Breast News Magazine

I have noticed a trend that I have to be honest, I don’t like.  Of course, I love the times of the month when my breasts swell and become larger, it’s fun, I must admit.  Every month, I have a window of 1-3 days where my breasts become very tender but also larger, maybe by a half cup size or so, which is quite a bit I think, and it’s always correlated to my monthly menstruation cycle because my hormones cycle around and make the breasts swell up for some reason.

However, along with this pleasant swelling, but not so pleasant soreness and tenderness, comes an unsightly side effect, which involves my veins being plainly visible through my skin on my breasts.  I actually thought of this the other day because i saw a picture of a very pregnant Angelina Jolie who happened to be wearing a cleavage-showing dress, and her breasts had the same thing I experience every month - you could see through her skin and see her veins on the top of her breasts -it’s like your skin become more translucent, or perhaps because the breast tissue is swelled up and out, the veins are just more visible during time of swelling.

At any rate, my boyfriend and I get a good laugh out of this when it happens, because of course he can’t take his eyes off of them when they get bigger, but there’s also the aspect that we call the “translucent” skin theory where my skin seems to have suddenly become as thin as paper since my inner veins are now so visible.  Actually, I’m about due for my monthly vein spotting, so here we go again!  Sorry for a gross topic, but I actually think it’s kind of funny. 

It seems the estrogen for women equates what the male sex hormone testosterone does in the body and in the mind as far as creating feelings of competition and rivalry.  We all know how we say that men are more competitive by nature than women, and that the competitive hormone responsible for their go get ‘em and kill ‘em attitudes in life is testosterone, which also is said to fuel agression in men, and even may have a role in that in women as well since women do have small amounts of testosterone as well in their bodies, and vice versa for men when it comes to estrogen. 

How do researchers know that estrogen plays a role in competition and the drive to win in women?  Well, like men, they’ve tested women’s estrogen levels after they’ve won something of a competitive nature and found that their estrogen levels pretty much went through the roof, and also fell significantly when they lost a competitive event, proving that estrogen is the same role player for the need to win and competition in men as testosterone is for the male.

So, ladies, guess we’re a lot more biologically driven to succeed and win in competitive sports and game than we realized, eh?  This doesn’t surprise me, and if I were to throw a bit of an evolutionary theory out there of my own, I’d say women these days are probably a lot more competitive as well because we’ve gained such independence and freedom as of late, considering we used to play a more docile and “quiet” role way back when. 

We now have jobs and careers and rear families, so our senses of competition and accomplishment is every bit as needed as it is in a man, if not more, since we still feel we need to prove something in many situations, which is an unfortunate biproduct of years of repression.  The research recently conducted on estrogen’s role in power and dominance need showed that women with more of a power need and thoughts of dominance and winning happened to also have higher overall levels of estrogen. 

Are we going to have to come up with a term for an “alpha female” now?   

Tanning boothes have not really waned in popularity, even in the wake of lots of bad PR about how bad those UV rays are for you, how they prematurely age the skin and can facilitate the start of skin cancers as well.  However, while there are a lot of negatives about tanning under the UV lamps that have been made so popular over the years, there are actually some up sides as well.

For instance, UV therapy can help with psoriasis, it can help to increase your positive moods in the winter, since one of the reasons we get depressed in the winter months when there is not a lot of sunlight is that we do not get enough exposure to sunlight, it helps in some cases to clear up acne, although it needs to be done in very miniscule quantities to do so, otherwise it will actually aggravate it, and it of course makes you feel fantastically sexy with a golden brown color!

One of the things you’ve got to watch for though in a tanning booth, or heck, if you happen to like sun bathing topless in your yard or on a topless beach, is to watch that your nipples don’t get too much sun exposure.  If your nipples get too much exposure to the UV rays, it can actually harm them and even eventually discolor them or alter their appearance. 

Some women may choose to rectify this by wearing a bikini top in the tanning booth or always wearing one when sunbathing outdoors, or they can put some form of “pasties”, which are those dubious little things that caused such a ruckus in the Janet Jackson Super Bowl debacle a few years back.  They stick to the nipple part of the breasts, and are a staple at many burlesques because they cover just enough of the nipple to make it a “tease” that you are not seeing the whole breast. 

Among other things to protect, you probably don’t ever really want to expose your facial skin for very long, because UV light does accelerate aging, so you may want to wear a powerful SPF on your face when tanning, or do what many others do, and cover your face with a little hand towel that they usually give out in tanning salons, which will guarantee that you won’t get any UV filtration, as long as you at least double it up and fold it on your face as many times as possible to make sure there’s no penetration. 

Wow, this certainly is a little against what we’ve talked about in the past, but it seems that the trend now is that new moms are nursing their infants on breast milk rather than bottle feeding them.  I guess I say that it goes against some previous info and speculation, because of women entering the workforce so much nowadays, and perhaps not having adequate time to first breastfeed, and then also pump breast milk.

The number of breastfeeding new moms has reached staggering, and perhaps even recently record breaking numbers - experts are estimating roughly 77% of new moms are breast feeding their babies now.  They attribute this extreme rise to education about breast feeding benefits, such as greatly enhanced immunity for the infant, better brain and organ development, and the speculation that breastfeeding also helps the baby when they are full grown with things like obesity and other potentially life threatening diseases and physical weaknesses. 

Dang, and I wasn’t breastfed!  Should I blame my mom for not breastfeeding me for all of my physcial and mental shortcomings?  I keed, of course!  But you get my drift, the pressure is on for women to breastfeed these days, and it’s not necessarily an unwelcome pressure for most new moms, who only want to give their infants the best start in life and want them to be healthy and happy babies. 

It also increases the bonding between mother and child, so this is another added benefit to breast feeding that most likely has contributed to it’s overwhelming popularity as of late.  Of the most affected groups, surveyors say that African American women have made the greatest progress in breast feeding, with their number statistically at a higher increase than other racial groups. 

The more I read about breast feeding’s benefits, the more I do think that it will be the way I go if I ever choose to have a child.  It is still of course a personal decision and choice, as it should be, but the evidence is overwhelmingly abundant of it’s continued benefits over bottle/formula feeding. 

If you’re into watching movies about pot smoking slackers who just happen to run into the craziest situations and even famous people on their journies throughout life, and you like the Forrest Gump type of movie where happen stance situations occur like that and can suspend reality to laugh your butt off for a while, then the Harold and Kumar sequel, Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay is for you.  My sister and I went to see this movie, and it’s pretty darn funny.

What made me write about it for this blog is that there is a hilarious scene in the movie where a friend of theirs has a revolutionary idea in that he has a “bottomless” party instead of a topless party, because who does bottomless parties?  No one, right?  He has women standing around just hanging out on the bottom instead of exposing their breasts, and it’s actually a funny part of the movie. 

The movies are both definitely what you’d call low brow, sophomoric humor, but dammit, it’s fun to laugh at that sometimes!  The humor ranged from politically incorrect humor to racial profiling humor, to jokes about the proverbial white ignorant guy who probably means well but makes Americans look as dumb as ever to people not from this country. 

It’s a great post 911 movie that takes a look at the hysteria surrounding us being another victim, but not in a serious way whatsoever - oh no, their intentions aren’t to “make people think” with this movie, but rather to get them to stop thinking so much and just laugh at what  bunch of idiots we can all look like sometimes when we find ourselves judging others based on something that shouldn’t even be used to base opinions on, like skin color, ethnic background, sex and where you come from (state wise, this is for people in the US). 

All in all, it was a hilarious movie, and although the female nudity and breast shots were totally gratuitous, what else would you expect from a Harold and Kumar sequel, right?

A friend and I were shopping just the other day and were talking about a woman who wanted to get breast implants.  The interesting thing about this particular woman though is that she had perfectly nice breasts to begin with, so we were wondering why she wanted them.  Now granted, I know that Wonder Bras and other sorts of pushup bras can do wonders for the appearance of larger cleavage and larger natural breasts, however, this girl really seemed to already be blessed with a very nice, curvy body naturally.

When we discussed it further, there was a boyfriend involved who may have had a larger hand in deciding whether she got breast implants.  That’s really just speculation, but it got me thinking.  I’ve had several women write me telling me that they are considering breast implants or some form of alternative natural breast enhancement to please their partners.  I have to be perfectly honest, in that I think this is probably the worst reason to get your breasts enlarged or worked on.

You really need to make these types of decisions, where you are essentially altering a body part for good, or at least semi permanently, in order to please someone other than yourself.  Believe me, in the end, if it’s not something you really wanted for yourself you may end up resenting the fact that you got it done for someone else, especially if that person isn’t even a permanent fixture in your life any more.

When you do something like that for your partner, you’re really trivializing your individuality, and that in itself will be something that you regret when you get older, and almost always inevitably look back on your life with regret for decisions you made simply to appease others. 

I also question whether a person who demands or even strongly suggests you alter your physical appearance in such a dramatic way for them truly has your best interests in mind, or even whether they really love you as they say they may.  It’s just something to think about and that I wanted to put out there, especially for the women to whom this may apply. 

Can you imagine, you’re in the prime of your life, when your life is in full swing, and you are in the middle of your college career, you are diagnosed with something that is most common among women that are at least in their forties, many times well into their fifties?  Well that’s exactly what happened to one such college student at the ripe young age of 21, just the legal drinking age, and she was diagnosed with the scary disease.  

Her name is Colleen Cappon, and she is in a great minority, thank God, for this young age diagnosis of such a potentially serious disease.  The worst part about getting breast cancer when you are younger, is that it is usually caught in it’s more advanced stages because of a combination of factors. 

That combination is that since younger women are not expected to get it as much, the awareness isn’t there, and the other factor is that screening women for early breast cancer detection is hard since younger women’s breast tissue is more dense, and therefore a lot harder to detect harmful lumps or masses of tissue that may be cancerous in a mammogram.  Colleen Cappon had a particularly agressive tumor that had tripled in size just over a week after she was diagnosed, so she went radical and had both her breasts removed. 

She also had chemotherapy treatments to agressively go after the cancer before it spread to her critical lymph nodes or covered a larger area, overtaking her healthy cells.  At the age of 22 now, she is cancer free, and still follows a diet regimen rich in antioxidants, as well as takes Tamoxifen for a few yeas to help block the estrogen hormone, which is thought to fuel breast cancer growth.  Since breast cancer runs in her family, and her mother had it twice already, she will have to take precautions, even with her breasts removed, which is unfortunate! 

Trans fats have caused quite a stir here in approximately the past decade since they have been banned from many fast food restaurants (self imposed, surprisingly), and are under a lot of scrutiny for the health issues they contribute to as well as a controversial addiction that can be developed by eating a lot of foods that contain them.  If you’ve seen “Super Size Me”, the documentary, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. 

Trans fats, or partially hydrogenated fats and oils, are a fat that has part of it’s molecules missing.  It’s supposed to be a better way to get more flavor into food, and it has a longer shelf life.  The problem is, once these partially hydrogenated fats get into our bodies, they can contribute to clogging arteries, contributing to obesity and weight gain, and also they are reportedly not as fulfilling as normal fats, so we eat more of it which equals more calorie consumption which is bad for all around health. 

It’s not exactly shocking that now trans fats have been linked to a higher risk of breast cancer as well.  Researchers in Europe are concluding that trans fats may not only clog arteries, but also may raise the risk of  breast cancer after they compared women who had high levels of trans fats in their bodies with women who didn’t and found that the women who had high trans fats were about twice as likely to have breast cancer than their counterparts.

It’s actually kind of funny how trans fats came about.  They were initially created for lower fat and supposedly “healthier” versions of high fat foods, like margarine as opposed to butter for example.  However, it was discovered years later that trans fats were causing the same amount of problems as regular fats, if not more, in the human body, so they really were less healthful than their old fashioned counterparts, like the butter margarine comparison.

Imagine my mom’s surprise when, after being a devout margarine consumer, favoring it over butter for years, she found that what she had thought was a more healthful choice could have consequently been harming her health more than ever.  She still does consume it in moderation, but in the back of her mind now she knows that the days of heaping her bread with margarine may be over, especially since she has breast cancer in her family and is reaching an age where it may become a concern.