“Go with Your Gut: From GI distress to allergies, probiotics
may help ease your health problems”
Yoga Journal, 09.08
Through her childhood and adolescence Jamie Koonce suffered from allergies and
migraine attacks. By the time she was in her early 20s, the migraines had gone,
but her maladies now included insomnia, stomach pain and depression.
Then, four years ago, Koonce made some changes in her life. She started doing
vinyasa yoga daily and taking Chinese herbs for general health. But she found
that the most profound improvements in her well-being came from the few nights
of kimchi she began eating before meals and the fermented kombucha tea she drank
daily. To her surprise, not only did her stomach cramps disappear but she almost
immediately had more energy and felt her mood lighten. She began sleeping through
the night and awoke feeling refreshed.
The secret behind Koonce’s miracle recovery? The probiotics, or beneficial
bacteria, that are prevalent in foods such as kimchi, yogurt, kefir and aged
cheese. Koonce had stumbled upon what medical systems such as traditional Chinese
medicine (TCM) and Ayurveda have found, and what Western medicine through science
is now beginning to accept: A shortage of “good” bacteria in the
gastrointestinal tract can affect nearly every system in the body, from your
respiratory system to your digestion. And some scientists are discovering that
replenishing the levels of certain beneficial strains of these bacteria may alleviate
long-standing conditions whose roots have evaded diagnosis.
Download a PDF of this article
here.
“Where are Heather’s Two Mommies? The numbers
of kids living with gay parents has increased dramatically,
but the amount of media catering to them has not”
The Advocate, 07.15.08
When Leslea Newman wrote the landmark Heather Has Two Mommies more than
18 years ago, not a single publisher would touch it. Not a gay press, not an
independent children’s book publisher and certainly not a major publishing
house like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins or G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Eventually, she published it via a friend’s small press, raising the money
for the first run through $10 donations from readers. Then gay publisher Alyson
Books picked it up.
Newman’s upcoming children’s books—the first board books for
infants featuring two moms and two dads—will be released by the independent
children’s publisher Tricycle Press in 2009. Tricycle publisher Nicole
Geiger sought Newman out for the job.
“I think of these books as Heather’s little brothers and sisters,” says
Newman. “But again, these are still the first of their kind. About once
a year one will squeak through from the major publisher. But in general, for
picture books aimed at kids up to age 8, I haven’t seen much change in
the market over the past 18 years.”
Children’s media—DVDs, books, television programming, even songs—lag
woefully behind the baby boom now underway in the gay community. Since the publication
of Heather, gay parents have raised more than 400,000 children, according to
statistics compiled by the Charles R. Williams Project on Sexual Orientation
Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. Despite this, only about two
dozen picture books aimed at those children have been published in the same time.
And product is similarly scarce among other children’s media.
Download a PDF of this
article here.
“New House on the Block: How new urbanism met
one old neighborhood”
San Francisco Chronicle, 05.18.08
The four new homes on Oakland's 66th Street have everything modern Bay Area houses
are to have - three bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, two stories, 1,500 square feet, plenty
of storage. The master bathrooms have separate tubs and showers. The living rooms
have large, elegant windows and open floor plans. The houses share this midblock
lot but have private yards. There are solar panels on each roof.
What they don't yet have is a family.
And really, that's what new houses need. By themselves in a neighborhood of established
homes and families, they are lonely things. What they really want is for the
mud of the yard to be tracked onto their clean hardwood and for stinky sneakers
and Little League uniforms to be thrown on now-pristine closet floors.
They long for the stampede of neighborhood kids who will crunch through their
careful landscaping and draw on their walls, and the owners who will patiently
guide the growth of trumpet vines and flowering elms around them. Their garages
ache for bikes or a car.
They long to belong—not only to the people who live in them but also to
the neighborhood.
Read
the full article here.
Download
a PDF of this article here.
“One-Stop Swapping: Swapping homes helps Bay Area people
see far-away places”
San Francisco Chronicle, 03.16.08
When Kate Pavao and Aaron Lazenby moved into their three-bedroom condo in Bernal
Heights two years ago, they knew they were making sacrifices. One of them was
that there would be no long Hawaiian vacations anytime in the near future.
But then the couple found themselves vacationing in Oahu for three weeks with
their 4-year-old daughter, Coco.
They didn't hit the lottery. No rich relative died and left them money. Instead,
Pavao and Lazenby discovered what hundreds of Bay Area residents already know.
To take your dream vacation, you don't have to pay an arm and a leg. You just
have to be willing to share your home.
Thanks to the Internet, home exchange programs have proliferated over the past
decade, offering Bay Area residents a way to leverage their biggest investment
into dream vacations. And, because they live in one of the post popular places
on Earth, they can easily swap their homes for the best locales. Potrero Hill
for Paris anyone?
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article
here.
“Lighten Up: When winter’s gloom darkens your mood,
yoga can brighten your days”
Yoga Journal, 01.08
During much of the year, Becky Hahn cheerfully heads to her yoga mat in the morning,
enjoying the deep breaths and Sun Salutations that leave her body humming.
But in the wintertime, it’s a different story. From mid-October through
April, Hahn feels mentally and physically drained. She struggles to get out
of bed in the morning, withdraws from family and friends, and has a tough time
coping with unexpected obstacles.
Sometimes she has to drag herself to her mat, but the 26-year-old Pennsylvania
resident makes sure not to miss her practice. Her regular yoga sessions make
her seasonal depression manageable. When she started doing yoga five years
ago, the change in her mood took a few weeks. But once she started feeling
an effect, she said, “The sunshine was back.”
Download a PDF of this article
here.
“Paradise Found: David Sandow, along with 180 other low-income
seniors, finds a happy home in San Francisco’s newest high-tech
neighborhood”
San Francisco Chronicle, 12.23.07
In San Francisco’s most up-and-coming neighborhood—high-tech, high-rent
Mission Bay—180 senior citizens with very low incomes have found paradise.
“I tell you—it’s not only a dream come true, but a blessing
and a prayer answered,” said Sondra Roland, 64. “To ever have a one-bedroom
apartment in this city, for an amount I could afford—it’s amazing.
I have a deck! Who would have thought I could have that without paying $1,700
a month?”
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Sticky Fingers: Open houses can be an open invitation
for theft”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.16.07
Selling your house? Consider this checklist: Alarm clock. Cuisinart. Glasswear.
Wine collection. Furniture. That Hummel collection. Area rugs. Leather jackets.
Laptop. Jewelry. Toiletries and towels.
A laundry list of items to pack up before you sell? Nope.
For Bay Area thieves, these are some of the items they’ve nicked from
open houses. Stealing during the open house itself, breaking back in to grab
a few things later and even backing a moving van up to a vacant, staged home,
open house thieves take literally the hospitality axiom “My home is your
home.”
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Good Bones: Unsatisfied with quick flips and dated inventory,
some home buyers are tearing down to build the house of
their dreams”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.16.07
Prospecting and flipping houses may be a cottage industry in San Francisco, where
home prices routinely buck national trends. But for some dedicated and visionary
homeowners, buying a house filled with someone else's labor is second best. When
they can afford it, they are willing to overhaul everything to make their house
fit them perfectly.
"What I've seen is that people pick a neighborhood where they want to be,
but those neighborhoods often have older, smaller homes than what they want," said
Derek Cavasian, president and general contractor of Distinctive Builders, a San
Rafael company that does new construction and remodeling all over the Bay Area. "If
they can't find the house they want in that location to fit their requirements,
they remodel extensively to get that."
These aren't cash-strapped first-time buyers who buy a fixer-upper
in order to break into the market. People who are attracted to teardowns
and extreme remodels can pay more than $1 million for a property and then
pour an additional half-million dollars into it.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this
article here.
“Borrowing in a Tough Market”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.16.07
Envisioning your dream home, complete with architectural drawings, is one thing.
Financing it is quite another - especially in the current market.
"It's going to be tough," said Natasha Lovas of Triton Funding Group
in San Francisco. "A lender is going to lend on the current value of the
property. To find a lender willing to lend on the future value, you need to get
a construction loan, where the rates are higher and the bank assumes a lot of
control over the whole process."
Not that long ago, a homeowner could get a loan for all the
value of the property without proof of income and with poor credit.
Today that's not the case.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this
article here.
“Modular Homes: How they stack up”
San Francisco Chronicle, 08.05.07
Rachel Purcell is a determined type. An industrial systems engineer by training,
Purcell is attracted to complex questions that require precise answers. So
when she discovered during the inspection of her new Alamo home that it was
full of toxic mold and asbestos - OK, yes, she flinched. But then she got to
work.
The solution, it turned out, came rolling in from a factory in Nebraska on
seven convoys of trucks. In less than three days, her new 6,000-square-foot
house was stacked and bolted together. Within three months, the final work
was completed - adding porches and other finish work. She and her family have
been living in it for four months.
Read
the full story here.
Download
a PDF of this article here.
“Modular home loan lenders hard to find”
San Francisco Chronicle, 08.05.07
Rachel and Bill Purcell were lucky. After taking out a mortgage on their Alamo
property, they were able to pay for the construction of their prefabricated
home without taking out another loan. For the rest of us, the normally arduous
process of navigating home finance is more complicated when it comes to prefabs.
Download a PDF of this
article here.
“Homophobic Bullying”
teenwire.com, 07.24.07
Homophobic bullying can be anything from teasing people for being gay or for
being perceived as gay to calling them anti-gay names, even in jest, to spreading
rumors about people's sexual orientation for the purpose of making fun of them
to hitting, throwing rocks at, and isolating people who are believed to be gay.
According to a study in the Journal of Early Adolescence, such behavior is more
than just a joke — it can have some serious, negative health effects for
the people who go through it. Like Kayla, people who experience homophobic bullying
are more likely to become depressed, anxious, feel like they don't belong, and
to withdraw from their social circles.
Read
the full story here.
Download a PDF of this
article here.
“Sleeping Separately”
NewsMax Magazine, 07.07
Apryl Chapman Thomas, 33, loves her husband and has two children
to prove it. But when she snuggles into bed most nights, she does it
alone.
“We’re about as normal as you can get,” says Thomas,
who lives in Watkinsville, Ga., with husband Chris and daughters Shay,
5, and Anna, 11 months. “But sleeping apart is actually better
for our marriage. I snore and talk in my sleep. We’re not fighting
about it anymore. I don’t see the big deal.”
A growing number of Americans are choosing to sleep in bedrooms
separate from their spouses, according to a recent survey
by the National Association of Home Builders. Survey respondents—most of them
home builders—say two out of every three custom houses will
have dual master suites by 2015. One in four new-construction houses
already does.
Article available upon request.
“Taking it for Granite: Gen Y asks for luxury
and technology”
San Francisco Chronicle, 07.15.07
The first shock to Kealoha Yoshioka's system after he signed
the papers to buy his first house last month was that he'd have to cut
back on buying Xbox games.
The 27-year-old Apple employee is a computer and gaming buff,
with a large flat-screen TV and a lot of high-definition media components.
He admits that limiting his purchases after a young adulthood where
he could have -- and did get -- everything he wanted is hard. Since
he and his fiancée, Christine Migita, 25, bought the two-bedroom
condo, Migita and her accountant mother put him on an allowance and
took away his credit cards.
But he says it was worth it to get a house with granite countertops,
his-and-hers sinks in the master bath, a home near restaurants and bars
and, new for him, an in-home washer and dryer. It even has crown moulding. "I
had no idea what crown molding was 'til we bought this place," he
chuckled. Living in Silicon Valley, he said he wants to be "in
the know about all the latest and greatest."
Yoshioka and his contemporaries often insist on a new home
with all the designer details, and are willing to spend to get them.
This is a generation that, according to demographers and market researchers,
spends more on itself than any other generation; that expects all the
high-end finishes and appliances that equip their parents' houses; and
that expects a few tech bells and whistles thrown in besides.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Riding into the Valley of Debt: Equity investing requires
saving, sacrifice, lots of patience”
San Francisco Chronicle, 05.20.07
Jessica Lanning has a radical idea: Don't pay off your mortgage. Don't pay a
down payment if you can avoid it. Carry as much debt as you can comfortably pay,
even if you could get a smaller mortgage, and put that debt -- that extra money
-- to work for you in the stock market, in savings or in high-yield investments
that can earn you more over the long run than simply buying and paying off your
home.
Lanning, a San Francisco certified mortgage consultant and financial strategist,
has spread this new debt gospel to more than 1,000 Bay Area residents, mortgage
brokers, certified financial planners and real estate agents over the past 10
years, and she expects to share it with 1,000 more before the end of June.
Read
the full article here.
Download
a PDF of this article here.
“Self Image and Sexual Health”
PlannedParenthood.org, 04.11.07
When Natalie Campbell-Ybarra, 24, got her first bra in second grade, she was
just an average tomboy who favored baggy jeans and loose T-shirts. She was totally
unaware of how other people saw her.
But after getting that bra, everything changed. She suddenly felt that she wasn’t
just a kid, but “the girl with boobs.” She became self-conscious
about people seeing the outline of her bra through her shirts and felt horrible
when kids teased her, asking her if she stuffed her bra. “Why would I do
that?” she remembers thinking. “Why would I want this?”
Soon she moved desks to the back of the class and became painfully
introverted. She refused to do oral reports because she would
have to stand up in front of everybody. She had a hard time
concentrating. She stopped playing jump rope with the other
girls. Her grades started to slip. She felt depressed and hated
her body. As a teenager, she says, all the teasing and assumptions
from people who thought she was older than she was and more
sexually experienced finally got to her. She started having
sex — and not good sex, either. She didn’t enjoy
it.
Campbell-Ybarra’s story may seem extreme, but it’s not, according
to a report recently released by the American Psychological Association. The
report, issued by the association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of
Girls, analyzed research on girls and sexualization and found that those who
felt alienated from their bodies and felt their appearance was the most valuable
part of themselves were also more likely to experience a number of poor health
effects.
Read
the full story here.
Download
a PDF of this article here.
“Generation Confused: Cancer vaccines, birth control,
emergency contraception -- with all these options, are
teens any sexually healthier?”
San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, 02.11.07
Teen girls
have access to the HPV vaccine, Depo-provera, a form of injectible
birth control they don't have to remember to take, and to prescription-only
Plan B, an emergency contraceptive that prevents pregnancy if
taken within days of unprotected sex. If you define sexual health as being
free of disease or pregnancy, today's teens have the potential to be the
healthiest of any in history.
But sexual health is more than that. The
World Health Organization defines it as "a positive and respectful
approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as
the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free
of coercion, discrimination and violence."
In a country where the president supports abstinence until
marriage, "To
Catch A Predator" regularly tops the ratings in its timeslot and
the raunchy "American Pie" films are hits, parents and teens
are trying to navigate a world marked by piety on the one
hand and raunch on the other.
What fills that gap is sexual schizophrenia:
lots of flash and little of substance to help teens understand
desire and how to navigate the tricky world of first relationships.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Resolve to Prepare”
teenwire.com, 01.02.07
Katie (not her real name) is starting the year with something
new: a prescription for emergency contraception (EC). As part
of her New Year’s resolution, the 17-year-old Massachusetts
resident is protecting herself in case a condom breaks or something
worse happens. Should you do the same? Katie thinks so.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“HIV Testing Today: How new guidelines could affect you.”
Planned Parenthood Online, 01.06
When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its revised recommendations for HIV testing earlier this fall, Dr. Celia Maxwell was ready.
Maxwell, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Management and Research at Howard University Hospital, deployed staff to the emergency room, labor and delivery department, the medical wards, and the outpatient clinics to give free HIV screening to everyone who wanted one.
She says it's time to start thinking of HIV in a different way.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Why his tenants Praise the ‘lord”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.26.06
Indeed, Hallinan is a tenant's dream: a landlord who is actively involved in
the health of his building, who attends annual Christmas parties, keeps rents
low, responds to complaints promptly, and pays union employees higher wages and
health benefits. And he's committed to not raising rents during this boom time.
"When I took over the buildings, I thought about, 'What would I be willing
to pay for this space?' " said Hallinan, a former tenants rights organizer. "What's
fair?"
Read
the full article here.
”HPV, Herpes and Sexual Health Vaccines”
Choice! Magazine Online, 10.27.06
When Jonas Salk discovered a vaccine for polio in the 1950s, he changed the lives
of millions of children and their parents. No longer did the public live
in fear of disfigurement or death from the disease. As the country commemorates
Salk’s birthday on October 28, researchers and scientists are making breakthroughs
of their own with vaccines that have the potential to improve the lives of people
at risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) — just about everybody
on the planet at some time in their lives.
“This is a very exciting time and I’m very heartened by the research,” said
Jeanne Marrazzo, associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington
in Seattle. “It’s a very wide open field right now. Sexual
health vaccines need to be very strongly developed over the next 10 years.”
Read
the full article here.
“A Healthy Give and Take”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.24.06
When Van Torma put his Alameda home on the market in April, he was expecting
packed open houses, multiple offers and a quick sale. Five months later, his
house is still on the market and Torma is perplexed.
Torma, 44, is one of a growing legion of "motivated sellers" populating
classifieds, open houses and real estate offices around the Bay Area. He has
slashed the price of his home, paid for staging, made upgrades and done a marketing
blitz. The original listing price was $930,000. Now it's $845,000, a fair amount
less than the $875,000 Torma turned down in April.
Read
the full article here.
“Men & the Mirror”
Choice! Magazine Online, 07.16.06
Research shows men of all ages and sexual orientations can experience a negatively
skewed view of their bodies called body dysmorphia. It can make men feel either
too fat, too short or too tall, or not muscular enough, and can include everything
from thinning hair to penis size to the shape and appearance of testicles, says
Dr. Katharine Phillips, director of the Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Body Image
Clinic at Butler Hospital in Providence, RI. She is the author of The Broken
Mirror: Understanding and Treating Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
Phillips' most recent research — which has not yet been published — shows
that 60 percent of men and women with body dysmorphia avoided physical contact,
including sexual activity and close dancing. Those who did have sex said it wasn't
satisfying. The study did not address whether men felt more sexually apprehensive
than women.
Read
the full article here.
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