Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (17 page)

If there’s one worm you don’t want around, it’s a tapeworm. Tapeworms have afflicted human beings for 10,000 years. They attach to the human host’s intestinal wall through hooks on their heads. Although tapeworms start out tiny, they grow . . . sometimes several feet long (an adult human has about 25 feet or more of intestine for the worms to make themselves at home in). They also cast off portions of their bodies in human waste. Those worms then go in search of their own hosts.

Traditional effects of having a tapeworm include constipation, diarrhea, malnourishment, and weight loss, but the parasites can do far more damage. A pork tapeworm can cause lesions and cysts and, at its worst, damage the brain and central nervous system. The kind of tapeworm that lives in dogs or sheep (though this one is pretty hard to catch) can affect the liver and other organs. So rumors may persist that tapeworms once made good diet aids (
read about that on page 4
), but really, they’re a wiggly hassle.

Standing Up, Laughing, and Getting a Pet

The best medicine isn’t always a pill or a treatment. And if there were an alternative to surgery, most people would take it. It turns out there are three methods that are easy to implement and inexpensive. And even though they’ve been around for . . . well . . . ever, science is just starting to understand how they help people stay fit and healthy.

Common sense says that if you lie around too much, you’ll put on weight. And even though a lack of exercise is one of the main reasons people pack on pounds, it’s not the only one. These days, people spend lots of time sitting at desks and in front of their computers and TVs. In April 2008, Marc Hamilton (a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia) presented a new study that said sitting down dramatically decreases the body’s ability to dispose of fat.

Hamilton found that fat tends to collect in tissue when people are sitting down. Also, while we’re sitting, our bodies produce only about 10 percent of the lipase, a natural enzyme that breaks down fat, than it does normally. HDLs, the “good” cholesterol, also went down while people were sitting.

Hamilton’s suggestion: stand up and walk around a little bit. Standing up while watching TV would be one start. Stand up while on the telephone at home. Apparently anything that decreases the amount of time spent sitting will do a body good.

The average four-year-old will laugh more in an hour than the typical adult. And toddlers usually laugh once every four minutes, while adults get in just 10 to 15 laughs a day. Does that matter? It seems to. The healing power of laughter is finally getting its due.

In 2005, the University of Maryland School of Medicine released the results of a study showing that laughter could help prevent a heart attack. The study worked like this: A group of people was shown a funny movie. As they watched and laughed, they were monitored. The result: Laughter caused their endothelium linings—the inner part of blood vessels—to expand, which increased blood flow, necessary for a healthy heart. Sad or stressful movies, in contrast, made the endothelium linings contract. The research bore out what science had long thought—stress harms cardiovascular health, while laughter helps it.

One of the pioneers of laughter research was Stanford Professor William Fry, who documented the intense benefits of laughter back in 1971. He found that laughter, like exercise, increases the heart rate. In fact, all the effects of hearty laughter mirror what the body goes through during a workout—in particular, an increase in blood pressure and oxygen consumption. The effects drop back to normal levels after it’s done, just as with exercise.

Other studies have shown that laughter also helps with respiration, diabetes (laughter lowers blood sugar levels), stress levels, pain management, and even productivity at work (happy workers get more done). So even though some scientists (probably the grumpy ones) say that the studies are inconclusive and don’t prove that laughter is a form of medicine, everyone agrees that laughter doesn’t hurt and that if there’s a chance it can help, it’s worth trying.

At the 2008 International Stroke Conference in New Orleans, Dr. Adnan Qureshi of the University of Minnesota delivered some surprising news: According to a study of 4,435 people, cat owners were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. On the other hand, people who didn’t own cats were 30 to 40 percent more likely to die from it.

That was good news for the more than one-third of U.S. households
that own a cat. Dog owners were not so elated—their pets didn’t decrease their chances of having a heart attack at all. But dog owners can still take solace in the fact that a 1995 American Journal of Cardiology study found that all pet owners are more likely to survive a heart attack than those who don’t have one. The National Institutes of Health seems to agree, saying that all pet owners have lower blood pressure, triglyceride, and cholesterol levels and feel less lonely than the pet-less. Also pet owners make fewer visits to the doctor.

Some dogs also seem to be able to warn of oncoming seizures. “Seizure-alert” dogs can be trained to predict a seizure up to 15 minutes before it comes on, giving their owners ample time to take safety precautions. People with Parkinson’s Disease who suffer from a condition called “freezing”—wherein their feet freeze up while their bodies are in motion—can be helped by dogs too. When a dog touches their feet while the situation is occurring, they become unfrozen.

Pets’ abilities to detect problems like cancer cells are being studied as well. Someday, scientists may figure out how to get Fido to sniff out cancers in the body before they become untreatable. In the meantime, pet owners can relax in the knowledge that their best friends provide many long-term health benefits.

Lauren Bacall

The pretty teenager who would one day become one of Hollywood’s most glamorous movie stars had one big problem: her high, nasally voice. That was the only thing keeping director Howard Hawks from hiring 19-year-old Betty Bacall for his 1944 film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
. Hawks’s wife, Slim, had seen a picture of Bacall on the cover of
Harper’s Bazaar
and convinced Howard to fly the young model and aspiring stage actress from New York City to California for a screen test. Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske in 1924) had the acting ability and the look that Hawks was looking for—plus she seemed wise beyond her years—but what to do about that voice?

Hawks worked with Bacall for two weeks, modeling her speaking on the low timbre of his wife Slim’s. Still not quite there, Bacall went home to New York and practiced for two more weeks. Then she traveled back to Los Angeles and wowed Hawks with her new husky, sultry voice . . . and got the part. At the insistence of Hawks, she changed her first name to the more alluring Lauren (though she still goes by Betty to her friends and family). “He wanted to mold me. He wanted to control me,” Bacall said of Hawks. “And he did . . . until Mr. Bogart got involved.”

He was 44; she was 19, but the chemistry was there from the
beginning. On the set of
To Have and Have Not
, Humphrey Bogart and the newly christened Lauren Bacall sparked a romance, and their attraction translated to the screen. In the film
’s
most famous scene, Bacall, as Marie “Slim” Browning, says to Bogie in her new sultry voice:

Both the line and the movie became instant sensations, propelling young Bacall to stardom.

Yet, as Hawks pointed out (and rumor had it that he was quite jealous of Bacall’s affections for Bogart), it was the character she was playing that Bogart had fallen in love with, “so she had to keep playing it the rest of her life.” Good thing that the role of a confident woman was easy for her to live up to, both on and off the screen . . . although that voice would one day catch up with her.

The public was enamored with Hollywood’s most glamorous couple, eagerly awaiting each new film noir picture they costarred in, most notably
The Big Sleep
(1946),
Dark Passage
(1947), and
Key Largo
(1948).

Off the screen, Bacall was making waves for, very simply, living life on her own terms. Even though she was happily married to Bogart, she went against the grain of the 1950s woman—she was outspoken, refused to take roles simply for a paycheck, and even protested against McCarthyism while campaigning for democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

Showing off her comedic talents in 1953’s smash hit
How to Marry a Millionaire
(also starring Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe), Bacall used her sultry voice to poke fun at her screen persona. “I’ve always liked older men—look at that old fellow what’s-his-name in
The African Queen
. Absolutely crazy about him.” The movie-going public loved the reference. And although Bacall was enjoying the life of a celebrity, all she cared about was the acting part of it—that and being a good citizen, wife, and
mother. In the spotlight, people were always telling her what to do, and she hated that. “Let people push you around, and you deserve whatever bad things happen after that.”