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Honestly, Is Baldness Really That Beautiful?
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It’s easy to say bald is beautiful when you’re a female with hair down to your ankles, but what about the poor bald guys who have to look in the mirror?
Would you believe the man in this picture is only 35?
Okay, I’m lying. But if you died his minimal remaining fringe hair brown and smeared his face with a bit of anti-wrinkle cream, that’s how he would have looked at age 35 – or hell, even at age 25. Men like this one, with only the thin horseshoe fringe barely clinging on, are termed Norwood Class 7 balders. That’s the summit of the top of the bald mountain no man wants to climb. You don’t get any balder than this. Men with seemingly no hair are Class 7’s who shaved off their fringe hair, like the actor Telly Savalas or Michael Jordan. All these fellows started losing their hair shortly after they obtained their driver’s licenses, maybe before. By the time they graduated university, they were walking around with the shiny scalps they’ll display for the rest of their lives. When you see flashbacks of a youthful Homer Simpson or Jeffrey Tambor’s patriarchal character on Arrested Development, both are shown with half decent heads of hair. In reality, both men, as Class 7’s, would never have had hair as adults. You can actually see a young Jeffrey Tambor in his mid-thirties in reruns of Three’s Company and in its spinoff The Ropers. He was as golfball bald then as he is now.
I’m not a vain man, but bald scalps never looked becoming to me. At just 10, I was paranoid I’d end up looking like the man in our picture. My grandfather on my mother’s side was balder than a bald eagle on chemotherapy, and back then I was told and believed that baldness was inherited through the mother’s father. Actually, baldness can be inherited from either side of the family. Well, no saving grace there. My father’s father was a Class 5, and my own father, as far as I can remember, was emerging into a Class 5 of his own. My chances for growing into adulthood with a hairy scalp looked bleak. Was I to be one of the doomed to have to smear sun screen upon his chrome domed scalp?
If I’d known anything about genetics then, there were a few meager strands of hope for me. Baldness is a sex-linked gene, which manifests more obviously in men than in women. My maternal grandmother’s brothers all possessed full heads of hair, and my paternal grandmother also came from a family where apelike scalps were not unknown. If my mother were carrying hairy genes, there was a chance my scalp would receive her endowment. Problem is: how do you know what genes your mom is carrying?
Male pattern baldness is triggered by hormones, a genetic predisposition, and an internal clock that governs when each follicle starts to shrink. The hormones don’t kick in until puberty. That’s why you never see any prepubescent bald tykes roaming about the playground. Nonetheless, by age 14 I was already using special anti-dandruff shampoos to prevent inflammation of the scalp. A short while later, I was using biotin shampoos and hair gels that purportedly counteracted the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase from turning the male hormone testosterone into dihydrotesterone (DHT).
[Click the picture to read the rest of this brilliant article]
Mastering A Master Cleanse
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Wringing yourself out only requires a few ingredients but a lot of commitment
In 1863, in an essay entitled Concerning Spiritualism And Materialism, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote that “man is what he eats.” Sixty years later, nutritionist Victor Lindlahr expressed that “ninety percent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.” That five-word phrase has since never gone out of fashion.
It’s widely accepted that scoffing processed chocolate bars and pizzas isn’t going to infuse your body with the same vitality as fresh fruits and vegetables. And despite the diet to health relationship being acknowledged, albeit grudgingly much of the time, it is by no means universally accepted that a detoxification regimen on an occasional basis is advisable to correct for the less-than-optimal foods put into us the rest of the time. In Britain, Sense About Science makes an annual effort debunking the entire idea of a detox. Sense About Science could just about be any mainstream organization in any developed nation, proclaiming that detox products don’t work and/or are a waste of money and that our bodies are already designed with the ability to handle whatever we pump into them. In 2007, CNN wrote up an article “Deconstructing ‘detox’ diets.” Their verdict: detoxes longer than 3 days can rob the body of vitamins and nutrients; the best way to detox the liver is to limit exposure to toxins; lymphatic drainage on a healthy person is impossible because there’s nothing whatsoever to drain; and a box of high fiber cereal is equivalent in health benefits to an expensive colonic irrigation.
If our marvelous bodies were capable of handling whatever garbage we dump into or onto them, then nobody should be toxic. Our efficiently-designed bodies would eliminate all the toxins. Yet when a journalist had himself tested for 320 substances for a “National Geographic feature in 2006, he tested positive for chemicals and toxins he was exposed to decades before, such as DDT and PCB’s. Most of us won’t or can’t shell out US$15,000 to get such comprehensive work done, but what makes any of us think we’d test negatively for similar toxins? We consume meat laden with hormones, vegetables doused in pesticides, and use household cleaners, cosmetics, creams, and lotions containing ingredients we can’t pronounce. Some common food additives don’t exist in nature, so our bodies don’t know how to effectively process them. Think of hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, and the artificial sweeteners found in soft drinks and sweets. If the body could handle whatever we threw at it, vegetarians should suffer from colon cancer – indeed, all cancers – at the same rates as carnivores, yet they don’t.
When you ask an expert about something, the true expert can answer you with authority only if he’s used or has wide experience with those who’ve used that something. The unique thing about the anti-detox brigade is the fact that none of them have ever undergone a serious detoxification. Detox detractors smear cleansing in a very simplistic fashion. They:
· Highlight a widely recognized ineffectual detox protocol and use that as an example to cast doubt on all other detoxification programs.
· Point out the extreme dangers a detox protocol could bring about if practiced by an idiot. This would be akin to someone calling vegetarian diets dangerous because they could lead to anaemia.
Notice the way CNN “deconstructs” a detox. They say that detoxes longer than 3 days can rob the body of vitamins and nutrients, not that they will. This all depends on what you’re doing during your program – are you crash dieting or juice fasting? The conventional American diet robs one’s body of vitamins and nutrients, but you never see the conventional media ever commenting on those dangers. CNN’s advice to detox the liver by limiting exposure to toxins is tantamount to saying that you could improve your chances of not dying in a car accident by limiting your exposure to cars. It’s useless advice.
Unlike the so-called experts, I feel I can offer some basic detoxification and cleansing advice because I’ve actually done several detoxes. My initial cleanses/detoxes were multi-day juice fasts. Later, I performed two five-day water fasts. Two-and-a-half years ago I went on a two-week cleanse. One week consisted of no eating, herbs, psyllium and bentonite, and colonics twice a day. I can unequivocally say after the experience that a box of high fiber cereal won’t clean out your intestines the same way a well-performed colonic will.
[Click the picture to read the rest of this brilliant article]