25 years ago today

She entered the world, and she's made my world a sunnier place every day since then!

Happy, happy birthday to my beautiful Hallie!

More stuff

1. Bare Minerals: This isn't news to anyone, but I still love the stuff. No oil slick on my face, no "line" around my jawline, no fake look. It just makes you look better. And it's naturally SPF 15, to boot.

2. Benefit concealers and brow products: These are a perfect partnership with my Bare Minerals. I dab on the concealing and highlighting products first, then dust the Bare Minerals on top of that. I especially like the brow kit and the Eye Bright product. And if you use the Boing cream concealer and then set it with a little bit of the wonderful Bare Minerals Bisque powder concealer, you can hide ANYTHING, all day.

The brow kit contains a wax that you brush onto your brows, then a powder that adheres to the wax. (I use a Bare Minerals charcoal colored powder instead of theirs--brown powder doesn't blend at all well with my black eyebrows.) But I love the way the wax stuff keeps my eyebrows neat and in line all day, and the combo of the wax and powder hides thin spots and graying eyebrows and stays on all day. It's amazing how nice eyebrows make your eyes pop!

And as little of these products as you need to use, these kits are probably a better approach than buying full-sized packages of the products.

I love makeup. But you knew that.

Some stuff I like:

1. Aquafor: it's sort of like super-vaseline. I often put it on my feet, which tend to be dry, before I go to sleep at night. But I use it anywhere I have dry skin. I put it on my face, around my mouth, outside corners of my eyes, any place easily irritated, before I put on my Retin A at night. In the winter when I get REALLY dry, I will put it on all over when I'm still damp from the tub, and it stays moisturized all day. It's an excellent lip balm/chapstick substitute. It is a wonderful, all-purpose intense moisturizer.

2. Vaseline Sheer Infusion lotion: This is the most astounding body lotion I have ever encountered. I don't know what sort of revolutionary ingredient they came up with, but all their claims are true. I've been using this all over, all summer, but especially on my legs and arms with their fading Mexico tan, and it's just...well, almost weird how damp and moist feeling it leaves your skin, and it stays this way all day, until it's washed off. I've never seen anything like it. Hallie got me a bottle and said "Mom, you won't believe me if I tell you about this stuff--you just have to try it." I'm hooked. If you're going to use anything on my little list, use this.

Now why don't they make something using this breakthrough for the face????

3. Badger Balm Sleep Balm: Ok, so maybe it's a placebo effect, but I SWEAR I sleep noticeably better when I rub a little of this below my nose and on my temples. And it smells SO wonderful--lavender and herbs. Somebody put this in my Christmas stocking, and it was instant love.

More to come.

I thought I should say something that didn't involve meat or corn syrup

So last night Dave and Hallie and I went to Taco Tuesday at the Mexican joint down the hill. While I was waiting in the bar with Dave (margaritas are half price on taco Tuesday!), I saw a stocky, smug-looking young gent sitting at the bar with his tattooed buddies, sporting with seeming pride a t-shirt that proclaimed, in huge white capital letters on a black shirt, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for the White Guy."

Honestly, sometimes I'm just sick that I'm even a human.

And to piggyback off of Urb's comments about foodmakers adding sweetness when they cut fat:

God almighty. Check out THIS article:

Cancer cells slurp up fructose, U.S. study finds

August 2, 2010

REUTERS

WASHINGTON—Pancreatic tumour cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

Tumour cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

“These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation,” Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.

“They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth.”

Americans take in large amounts of fructose, mainly in high fructose corn syrup, a mix of fructose and glucose that is used in soft drinks, bread and a range of other foods.

Politicians, regulators, health experts and the industry have debated whether high fructose corn syrup and other ingredients have been helping make Americans fatter and less healthy.

Too much sugar of any kind not only adds pounds, but is also a key culprit in diabetes, heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association.

Several states, including New York and California, have weighed a tax on sweetened soft drinks to defray the cost of treating obesity-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

The American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods have strongly, and successfully, opposed efforts to tax soda.

The industry has also argued that sugar is sugar.

Heaney said his team found otherwise. They grew pancreatic cancer cells in lab dishes and fed them both glucose and fructose.

Tumour cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. “Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different,” Heaney’s team wrote.

“I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets,” Heaney said in a statement.

Now the team hopes to develop a drug that might stop tumour cells from making use of fructose.

U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, researchers reported in 2004 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.