All the lonely people, part 2

"All the lonely people, where DO they all belong?" -The Beatles

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer

In bleak nursing homes and vibrant college dorms, in crowded cities and spread-out suburbs, Americans confront an ailment with no single cause or cure.

Some call it social isolation or disconnectedness. Often, it's just plain loneliness.

An age-old ailment, to be sure, and yet by various measures — census figures on one-person households, a new study documenting Americans' shrinking circle of intimate friends — it is worsening.

It seems ironic, even to those who are affected. The nation has never been more populous, soon to reach the 300 million mark. And it has never been more connected — by phone, e-mail, instant message, text message, and on and on.

Yet so many are alone in the crowd.

"People are increasingly busy," said Margaret Gibbs, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. "We've become a society where we expect things instantly, and don't spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person."

Some Americans are making a new commitment, getting reconnected in groups or one-on-one and combatting a phenomenon that can take a heavy toll on communities and individuals.

In its most pronounced forms, loneliness is considered a serious, even life-threatening condition, heightening the risks of heart disease and depression. A sense of isolation can strike at almost any age, in any demographic sector — parents struggling to adjust to empty-nest status, divorcees unable to rebuild a social life, even seemingly self-confident college students.

John Powell, a psychologist at the University of Illinois counseling center, says it's common for incoming freshmen to stay in their rooms, chatting by computer with high school friends rather than venturing out to get-acquainted activities on campus.

"The frequency of contact and volume of contact does not necessarily translate into the quality of contact," Powell said.

The trend toward isolation surfaced in the last U.S. census figures, which show that one-fourth of the nation's households — 27.2 million of them — consisted of just one person, compared to 10 percent in 1950.

In June, an authoritative study in the American Sociological Review found that the average American had only two close friends in whom they would confide on important matters, down from an average of three in 1985. The number of people who said they had no such confidant soared from 10 percent in 1985 to nearly 25 percent in 2004; an additional 19 percent said they had only one confidant — often their spouse.

"That may be the most worrisome thing," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who co-authored the study. "If you lose that one person, because the relationship declines or the person dies, you have no one to support you. If we're all becoming more dependent on our spouse or partner for that kind of complete knowing of each other, we're all vulnerable to losing that."

The study suggested an array of possible causes — including an increase in working/commuting hours and expanding use of the Internet to stay in touch with other people, lessening the need for face-to-face contacts.

"We e-mail each other rather than calling or meeting, so there can be a sense of connection but also a loss of actual time spent with friends and families," Gibbs said.

Some Americans shrug off the trend, content with their ever-evolving social circles. Others, though, are unsettled at what they see and feel, and search for remedies.

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MID-LIFE SINGLES:

Karina Penaranda was at Mass in 2002 when it dawned on her that her peers at her Roman Catholic church in Phoenix — single adults 35 to 60 — had no fixed place in the diocese's social orbit.

"There were groups for elderly people, marriage encounters for couples — and youth groups are everywhere," said Penaranda, who is in her 40s. "Once single people reach this age they don't have a community. They don't really have a place to go where they can share their hopes and dreams."

With a few other parishioners, Penaranda founded a group called Catholic Singles Ministry. It now draws scores of people from across the Phoenix area and beyond to twice-yearly retreats and to events ranging from prayer breakfasts to bowling nights to food-bank volunteer work.

"We have people who've been divorced, been widowed, never been married," she said. "At our retreats we talk about loneliness, relationships. ... You know that you're not alone in going through this journey."

Penaranda, a project manager for a bank, has never been married. She savors socializing, but it takes conscious effort.

"The busyness in people's lives is one of things that prevents it," she said. "That happens to me — I get immersed in work, and have to step back and say, 'Time out.'"

One of Penaranda's colleagues in the ministry, Monica Smith, said community service is a key element.

"We're reaching out to others in our singleness, our aloneness," she said. "It gives us, without family, without children, a greater sense of belonging."

Singles ministries have proliferated nationwide, notably at megachurches. At Parkcrest Christian Church in Long Beach, Calif., about 150 of the 2,500-member congregation participate in a group for singles aged 35 to 65.

"They're looking to connect with other people in a society that's geared to married people, to people with families," said the Rev. Jim Vlahos, Parkcrest's singles minister.

Many of the group's members are divorced, said Vlahos, himself a never-married 41-year-old.

"Once someone gets divorced, they tend to lose their married friends," he observed. "It's not a stigma thing, it's an awkward thing — 'Oh, you're single now, and we do married things.'"

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EMPTY NESTERS:

Having a spouse and children doesn't insulate adults from bouts of loneliness; one particularly vulnerable subset are parents confronting the empty-nest syndrome as their children reach young adulthood and leave home.

"Some take it really really hard," said Jeanine Herrin of Inglis, Fla., who launched an Internet chat room called Empty Nest Moms. "That's all they did — they lived and breathed kids, and all of the sudden the kids are gone."

She noted that many such parents had a network of adults they knew through their children's activities — a network that can shrink or vanish when the children leave.

"Some moms are almost basket cases when they come into our group," Herrin said. "But with most of them, you can feel that sense of relief, that they're not really going crazy, that there are so many others feeling the same way."

Some husbands share the emotional rollercoaster, while others "just don't understand at all," Herrin said. "Some are thrilled to death the kids are gone."

Many of the hundreds of women who have posted messages on the Web site candidly acknowledge their bouts of crying and self-pity. One mother described in detail her devastation over the departure of her youngest child, and then the elation of filling the emptiness by becoming a foster parent.

Ellen Ritter, who has a doctorate in psychology, works as a "family transitions coach" in Hudson, Ohio, and often counsels empty-nest mothers. "It's really hard to make new friends," she said, "and that's why so many women are reaching out to the Internet."

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COLLEGE STUDENTS:

If some empty-nest parents feel a void in their lives, so do some of their absent children

"A lot of students go through periods of loneliness," said Zanny Altschuler, 20, of Menlo Park, Calif., who is completing her freshman year this summer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

"The social life on campus can be crazy," she said. "Rather than sticking with close friendships that can be hard to maintain, people forge a broader circle of acquaintances."

Altschuler cited the phenomenon of Facebook.com, the social-networking Web site on which students can enumerate their "friends."

"You go on some profiles and they say they have 1,000 friends, and they probably don't even know half of them," she said.

John Powell, from his vantage point at the Illinois counseling center, says students increasingly have difficulty "making really satisfying connections" even though the university offers many activities to bring students together.

"All the students I work with have incredibly many pseudo-intimate relationships online — but without the kind of risk and vulnerability that goes with sitting across a cafe booth from another person," Powell said.

Sean Seepersad, who now teaches at California State University, Fresno, earned his doctorate at Illinois last year by designing an intervention program for lonely students.

Seepersad said some of the students were predictably shy and withdrawn, others on the surface seemed extroverted and socially skilled. He encouraged them to share their feelings, analyze why they felt lonely and work on their social skills.

"Lonely people may not be aware of things they're doing that perpetuate the problem," he said. "It's something that can be helped."

___

OLD AND ALONE:

She laughs gently at her blunt self-analysis, but Helen Granath doesn't mince words.

"It's a very lonely existence — most of the time the loneliness can be excruciating and painful," says the 84-year-old widow from San Francisco. "I have very few friends. They're either ill or they've passed away or moved somewhere else."

Her husband died 30 years ago; she says her son "is very busy in the computer business. I don't see him very often."

No data set enumerates how many elderly Americans feel such pangs of loneliness, but undoubtedly there are millions who could empathize with Granath. She ventures out of her apartment for errands and movies, but is slowed by leukemia and arthritis and — after the latest in a series of hip replacements — sought help and companionship from a volunteer group called Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly.

For the past several years, the group has sent volunteers to visit her — bringing flowers on holidays and gifts on her birthday.

Jim Doyle, 48, who does promotional work in San Francisco for a movie theater chain, started volunteering for Little Brothers this year, and has become the sole loyal friend of a 67-year-old developmentally disabled man named Frank.

"He lives by himself, and does custodial work, but other than that he didn't have a whole lot to do," said Doyle. "He'd stay home and watch a lot of TV. Now we got out to the movies, for walks — he calls me all the time. He appreciates it, and it's been great for me."

Bob Moody, a retired Chicago businessman, has been volunteering for Little Brothers since 1981 — he had been visiting his cancer-stricken mother in a nursing home and noticed that many patients didn't have visitors.

Since then, he's devoted each Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter to visits with isolated seniors, as well as making visits periodically throughout the year.

"Let's face it," Moody said. "Old people can be grouchy sometimes. With some, there's a little mistrust early on because they don't really know you. But as time goes on, they gradually open up."

One refrain he hears: "My kids don't live that far away, but they don't come to visit me."

His current Little Brothers friend is Rocky Lepore, an 85-year-old blind man who savors the visits. "He always wants to give me something," Moody said, "a box of candy, some little mints."

___

NEIGHBORS:

If anyone was pleased by the June report on shrinking circles of close friends, it was Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who viewed it as vindication of his best-selling book "Bowling Alone."

Some academics had challenged his thesis in 2000 that civic engagement and neighborliness were on the decline, but many Americans took the message to heart.

Close to Putnam's home base at Harvard, for example, David Crowley has founded an organization called Social Capital Inc. that is striving to connect neighbors and build civic spirit in the Boston-area communities of Woburn, Dorchester and Lynn.

"People are less connected to their neighbors today, and they miss that," Crowley said.

His projects seek to use the Internet as a connecting tool.

Last winter, for example, SCI members in Woburn received an e-mail notice that one elderly, low-income resident was worried how he would get his driveway cleared of snow. Within a day, Crowley said, a neighbor volunteered to use his snowblower to the keep the driveway clear all winter.

Putnam, in an interview, said vibrant social networks have benefits for individuals in terms of health and happiness, and for communities as well.

"The crime rates are lower, the schools work better, the economy works better," he said.

The challenges to connectedness are many. Strolls through the neighborhood and visits on front porches have been replaced in many cases by retreats indoors to be entertained by TVs, computers and video games.

Spouses are more likely to be both working and less likely to have one or two other couples with whom they forge close, long-lasting ties. Instead, they may have a broader circle of couples they know only casually through their children's schools or sports leagues.

"We've brought more women into the workplace, but we have not addressed the consequences for families and communities," Putnam said. "We need to invent new ways of connecting."

Born too late

Here's a guy who really lives in the slow lane. The rest of us are pretenders. Enjoy.

Born 150 Years Too Late

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By JOYCE WADLER

Published: August 3, 2006

DUNDEE, N.Y.

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FRED R. CONRAD/The New York Times

John A. Coffer sitting for a portrait on his farm in Dundee, N.Y.

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Audio Slide Show: A Master of Tintype

THERE are those who, on hearing that the tintype photographer John A. Coffer lives without car, phone or plumbing, might call him a Luddite. This, he insists, is not true — for one thing, he has a computer. He even has a computer room. The walls are bales of hay, the roof is tin, and the power source is a 75-watt solar panel outside in the pasture. Mr. Coffer, who lives on a 48-acre farm in the Finger Lakes, built his computer room in March. It’s lasted nicely through heavy rains and if it falls apart, Mr. Coffer says, no matter: He’s invested all of $15 in it.

You consider yourself a dedicated artist because you lived in a tenement walk-up without air-conditioning? Mr. Coffer, who is one of the few people credited with a recent revival of tintype photography, and who supports himself with the sale of his work and his tintype workshops, does not just make photographs as one did in the 1860’s, he lives, to a large extent, the way one might have in the 1860’s. (In late July, he played host to his sixth annual tintype jamboree, free of cost, for dozens of fellow aficionados.)

He spent seven years on the road with a horse and buggy, and that’s the way he still gets around. He uses an outhouse. He lives in a small log cabin, which he built. The heat in the cabin comes from a wood-burning cast-iron stove, so that everything in the cabin, including Mr. Coffer, has the soft, smoky scent of soot.

One also senses, early on, a low smoldering anger. Mr. Coffer, who, with his suspenders, straw hat, horse and buggy, is frequently mistaken for Amish, is not a mad artist in the woods, but he can be a somewhat cranky one. Asked why subjects in 19th-century photos rarely smiled, he says it is because they were dignified; it is only in recent times that people “feel they have to show their teeth like a used-car salesman.” He is annoyed with the values of modern women — an attitude which is easier to understand once you learn that his wife, after a short time in the cabin, ran off.

And while Mr. Coffer, who is 54, prides himself on living off the grid, he does not want to be lost there. Meeting a reporter for the first time, he brings his scrapbook of newspaper stories about his life on the road. Much of Mr. Coffer’s work in those days was at Civil War re-enactments, and as he flipped through his scrapbook, he said that he sometimes drove eight and a half days in his buggy to get to a site, while the re-enactors pulled up in their trucks or vans.

“You’d be surprised at how delicate some of these re-enactors are,” Mr. Coffer said.

No one could ever accuse Mr. Coffer of being delicate. His log cabin is 12 feet square. He hauls water from his well with a two-bucket yoke. He sleeps in a small loft, with sheets that scream out for an intervention. Since Mr. Coffer has no refrigerator to which he can affix photos, a few favorite tintypes cling to the cross-saws on the cabin wall.

One shows two young women Mr. Coffer met at a Civil War re-enactment a few weeks ago. They’d been bored, so he’d photographed them in their Civil War underwear — pantaloons and tops — along with a whiskey jug and gun belt that he added “to make it interesting.” Mr. Coffer is a man, it is becoming clear, who could use an online dating service, but as his computer is not connected to the Internet, some hardy woman of pioneering spirit will have to find him, taking care not to kick the chickens as she crosses the cabin threshold.

It is also clear that Mr. Coffer is a very handy fellow. His farm includes a half-dozen structures: wagon barns, outhouse, darkrooms, root cellar, all of which he built. The skull atop Mr. Coffer’s corral is what remains of White Lightning, an ox who appeared in many of his tintypes. Mr. Coffer reduced the skull to bone by placing it on an anthill.

Mr. Coffer is not opposed to all modern convenience. His solar panel charges batteries for the single bulb in his cabin and for the radio on which he listens to NPR. He keeps his expenses to the bone. His cabin cost $800, most of it for cedar shingles. The handsome claw-foot cast-iron tub near the woods, in which he bathes in fine weather, was $1. The 60-gallon cauldron that he uses to heat bath water was $20.

How often does he bathe?

Twice a week in winter, when he uses a portable aluminum tub indoors; every day in summer.

What about the sheets?

Mr. Coffer proudly led the way to a 1925 Maytag, which is outside the cabin, near the woods. The rubber wringer is corroded but the inside is fine. Mr. Coffer hauls the water from his well and hooks the Maytag up to a battery. The washer cost $15 at a farm sale.

The big question: why does Mr. Coffer choose to live like this?

“Modern living was always too fast for me,” he said. “I was not good at 20th-century living.”

He grew up in Las Vegas. His father was a magician and hypnotist; his mother was a schoolteacher who refused to marry his father until he became a responsible provider. That turned out to be never. His father gambled; both parents were hooked on diet pills. Both are now dead. Although his father was “kind of a louse,” Mr. Coffer admired his independence.

Mr. Coffer, as a young man, tried several careers: doing underwater construction on oil rigs; running a diving business; working as a studio photographer in Orlando, his subjects schoolchildren and businessmen.

“There was one approach to portraiture,” he later wrote, in a self-published book “Horsehair In My Soup: Book 1.” “The broad smile, the flash, the color prints that fade all too soon and the aura of glamour that surrounded the studio began to grate against my sensibilities. Something within me was intent at looking deeper than face level.”

Then one day, he saw an old wooden Century Number 4 camera in a shop window and knew, in an instant, that it would change his life. He bought the camera for $50 and began photographing re-enactments, soon trading in his car for a horse and buggy. He mixed his own chemicals, creating images on glass and metal plates.

It took about an hour to make a portrait, including sensitizing the plate, taking the picture, then developing, fixing, washing, drying and varnishing the plate. Subjects also had to sit unmoving for several seconds, sometimes with the aid of a neck brace. Sitting for that amount of time, it is difficult to hide one’s true face.

On the road, Mr. Coffer also found a wife.

“Big mistake,” Mr. Coffer says now. His wife had wanted adventure, but after a while she said she’d leave if they didn’t settle down. In 1985, they came to Yates County, where land was $300 an acre and an Amish community provided a support system for horse-drawn conveyances. Mr. Coffer’s wife stuck around for the building of the cabin. Then came her demands for the car and the phone, he said. Then, he said, after two years in the cabin, she ran off with Mr. Coffer’s assistant for the bright lights of Ithaca. She left him 18 years ago and Mr. Coffer hasn’t had an affair of the heart since.

“Nobody likes it up here, I guess,” he said, out in the canvas-covered darkroom in the pasture, as evening came on and with it time to milk the cow. “It’s like a monastery here, I guess.”

He could go out and try to meet a woman.

“I used to do all that, go to singles bars,” Mr. Coffer said. “It was cheap. It just wasn’t fulfilling. I don’t want to live up to other people’s expectations. I own this land, 50 acres free and clear. I’ve got a lot of money in the bank. I’ve been in galleries in New York. And yet girls go, ‘He doesn’t have a phone.’ ” Mr. Coffer rarely curses, but speaking about women, he does. They’ll chase down a guy 10 feet in debt over his head, working at some dead-end job, who’s got a phone and a car, he said angrily.

Actually, it’s probably the lack of plumbing, he was told.

“I love my outhouse,” Mr. Coffer said. “It is a little bit of a challenge in January, but I don’t linger out there.”

Also, since we’re on the subject, there’s no place inside the cabin to bathe. That claw foot tub near the trees might be okay in August, once, if a lady is feeling like doing a little nymph in the woods number, but after that, forget it. There aren’t many hippie chicks left. And Mr. Coffer is 54, and if we’re talking women his own age, they’ll be getting up in the middle of the night to hit the bathroom. Often.

Mr. Coffer was unmoved. He happens to like living as he does, he said. Conveniences like e-mail and phones end up being your master. Driving a horse and buggy, he’s not beholden to auto and gas companies.

“I was a great student of how people lived in the 19th century,” he said. “I emulate my heroes, the independence people had, the old wagons and things. It’s just more of an earthy way of moving, the natural rhythm, the poetry, the pace.”

And he headed down to the pasture, to the cows.

Baby Food

Baby Food is becoming more and more delicious. Enjoy.

A New Tasting Menu in the Baby Section

By DANA BOWEN

Published: August 2, 2006

WHEN Akiyo Mitchell, a jewelry designer, traveled from New York to Las Vegas on business in June, she had asparagus risotto and homemade chicken soup FedExed to her hotel.


Lars Klove for The New York Times
NO BIB? NO PROBLEM A taste test of HappyBaby organic food in progress.
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Forum: Parenting

Maren Caruso
Frozen puréed foods made by HappyBaby include spices like coriander.
It’s not that she wasn’t planning on dining out. The meals were for her 9-month-old daughter, Lena, who turns up her nose at jarred baby foods.
“They’re tasteless,” Ms. Mitchell said in a sympathetic tone. So she went to urbanbaby.com and found a reference to Evie Failla, a personal chef for babies who cooks, vacuum-packs and freezes weeks’ worth of meals in her clients’ homes. Ms. Failla recently started Evie’s Organic Edibles, a line of small-batch frozen baby food. The product has become a staple in Ms. Mitchell’s freezer.
For years baby food changed little. Now there has been a growth spurt of alternatives, from single-ingredient purées to complete toddler meals in designer packages. Most can be found in the frozen-food section of supermarkets, like Whole Foods, which has freezers dedicated to baby food in some of its stores.
Homemade Baby, in Culver City, Calif., ships fresh baby food, even cross-country. Bohemian Baby, in Los Angeles, also ships, but it will drop off batches of food made hours earlier to houses in its delivery area, replacing empty jars.
And while these new baby foods often cost twice as much as jarred food, or more, interviews with several customers suggest they are not just feeding babies born with silver spoons in their mouths.
“Our gift certificates have been in celebrity baby shower goodie bags, but most of our customers are concerned parents who have made fresh food a priority,” said Theresa Kiene, co-founder of Homemade Baby, a year-old company that sells fresh meals like Baby Tex Mex (kidney beans, brown rice and vegetables) in her Culver City store, which has a tasting room where parents and children can sample before they buy.
These baby food start-ups, mostly the brainchildren of parents who searched in vain for alternatives to jarred food, address the way parents’ dietary concerns are magnified by a highchair. The new baby foods are all organic, and they are sold fresh or frozen, not in shelf-stable jars, which, Ms. Kiene said, “are often older than the baby you’re feeding them to.”
They also contain ingredient pairings not usually found in food for infants and toddlers. Plum Organics, a new company based in New York, will sell a fruit-studded rice pudding and chunky meat stews made with celeriac and bay leaf. A spoonful of carrots from Evie’s Organic Edibles, available at Fairway and Whole Foods, delivers a gingery zing. You can taste shallots and herbs lurking in the lentils.
HappyBaby, which sells colorful cubes of frozen vegetable and fruit purées through FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage, flavors puréed peas with fresh mint, and potatoes and red lentils with coriander and cinnamon in their savory dahl, an Indian staple.
“This is how my parents fed me,” said Shazi Visram, co-founder of HappyBaby, which began on Mother’s Day and is expanding its line this month. “Why shouldn’t babies, of all people, get to eat delicious things?”
Baby food has grown into a $3.6 billion a year business, according to ACNielsen, the consumer research company. But until recently flavor profiles had not evolved much since 1928, when Dorothy Gerber sold her first cans of puréed, strained peas and carrots — an innovation at a time when babies were often fed cereal gruel, said Amy Bentley, an associate professor at New York University who is working on a cultural history of baby food. (The glass jars came in 1931, from Beech-Nut.) Most baby food manufacturers long ago abandoned added salt, sugar and modified starches as thickeners.
The new baby foods appeal to parents from countries where the division between adult and baby food is not as distinct as it is in the United States.
“In Japan mothers are very creative and try to feed their babies from the same meals as adults,” Ms. Mitchell, who was born in Japan, explained over the phone. One of the earliest foods she fed her daughter was broth infused with bonito flakes, seaweed and, later, miso.
She believes these early introductions have made her children adventurous eaters. “I have friends whose kids won’t eat anything but pasta,” she said.
Many experts agree that if babies develop a taste for fresh fruits and vegetables and for healthy preparations that make them more interesting, these preferences will follow them through life.
“One of the big issues that we’re struggling with is obesity,” said Steven J. Czinn, a pediatric gastroenterologist and chairman of the department of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “I think anyone who’s looked at baby food, who’s had a child who had tried baby food, will agree they’re relatively bland with not much taste. Doing something to enhance flavor, if the baby food itself has the appropriate nutrition, is a good thing.”
Major baby food companies have been expanding their flavor range, too. A new line of soup by the Earth’s Best line includes cinnamon. Gerber’s new organic line, Gerber Organic — the largest introduction of new products in the company’s history — pairs ingredients like apples and sweet potatoes.
In 2002 University of Tennessee researchers, commissioned by Gerber, published an eight-year study that reported that children’s food preferences are formed as early as 2 to 3 years of age and that new flavors may first be shunned but are often accepted after repeated offerings.
Dr. Czinn recommended cautiously introducing foods, one at a time. Because food allergies and intolerances are on the rise in the United States, he urges parents to wait until babies are at least 4 months before introducing solids, and to avoid potential allergens like eggs, nuts and honey until a year, when the digestive and immune systems are fully developed.
But many parents complain about the mixed messages they get from pediatricians, friends and family.
“I’m overwhelmed with questions,” said Leah Agudelo, cradling 4½-month-old Veronica, after taking a baby food class at Realbirth, an education center for new parents in Manhattan. Ms. Agudelo’s mother is pushing orange juice, her doctor rice cereal. “My husband is from Colombia, and they feed babies ground lentils, even meats, and rice,’’ she said. “We’re thinking avocado.”
Erin Patterson, the instructor of the class, who also runs smallbitesonline.com, a Web site about feeding children, said, “There are no rules or laws, especially in a city where we have people from all over the world.”
But some parents remain skeptical. “Moms ask me, ‘Can babies really have that?’ ” said Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby, which delivers meals like Vegetable Korma, made with coconut milk, for 12-month-olds, and purées of fruits like pomegranates and figs for infants. “And I say, of course! What do you think they feed babies in India?”
Not all parents see the point in the new, more expensive preparations of baby food.
“I don’t need another thing that’s going to go bad in the fridge,” said Sheila Cecil, of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, whose youngest of four children started picking up finger food and eating it at 8 months. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to pop a sweet potato in the microwave.”
The new baby food companies tout their fresh and frozen methods as being healthier, claiming that they preserve more nutrients than the jarring process, which involves cooking food to higher temperatures.
Nutritionists agree that freezing gently cooked ripe produce could be even healthier than cooking under-ripe produce.
While major baby food companies have yet to venture into a frozen product, they have been galloping toward organics. Sales of organic baby food have shot up 58 percent in five years, 16 percent in the last year alone, according to ACNielsen.
“I don’t always eat organic, but our kids pretty much do,” said Louise Ortega, a former nanny who lives in Inwood and hired Ms. Failla to cook for her 22-month-old daughter, Emily. “In fact, they eat better than we do.”

Give wounds air

Yet aother Grandma Lillian piece of advice proven scieintifically true.

Really?

The Claim: Wounds Heal Better When Exposed to Air

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By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Published: August 1, 2006

THE FACTS Most parents and school nurses have a time-honored approach to treating a small wound: clean it up, stop the bleeding and then let it get some air.

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Leif Parsons

The point of this approach, as described in medical texts, is to lower the odds of infection and to speed the healing process. But over the years, researchers have found that what many people know about treating small cuts and scrapes is wrong.

Exposing a wound to the air so it can breathe is a terrible mistake, experts say, because it creates a dry environment that promotes cell death.

A handful of studies have found that when wounds are kept moist and covered, blood vessels regenerate faster and the number of cells that cause inflammation drop more rapidly than they do in wounds allowed to air out. It is best to keep a wound moist and covered for at least five days.

Another common mistake is applying antibiotic ointments, said Dr. Mark D. P. Davis, a professor of dermatology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. These ointments may keep the wound moist, he said, but they can also lead to swelling and an allergic reaction called contact dermatitis. Plain and simple Vaseline, applied twice a day, works fine.

And as awful as removing scabs may sound, it may actually be a good idea, Dr. Davis said. A small initial scab will help stop the bleeding, but if left for too long it will do more harm than good.

“You don’t want it to mature too much because it increases scarring,” he said. “That’s the general thinking.”

THE BOTTOM LINE Exposing a cut so it can breathe slows healing.

scitimes@nytimes.com

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Bigger - but better?

IS bigger, better? I don't think so . . . Enjoy !


The New Age
So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You

Richard Perry/The New York Times
The 21st-century Keller family. Craig and Sandy are seated at center, with their daughters Kristy Harden, left, and Rachel. In the rear from left are Kim Werk, Craig’s sister; Dennis, his brother; and Priscilla Keller Reynolds, his mother.


By GINA KOLATA
Published: July 30, 2006
Valentin Keller enlisted in an all-German unit of the Union Army in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1862. He was 26, a small, slender man, 5 feet 4 inches tall, who had just become a naturalized citizen. He listed his occupation as tailor.
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A year later, Keller was honorably discharged, sick and broken. He had a lung ailment and was so crippled from arthritis in his hips that he could barely walk.
His pension record tells of his suffering. “His rheumatism is so that he is unable to walk without the aid of crutches and then only with great pain,” it says. His lungs and his joints never got better, and Keller never worked again.
He died at age 41 of “dropsy,” which probably meant that he had congestive heart failure, a condition not associated with his time in the Army. His 39-year-old wife, Otilia, died a month before him of what her death certificate said was “exhaustion.”
People of Valentin Keller’s era, like those before and after them, expected to develop chronic diseases by their 40’s or 50’s. Keller’s descendants had lung problems, they had heart problems, they had liver problems. They died in their 50’s or 60’s.
Now, though, life has changed. The family’s baby boomers are reaching middle age and beyond and are doing fine.
“I feel good,” says Keller’s great-great-great-grandson Craig Keller. At 45, Mr. Keller says he has no health problems, nor does his 45-year-old wife, Sandy.
The Keller family illustrates what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.
New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”
The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.
The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.
Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.
The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.
“What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging,” said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.
Each event can touch off others. Less cardiovascular disease, for example, can mean less dementia in old age. The reason is that cardiovascular disease can precipitate mini-strokes, which can cause dementia. Cardiovascular disease is also a suspected risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
The effects are not just in the United States. Large and careful studies from Finland, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands all confirm that the same things have happened there; they are also beginning to show up in the underdeveloped world.
Of course, there were people in previous generations who lived long and healthy lives, and there are people today whose lives are cut short by disease or who suffer for years with chronic ailments. But on average, the changes, researchers say, are huge.
Even more obvious differences surprise scientists by the extent of the change.
In 1900, 13 percent of people who were 65 could expect to see 85. Now, nearly half of 65-year-olds can expect to live that long.
People even look different today. American men, for example, are nearly 3 inches taller than they were 100 years ago and about 50 pounds heavier.
“We’ve been transformed,” Dr. Fogel said.
What next? scientists ask. Today’s middle-aged people are the first generation to grow up with childhood vaccines and with antibiotics. Early life for them was much better than it was for their parents, whose early life, in turn, was much better than it was for their parents.
And if good health and nutrition early in life are major factors in determining health in middle and old age, that bodes well for middle-aged people today. Investigators predict that they may live longer and with less pain and misery than any previous generation.
“Will old age for today’s baby boomers be anything like the old age we think we know?” Dr. Barker asked. “The answer is no.”
Trying to Change a Pattern
Craig Keller does not know what to expect of his old age. But he is optimistic by nature, and he knows he has already lived past the life span of his beleaguered ancestor Valentin. He is 5-foot-9, 200 pounds and exuberantly healthy.
He grew up in Hamilton, the same town on the Kentucky border where Valentin lived, worshiped and was buried. And he still lives there, working as a court bailiff, married to Sandy, whom he met when they were in second grade. Now, married 25 years, the Kellers have two grown daughters, a lively black dog and no complaints.
Craig and Sandy Keller had all the advantages of middle-class Americans of their age: childhood vaccines, plenty of food, antibiotics when they fell ill. Now, wanting to stay healthy, they walk in the evenings, try to eat well and rely on their strong faith, which, they say, makes a big difference to their health. And they enjoy life.
Mr. Keller pulls his wife’s tan Chevy Malibu into the driveway of his small, immaculate house on a sidewalk-lined street. It is the same house that he grew up in; he and Mrs. Keller bought it from Mr. Keller’s parents 22 years ago. While Mrs. Keller brings out a snack of a homemade cheese ball, crackers, sandwiches, fruit salad and brownies, Mr. Keller settles in to marvel at the contrast between his comfortable life and the lives of his ancestors.
For him, the idea of falling ill in his late 20’s and never working again is unimaginable. He knows, though, that he is nearing the age when many of his ancestors died. His father, Carl D. Keller, a lifelong smoker, developed prostate cancer, then emphysema, and then lung cancer, which killed him at age 65. His father’s father, Carl W. Keller, also a smoker, died of cancer of the esophagus just after he turned 69. His grandfather on his mother’s side died of cirrhosis of the liver at 55; his grandmother died at 56 of breast cancer.
“They never got out of their 50’s and 60’s,” Mr. Keller said. “So that’s kind of in the back of your mind.” He worries about his lungs, given his family history. He had pneumonia once and has had bronchitis.
But, Mr. Keller reasons, he is so physically different from his ancestors — he has never smoked and is so much healthier, so much better fed — that he really thinks he will break the spell.
And if exercise is good for health, the Kellers certainly have exercised. Mr. Keller displays a bookcase in their basement, crammed with athletic trophies. Mrs. Keller’s are from baton twirling, Mr. Keller’s are from baseball, basketball, softball and soccer. Their daughters, 19-year-old Rachel and 22-year-old Kristy, got theirs cheerleading.
Mrs. Keller said that when she was her daughters’ age, “I didn’t think about my health very much.”
“But later in my 30’s and toward my 40’s,” she said, “I started to think about it. You try to eat right, you try to exercise. And you do see your parents with illnesses. And you wonder about yourself. My mom had a quadruple bypass when she was 75, and she had to have a pacemaker after that. She’s now in her 80’s, but you do wonder.”
Was it genetic destiny or health habits that caused her mother’s heart disease? Mrs. Keller asks herself. Her mother smoked for more than a decade, finally quitting with great difficulty before Mrs. Keller was born. “She said the Lord helped her,” Mrs. Keller said.
Mrs. Keller has never smoked. Concerned about heart disease, she had her cholesterol level tested a few years ago and now takes medication to lower it. She walks at lunch with the women in her office and after dinner with her husband.
Her daughter Rachel, petite and quiet with a quick smile, is already thinking about her family’s medical history. She worries about heart disease, worries about lung disease. She has already had her cholesterol level measured — it was normal. And she is shocked when people her age start smoking.
“In high school, none of my friends smoked,” she said. “They came back from their first year in college, and all of them did.”
“It’s hard to think about getting old when you’re young,” Rachel added. “But when you see your family members — my grandpa died of lung cancer, my grandparents on both sides had cancer. So it’s on my mind a lot of times.”
But still, the future is so distant it is almost unfathomable to her. “I wonder what we’re going to be like when we’re old,” she mused.
Lives Plagued by Illness
Scientists used to say that the reason people are living so long these days is that medicine is keeping them alive, though debilitated. But studies like one Dr. Fogel directs, using records of of Union Army veterans, have led many to rethink that notion.
The study involves a random sample of about 50,000 Union Army veterans. Dr. Fogel compared those men, the first generation to reach age 65 in the 20th century, with people born more recently.
The researchers focused on common diseases that are diagnosed in pretty much the same way now as they were in the last century. So they looked at ailments like arthritis, back pain and various kinds of heart disease that can be detected by listening to the heart.
The first surprise was just how sick people were, and for how long.
Instead of inferring health from causes of death on death certificates, Dr. Fogel and his colleagues looked at health throughout life. They used the daily military history of each regiment in which each veteran served, which showed who was sick and for how long; census manuscripts; public health records; pension records; doctors’ certificates showing the results of periodic examinations of the pensioners; and death certificates.
They discovered that almost everyone of the Civil War generation was plagued by life-sapping illnesses, suffering for decades. And these were not some unusual subset of American men — 65 percent of the male population ages 18 to 25 signed up to serve in the Union Army. “They presumably thought they were fit enough to serve,” Dr. Fogel said.
Even teenagers were ill. Eighty percent of the male population ages 16 to 19 tried to sign up for the Union Army in 1861, but one out of six was rejected because he was deemed disabled.
And the Union Army was not very picky. “Incontinence of urine alone is not grounds for dismissal,” said Dora Costa, an M.I.T. economist who works with Dr. Fogel, quoting from the regulations. A man who was blind in his right eye was disqualified from serving because that was his musket eye. But, Dr. Costa said, “blindness in the left eye was O.K.”
After the war ended, as the veterans entered middle age, they were rarely spared chronic ailments.
“In the pension records there were descriptions of hernias as big as grapefruits,” Dr. Costa said. “They were held in by a truss. These guys were continuing to work although they clearly were in a lot of pain. They just had to cope.”
Eighty percent had heart disease by the time they were 60, compared with less than 50 percent today. By ages 65 to 74, 55 percent of the Union Army veterans had back problems. The comparable figure today is 35 percent.
The steadily improving health of recent generations shows up in population after population and country after country. But these findings raise a fundamental question, Dr. Costa said.
“The question is, O.K., there are these differences, and yes, they are big. But why?” she said.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at Harvard. “Maybe it’s the trillion-dollar question. And there is not a received answer that everybody agrees with.”
Outgrowing the Past
Don Hotchkiss, a civil engineer in Las Vegas and a descendant of Civil War veterans, is an avid Civil War re-enactor. Early on, he and his brother tried to sleep in an exact replica of one of the old tents.
It was too small, Mr. Hotchkiss said. He is six feet tall and stocky. His brother, a police officer in Phoenix, is thinner, but 6-foot-2. The tents were made for men who were average size then. “In the past 145 years, we’ve ballooned up,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.
At a recent meeting of a Las Vegas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, eight burly men crowded into a library meeting room. All had experienced the equivalent of the Civil War tent problem.
“At the re-enactments, all the directors, all the costume directors say the re-enactors are just too darn big,” said George McClendon, a hefty 67-year-old retired airline pilot.
Mr. McClendon is right. Men living in the Civil War era had an average height of 5-foot-7 and weighed an average of 147 pounds. That translates into a body mass index of 23, well within the range deemed “normal.” Today, men average 5-foot-9½ and weigh an average of 191 pounds, giving them an average body mass index of 28.2, overweight and edging toward obesity.
Those changes, along with the great improvements in general health and life expectancy in recent years, intrigued Dr. Costa. Common chronic diseases — respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems — have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.
The reasons, she and others are finding, seem to have a lot to do with conditions early in life. Poor nutrition in early years is associated with short stature and lifelong ill health, and until recently, food was expensive in the United States and Europe.
Dr. Fogel and Dr. Costa looked at data on height and body mass index among Union Army veterans who were 65 and older in 1910 and veterans of World War II who were that age in the 1980’s. Their data relating size to health led them to a prediction: the World War II veterans should have had 35 percent less chronic disease than the Union Army veterans. That, they said, is exactly what happened.
They also found that diseases early in life left people predisposed to chronic illnesses when they grew older.
“Suppose you were a survivor of typhoid or tuberculosis,” Dr. Fogel said. “What would that do to aging?” It turned out, he said, that the number of chronic illnesses at age 50 was much higher in that group. “Something is being undermined,” he said. “Even the cancer rates were higher. Ye gods. We never would have suspected that.”
Men who had respiratory infections or measles tended to develop chronic lung disease decades later. Malaria often led to arthritis. Men who survived rheumatic fever later developed diseased heart valves.
And stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.
People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. “In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85,” he said. Now the average age is 62.
A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. “I think there is just this long-term scarring.”
Searching for Answers
Dr. Barker of Oregon Health and Science University is intrigued by the puzzle of who gets what illness, and when.
“Why do some people get heart disease and strokes and others don’t?” he said. “It’s very clear that current ideas about adult lifestyles go only a small way toward explaining this. You can say that it’s genes if you want to cease thinking about it. Or you can say, When do people become vulnerable during development? Once you have that thought, it opens up a whole new world.”
It is a world that obsesses Dr. Barker. Animal studies and data that he and others have been gathering have convinced him that health in middle age can be determined in fetal life and in the first two years after birth.
His work has been controversial. Some say that other factors, like poverty, may really be responsible. But Dr. Barker has also won over many scientists.
In one study, he examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.
Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.
That famine lasted from November 1944 until May 1945. Women were eating as little as 400 to 800 calories a day, and a sixth of their babies died before birth or shortly afterward. But those who survived seemed fine, says Tessa J. Roseboom, an epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam, who studied 2,254 people born at one Dutch hospital before, during and after the famine. Even their birth weights were normal.
But now those babies are reaching late middle age, and they are starting to get chronic diseases at a much higher rate than normal, Dr. Roseboom is finding. Their heart disease rate is almost triple that of people born before or after the famine. They have more diabetes. They have more kidney disease.
That is no surprise, Dr. Barker says. Much of the body is complete before birth, he explains, so a baby born to a pregnant woman who is starved or ill may start life with a predisposition to diseases that do not emerge until middle age.
The middle-aged people born during the famine also say they just do not feel well. Twice as many rated their health as poor, 10 percent compared with 5 percent of those born before or after the famine.
“We asked them whether they felt healthy,” Dr. Roseboom said. “The answer to that tends to be highly predictive of future mortality.”
But not everyone was convinced by what has come to be known as the Barker hypothesis, the idea that events very early in life affect health and well-being in middle and old age. One who looked askance was Douglas V. Almond, an economist at Columbia University.
Dr. Almond had a problem with the studies. They were not of randomly selected populations, he said, making it hard to know if other factors had contributed to the health effects. He wanted to see a rigorous test — a sickness or a deprivation that affected everyone, rich and poor, educated and not, and then went away. Then he realized there had been such an event: the 1918 flu.
The flu pandemic arrived in the United States in October 1918 and was gone by January 1919, afflicting a third of the pregnant women in the United States. What happened to their children? Dr. Almond asked.
He compared two populations: those whose mothers were pregnant during the flu epidemic and those whose mothers were pregnant shortly before or shortly after the epidemic.
To his astonishment, Dr. Almond found that the children of women who were pregnant during the influenza epidemic had more illness, especially diabetes, for which the incidence was 20 percent higher by age 61. They also got less education — they were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. The men’s incomes were 5 percent to 7 percent lower, and the families were more likely to receive public assistance.
The effects, Dr. Almond said, occurred in whites and nonwhites, in rich and poor, in men and women. He convinced himself, he said, that there was something to the Barker hypothesis.
Craig Keller hopes it is true. He looks back at the hard life of his ancestors, even those of his great-grandfather and his grandfather, working as painters, exposed to fumes. And, of course, there was poor Valentin Keller, his Civil War ancestor, his health ruined by the time he was 30.
Today, Mr. Keller says, he is big and healthy, almost despite himself. He would like to think it is because he tries to live well, but he is not so sure, especially when he hears about what Dr. Barker and Dr. Fogel and the others have found. Maybe it was his good fortune to have been born to a healthy mother and to be well fed and vaccinated.
“I don’t know if we have as much control as we think we do,” he said.
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All families should have such a lovely video of sons and daughters as they grow up. Enjoy.

Shared Yoga Mats spread yukkies !!!

Holy smoly !!! Be forewarded !!!

Communal Yoga Mats: Beware of Germs

By ABBY ELLIN

Published: July 27, 2006

GREG E. COHEN, a podiatrist at Long Island College Hospital, hears the same story a lot: women complaining about a flaky red bump or a persistent itchy patch on a foot. By the time he sees them, they’re embarrassed and horrified. A few years ago, Dr. Cohen, who also has a private practice in Brooklyn Heights, didn’t know what to make of it, but these days he doesn’t blink an eye.

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TREAD CAREFULLY Health clubs and gyms vary widely on the practice of cleaning yoga mats.

“The first thing I ask is, ‘Do you do yoga?’ ” he said. As often as not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

In the last two years, Dr. Cohen said, he has seen a 50 percent spike in patients with athlete’s foot and plantar warts. The likely culprit? Unclean exercise mats, he said.

Gyms have long been hothouses for unwanted viruses, fungi and bacteria, a result of shared equipment, excessive sweat and moisture in locker rooms. Many facilities provide disinfectant so clients can wipe down machinery, but they are often less diligent when it comes to exercise mats. It’s common to see staff members clean a stationary bike. It’s rare to see them disinfect a mat.

This is starting to worry many yoga practitioners who go barefoot on high-traffic mats. Half a dozen kinds of yoga-mat wipes are now sold nationwide, and new products like hand and foot mitts, to protect serial mat borrowers, have hit the market.

Because yoga is more popular than ever, it could well be a coincidence that health-care professionals like Dr. Cohen are seeing more infections. In 2005, 16.5 million people practiced yoga nationwide, up 43 percent from 2002, according to Yoga Journal.

Research has not confirmed the link between unclean yoga mats and fungal, bacterial and viral infections better known as jock itch, plantar warts and staph infections. Nor can dermatologists and podiatrists conclusively trace these ailments to dirty yoga mats.

Still, some are making unofficial connections. A handful of dermatologists and podiatrists say that in the last two years or so they have noticed a rise in the number of skin infections in their patients who practice yoga and use public mats.

“Most people know to wear flip-flops in the shower and locker rooms but they don’t think about it on a yoga mat,” said Noreen Oswell, the chairwoman of podiatric surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the last two years, Dr. Oswell said there has been an uptick of fungal infections among her patients who use mats that aren’t properly cleaned.

Dr. Ellen Marmur, who runs the division of dermatologic surgery at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, said she has seen more bacterial infections in the last year and a half in “young women who mentioned they did yoga and Pilates,’’ and for whom she had ruled out other risk factors for dermatitis or dry, itchy skin. Dirty exercise mats were most likely to blame, Dr. Marmur said.

Washing dozens of mats regularly can be laborious and costly, which is why Jen Lobo, an owner of Bikram Yoga NYC, raised her rental price to $5 a mat from $2.

“Every night we clean the mats with an antibacterial yoga spray” and hang them to dry, Ms. Lobo said. “Weekends, we put them in the washing machines with Dr. Bronner’s Soap. It’s a lot of manual labor.”

Many facilities encourage practitioners to buy their own mat or put the onus on members to clean them. For instance, Sports Club/LA gyms provide wipes outside classrooms for patrons. Most Gold’s Gyms offer antiseptic solutions for yogis.

Representatives at most of the 10 gyms and studios that a reporter called nationwide said that they aim to clean mats thoroughly once a week.

Some chains like Crunch Fitness had more ambitious policies, but little oversight. “The goal is to wash mats once a day,” said Amy Strathern, a spokeswoman. Does that happen? “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s up to the general manager of each gym to make sure it’s done properly.”

Among chains, compliance sometimes varies from club to club. Carol Espel, the national director of group fitness for Equinox Fitness, said that mats are wiped with a citrus-based disinfectant every other day and machine-washed twice a month.

But a group fitness manager at a branch of Equinox Fitness in Manhattan, who was granted anonymity because he feared losing his job, said that mats were machine-washed only “every two months” and wiped down in between. On the other hand, George Smith, maintenance manager at the Greenwich Avenue outpost, followed Equinox’s policy more closely. Mr. Smith said mats were disinfected in a machine weekly and wiped down three times a week.

Critics warn that hygiene isn’t always a priority at some gyms and studios. Heather Stephenson, a Brooklyn yoga teacher who has worked for two gyms and has worked out in more than 25 worldwide, said: “In my experience it is not an incredibly regular practice to clean them.” Ms. Stephenson, who is a founder of Idealbite.com, an eco-living Web site, added that blankets, which are used for headstands, “aren’t often cleaned, either.”

Some specialists also worry that the cleaning solutions are not as effective as they could be. In order for a mat wipe to work, the liquid needs to have alcohol or quat-based disinfectants that are commonly used in detergents, said Dr. Philip Tierno, the director of clinical microbiology at N.Y.U. Medical Center. The wipe also needs to be moist enough to wet the entire surface. Soap and water won’t kill bacteria, but chlorine will, added Dr. Tierno, the author of the book “The Secret Life of Germs.”

Longtime devotees of yoga tend to buy their own mats and don’t lend them to anyone because they consider them an intimate part of their practice. It’s what Robert Butera, editor in chief of Yoga Living magazine, calls yoga hygiene. Cleaning one’s mat is about “being self-reliant and improving your health any way you can,” he said.

Drop-ins and relative newcomers who use communal mats take the biggest risks. Robin Parkinson, a marketing executive in Los Angeles, began doing yoga at Equinox in Westwood about six months ago. She used the mats provided because she never saw a need to buy her own. “I don’t have a horse, either, and I ride,” Ms. Parkinson said.

One day she noticed a scaly red patch of skin on her right arm. It began to itch. And when her left leg and inner thighs also started itching, she went to four doctors because no one seemed to know what was wrong. At last, one gave her cortisone cream and told her to stop borrowing yoga mats. “I haven’t gone onto a public mat since,” she said.

For two years, Darby Friedlis used loaner mats from Bikram Yoga East in Midtown Manhattan, where she practiced hot yoga. Then she got a nasty surprise when she went for her monthly pedicure. “The manicurist took one look at my foot, which was itchy and a little flaky, and cried, ‘You have athlete’s foot!’ ” said Ms. Friedlis, a 25-year-old publicist in Manhattan. Her father, a doctor who specializes in pain treatment in Fairfax, Va., was the one to suggest that unclean yoga mats might be the source of her problem.

While a wart or fungus between their toes may dismay yogis, such ailments won’t kill them. “Athlete’s foot is not exactly a life-threatening disease,” said Dr. Timothy McCall, the medical editor for Yoga Journal. “And plantar warts and athlete’s foot are so common. You could make yourself crazy with this stuff.”

That hasn’t stopped entrepreneurial yogis from rolling out products to combat the hygiene problem. Judy Alley from Scottsdale, Ariz., created hand and foot mitts called Yoga Grip Gloves, after an especially unpleasant class four years ago. “The first time I got down on the mat I was disgusted,” Ms. Alley said. “I wanted to wear my shoes but they said ‘No.’ ”

Before starting a cleaning-products line six months ago, Selena Stirlen visited 20 yoga studios nationwide and asked about cleaning practices. Their response disgusted her. “A lot of studios can’t afford a cleansing product, and they only do a major wash in the machine twice a year,” said Ms. Stirlen, who now sells wipes for on-the-go hygiene as well as a spray and machine detergent.

Not everyone is impressed. Heather Schlegel, who has practiced Bikram yoga for three years, once bought a Jo-Sha Wipe, another moist towelette made for mat cleaning. “I tried wiping down my mat, but the unfolded square was too small and kept getting scrunched up as I rubbed it across,” she said of the 75-cent wipe. “It didn’t look particularly cleaner when I was finished.”

As for Ms. Friedlis, she stopped yoga after curing her athlete’s foot with an over-the-counter cream. “Now I do the elliptical or the treadmill,” she said. “Things where I have shoes on.”

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This concoction has long been the Holy Grail for makers of confections: the fat-free yet creamy and yummy ice cream ! Can't wait to try this product. Enjoy.

Creamy, Healthier Ice Cream? What’s the Catch?

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: July 26, 2006

IN its quest to create ice cream as voluptuous as butter and as virtuous as broccoli, the ice cream industry has probed the depths of the Arctic Ocean, studied the intimate structures of algae and foisted numerous failures on the American public.

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SCOOP OF SCIENCE Companies are using new methods to make ice cream a guiltless pleasure.

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Forum: Fitness and Nutrition

“I have tried them all as they came down the pike: dairy-free, fat-free, sugar-free; with tofu, yogurt, rice, whatever,” said Linda Calhoun, a teacher who lives near Flagstaff, Ariz., cataloguing the disappointments she has tasted over the years. “They always make me sad.”

For Americans who spend each summer wrestling with temptation, there is fresh hope in the freezer case. New industrial processes, including one that involves a protein cloned from the blood of an Arctic Ocean fish, have allowed manufacturers to produce very creamy, dense, reduced-fat ice creams with fewer additives. The new products appeal to those who have acquired a taste for superpremium high-fat ice cream but cannot stomach its fat content.

Edy’s (branded as Dreyer’s west of the Rockies) has tripled sales in its reduced-fat line since replacing its Grand Light with Slow Churned in 2004. Breyers introduced Double Churned flavors last year and has nearly doubled its product line. More than just marketing-speak, slow-churned and double-churned each refers to a process called low-temperature extrusion, which significantly reduces the size of the fat globules and ice crystals in ice cream.

Banking on the creamy mouth-feel of these new formulations, even Häagen-Dazs launched a line of Light ice creams last year to complement its butterfat-rich line. “We waited years and years for this technology,” said Gulbin Hoeberechts, a marketing manager for the company. “Before, our only choices would have been adding air, water or ingredients that don’t belong in ice cream.”

Almost all commercial ice creams contain industrial ingredients that mimic the luxurious effects of butterfat and egg yolks: some are natural, like carrageenan, extracted from algae plentiful in the Irish Sea; others are synthetic, like mono- and diglycerides.

But using new technologies can be risky for manufacturers. The other new method for making supercreamy ice cream was caught up last month in the global debate over genetically modified foods. In June, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, applied to Britain’s Food Standards Agency for permission to use a new ingredient in its frozen desserts — a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.

Instead of extracting the protein from the fish, which Unilever describes as “not sustainable or economically feasible” in its application, the company developed a process for making it, by altering the genetic structure of a strain of baker’s yeast so that it produces the protein during fermentation.

This ingredient, called an ice-structuring protein, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is used by Unilever to make some products in the United States, like some Popsicles and a new line of Breyers Light Double Churned ice cream bars.

“Ice-structuring proteins protect the fish, which would otherwise die in freezing temperatures,” said H. Douglas Goff, professor of dairy sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “They also make ice cream creamier, by preventing ice crystals from growing.”

In Britain, where Unilever’s Cornetto cone is as iconic as the Fudgsicle is in the United States, the news media have leapt in with headlines about “vaneela” ice cream. Britain, like the rest of the European Union, requires labeling for any food that has contact with genetically altered material, even if that substance is not present in the finished product. In its application Unilever stressed that no DNA or other “material from fish” is used in the process. But genetically modified foods have yet to gain wide acceptance from the European public, and Unilever has found itself the unwilling center of attention.

“It’s unfortunate that this happened to come out during our so-called summer when people are interested in ice cream,” said Trevor Gorin, head of media relations for Unilever in the United Kingdom. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that no, the Cornetto will not taste fishy.”

The United States has no regulations requiring the labeling of genetically modified food, which has become increasingly common at every point in the food chain. Until recently, its practical applications were mostly in developing strains of crops, like soybeans and corn, that are more resistant to stresses like disease, weather and insects.

But research by people like Professor Goff is beginning to bear fruit for the processed-food industry: proteins like the ones found in the ocean pout are an example.

For consumers, the benefit is that ice-structuring proteins and low-temperature extrusion have raised the “creaminess” bar for the ice cream industry.

“The ice creams produced with the new methods are simply better than any ice creams have ever been,” Professor Goff said. “Quite definitely better in texture, and much better tasting.”

A tasting by the staff of the Dining section found the Breyers Light Double Churned chocolate ice cream bar with the ice-structuring protein very creamy, even dense. It was the favorite of five ice cream bars tasted. The Häagen-Dazs Light and the Breyers Light chocolate ice cream, using low-temperature extrusion, were also very creamy and did not seem to be low-fat. But tasters found that the new ice creams still lagged behind full-fat versions in flavor.

“The quest has always been for the taste and texture of full-fat ice cream,” said Tyler Johnston of Edy’s. “Since the 1980’s it’s been about adding ingredients,” he said, referring to the gels and gums that commercial producers churn into reduced-fat ice cream to improve and stabilize its texture. “Now we have a complicated process, but the recipe can be simplified,” he added, referring to the industrial freezers that reduce the ice cream from minus 5 to minus 25 degrees Celsius for low-temperature extrusion.

The public seems persuaded. Shelf space for Dreyer’s/Edy’s Slow Churned, Breyers Light Double Churned and Häagen-Dazs Light has consistently expanded since they appeared. The category to which they belong, reduced fat, is the only part of the ice cream market that has been increasing in sales. As defined by the F.D.A., light or reduced-fat products can contain up to half the fat grams and two-thirds the calories of the original. (For a product like Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, this means a reduction from 18 fat grams to 7 in the Light line; a low-fat product can have no more than three fat grams per serving.)

While full-fat ice cream still makes up more than 65 percent of the total market, the International Dairy Foods Association says that sales in the category have been flat for three years and that sales of low-fat and nonfat ice cream have gone down in the same period.

Professor Goff said that outside the United States the significance of the new technologies would be noted not on the palate but on the pallet. “American companies are getting ready to export ice cream to China, India, the Philippines,” he said. “These are places that have very real cold-chain issues,” he said, referring to the challenge of keeping ice cream consistently frozen throughout the shipping process.

Products produced with the new technologies are less affected by partial thawing than traditional ice creams, which become dry, sticky and hard in fluctuating temperatures. (This is why letting a container of ice cream thaw on the counter before scooping it is a bad idea.)

“Ice crystals are everyone’s enemy in ice cream,” said Arnold Carbone, the head of the Ben and Jerry’s research lab in South Burlington, Vt. (Ben and Jerry’s, now also owned by Unilever, does not use either new process.) “Ice cream is an emulsion of air, fat and water, and emulsions are always fragile because the elements want to separate.”

Every time ice cream thaws slightly, the emulsion is compromised and the ice crystals combine into larger, jagged crystals that destroy the ice cream’s texture. “This is the drama of the cold chain,” he said. “Every minute that ice cream sits on a loading dock, it suffers incredible abuse.”

Professor Goff, whose lab is working on a process of extracting ice structuring proteins from winter wheat, has a low-tech solution for those trying to avoid crystallization. “It’s simple,” he said. “Never leave a container of ice cream unfinished.”