquarters of the Stockholm IT giant Ericsson.

John Langared, a 30-year-old programmer, is hurrying to pick up his daughter from school. He has her at home every other week, so tends to alternate short hours one week with long hours the next.

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‘Step away from the porn’: how to have hot sex at every age

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From early experimentation to long-term relationships, our erotic lives constantly evolve – here’s expert advice for all stages of life

“Nowadays many people start their sexual journey with porn,” says the sex educator and author of The Curious History of Dating, Nichi Hodgson. In fact in a recent study of 1,000 18 to 25-year-olds, 45% said that porn was their main source of sex education, while in a 2016 study commissioned by the NSPCC, more than a third (39%) of the 13 to 14-year-olds said they wanted to copy the behaviour they had seen in porn. “The upcoming age restrictions [on porn sites] will make it less likely that young people just stumble across this content, but there still needs to be a degree of shame-free porn literacy,” says Hodgson.

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The truth about sex: we are not getting enough

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In a world that seems so at ease with sex, you’d think we were having it all the time. Think again

We owe a lot to the sex lives of Greeks. Ancient Greece gave us the origins of the names and concepts for homosexuality, homophobia and nymphomania, as well as narcissism and pederasty. The Romans talked freely to each other in toilets and were equally community-minded when it came to sex, with a reputation for lasciviousness and orgies. Georgians, we believe, were smutty, and Victorians were prudes and hypocrites. (All of these are partial truths.) We like to use sex as a mirror of an era, and to make judgments accordingly. What then, are we to make of us right now?

This is the most sex-positive age ever, right? We are liberal and comfortable with sex like no other people have ever been. Our magazines publish articles on how to get on better with your clitoris. Porn is freely available (and accessed by teenagers). Erotic books are bestsellers, however badly written. TV broadcasts shows in which the contestants are naked, or have sex in a box, or make a sex tape on camera. If sexual choice were a shop, it would be a hypermarket, with dizzyingly long aisles of every possibility: straight, gay, bi, trans, poly, fluid, each with its own culture and each widely accepted.

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The age of rage: are we really living in angrier times?

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In a world in which populists whip up anger that spreads on social media, it’s easy to conclude we have never been more furious

It’s a standard observation that the world is getting angrier – but the truth is that taking the emotional temperature of an entire era is a mug’s game. For one thing, it’s almost impossible to get the necessary historical perspective: road rage, for example, feels like a modern phenomenon, until you learn that in 1817, Lord Byron was reported to the police for delivering a “swinging box on the ear” to “a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse”. It’s also easy to overlook the ways you’ve changed as an individual: I certainly remember life in the early 80s as less frustrating, but that’s surely just because I lived a child’s life of leisure, all expenses paid.

Still, the best data we have suggests that, overall, we are indeed getting angrier. Last year, 22% of respondents around the world told the Gallup organisation they felt angry, a record since the question was first asked in 2006. And something else, even harder to measure, feels like it’s different as well: it’s as though our anger has curdled, gone rancid. As a society, we seem not to express it and move on, but to stew in it – until, at the extremes, it hardens into violence and hate.

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Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands

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For a century, the humble paper towel has dominated public toilets. But a new generation of hand dryers has sparked a war for loo supremacy.

By Samanth Subramanian

In the summer of 2005, a Chicago marketing consultant named George Campbell received a tantalising call from a headhunter. Was he open to an interview at Dyson? The company was secretively preparing to launch a new appliance, and it needed a sales strategy for the US: that was all the headhunter would divulge. Campbell was excited; he saw Dyson as “a company with the iconic quality of Apple, and an ability to take a basic product like a vacuum cleaner and make an 80% margin on it”.

He went along to Dyson’s office, a factory-like space with lofty ceilings and timber beams next to the Chicago river. In his first few conversations, he recalled, they wouldn’t even reveal what the product was. Finally, Campbell was told in strict confidence: it was a hand dryer. And he’d thought he was joining Dyson for the glamour. “My heart dropped to my stomach.”

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The dad who gave birth: ‘Being pregnant doesn’t change me being a trans man’

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Transitioning meant that Freddy McConnell finally felt comfortable in his skin. Then he began a quest to conceive and carry his own child

Freddy McConnell takes out his phone and shows me a film of his baby snoring contentedly. Jack is gorgeous, with blond hair, blue eyes and heavy eyelids, and McConnell is the classic doting dad – albeit more hands-on than most. It’s a year since he gave birth to Jack, an experience he describes as life-changing. He has also made an intimate and moving film about that experience, from the decision to have a baby, through pregnancy and the delivery. Everything is documented in close-up, including Jack’s arrival in a hospital birthing pool.

You might expect McConnell to be an extrovert; an exhibitionist, even. In fact, the Guardian multimedia journalist is reserved and private in a rather old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip English way. So why on earth would he want to expose himself like this?

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World’s smallest baby boy at birth to leave hospital in Japan

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Mother of Ryusuke Sekino said: ‘It seemed he would break if I touched him. I was so worried’

When Ryusuke Sekino was born last October, his mother feared that even touching him could prove dangerous for his tiny frame.

Six months later, Ryusuke, believed to be the world’s smallest surviving baby boy, is preparing to leave hospital in central Japan on Saturday after his weight increased from 258g (9.1oz) at birth – roughly the weight of a pack of butter – to more than 3kg.

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Women’s rights in the Catholic church | Letters

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Jenny Tillyard addresses the issue of unwanted pregnancy and a ‘demographic disaster’ in Africa, while Judith A Daniels says the church needs to legitimise women’s much-needed accession to leadership roles

Cherie Blair was right to mention the problem of forced pregnancy among young schoolgirls in Africa (Cherie Blair accused of reinforcing stereotypes about African women, 27 March). She was speaking at a Catholic school, and Catholics are currently struggling with the whole problem of unwanted pregnancy and women’s (and men’s) rights.

In traditional societies in Africa, a girl’s reproductive capacity was “owned” by her birth family, and there were recognised customs to enforce damages for “seduction”, which to some extent protected young girls. These protections have vanished with modernity, and organisations such as Cafod can provide in-depth information about the attrition of girls in school past puberty, which puts a question mark over every attempt at social development (we are talking about girls as young as 11). Of course African leaders, including bishops, would rather not talk about this. But a demographic disaster is unfolding in southern Africa, and silencing talk about it will not make it go away.
Jenny Tillyard
(Lived 30 years in Zimbabwe), Seaford, East Sussex

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When do the clocks change in 2019 and could this be the last time?

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British Summer Time starts on Sunday as EU moves towards ending mandatory clock changes

It’s that time of year again, the ritual of trying to work out which of your electronic gadgets automatically adjust for clock changes, and which don’t. British Summer Time (BST) officially starts at 1am on Sunday 31 March, when the clocks go forward an hour to 2am.

With Brexit on the horizon, it remains to be seen whether changes to daylight savings time (DST) plans in continental Europe will have any effect on the British clocks in the future. This week MEPs voted to approve plans for European Union member states to abolish clock changes if they want.

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Getting fit in middle age as beneficial as starting early – study

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Increasing activity in 40s and 50s lowers risk of early death just like staying fit from teens

Getting active in midlife could be as good for you as starting young when it comes to reducing the risk of an early death, researchers have suggested.

But experts say the study, which looked at people’s patterns of exercise as they aged and their subsequent death records, also shows it does not do to rest on your laurels: the benefits fade once exercise declines.

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New parents face up to six years of sleep deprivation, study says

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Data from thousands of men and women shows rest is at its worst three months after birth

Starting a family is a well-known way to make a good night’s sleep a distant dream, but new research suggests the parental yawns might go on for six years.

Researchers tracking the sleep of thousands of men and women as their family size increased have found that shuteye hits a low about three months after birth – with the effect strongest in women.

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Siesta no more? Why Spanish sleeping habits are under strain

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Spaniards eat later and stay up longer than their European neighbours because of the siesta. But now that’s under threat

Midweek in Madrid on a summer’s evening, it’s 25C and at 10pm the bars, cafes and squares are full of Madrileños, chatting and drinking. They’re still there at midnight, only now some are eating too. Not until 2am do the bars start to close as the crowd thins out. Most of these people will have to go to work in the morning, so the question is: when do they sleep?

The answer is, later. According to Eurostat, the average Spaniard’s day starts 90 minutes later than a German’s. When the Spaniard eats lunch the German has been back at work for two hours and when the German knocks off at 4.30pm, the Spaniard is heading back to work for another three hours. And finally, when the German is in bed at 10pm, the Spaniard is having supper before hitting the sack some time between midnight and 1am.

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‘You will have an emotional reboot’: the ultimate guide to stress at every age

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Every life stage brings its own pressures, from worrying about exams to juggling the needs of family. Here are the best coping tactics for each generation

Triggers
“Children are really the canaries in the mineshaft of human society. They are the individuals within our cultures that are the most sensitive to the difficulties – and stresses – that societies experience,” Tom Boyce tells me. Professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, he specialises in the treatment of three- to eight-year-olds. Major stressors in this age group include marital conflict, violence in the home, violence in the community, problems with parental mental health – a mum or dad who is depressed – maltreatment and disciplinary behaviours that become punitive.

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‘Getting out of bed is the first hurdle’: how I cope with my anxiety

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Dread and despair have been a part of my life since childhood – and then I started writing about politics ...

The anxiety is ever-present. Sometimes only as a form of background noise; a voice that tells me I’ve failed at the day before it’s even begun. At other times it’s more insistent. An almost physical presence. A heart-pounding feeling of dread that makes it a struggle to get out of bed. A longed for desire to go back to sleep, to rewind the clock, in the desperate hope that I could start the day again.

I stare at the clock, calculating how long I can leave it before I have to get out of bed and engage with the day. Another 10 minutes maybe? Twenty if I choose to skip breakfast. Hoping that the anxiety will have passed by the time I do get up, while knowing that every delay merely makes it worse. I know it’s a kind of madness. But it’s one to which I invariably succumb.

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