slightly more, redheads slightly fewer). The other 900,000 follicles are resting. Each strand of hair grows six inches a year, eventually reaches two to three feet in length, and has its own blood supply. As you age, the density, diameter, and strength of your hair decrease; fewer hairs grow, more rest; you lose hair on your scalp and gain it on your face; and your hair can change not only in color but in texture: your hair can go from straight to curly. Men’s eyebrows get thicker, and hair sprouts on the inner canal of the outer ear.
Because they have less estrogen to counteract their bodies’ testosterone, postmenopausal women grow facial hair; by age 55, about 40 percent of women grow hair above their upper lip. As women age, they have less armpit hair, which, in older women, often disappears. Armpit hair disappears in most postmenopausal Japanese women. Pubic hair vanishes in a small percentage of women over age 60.
Approximately 100 hairs fall out of your head each day, more during the fall and fewer during the spring. Hair loss is the result of changes in the levels of hormones. If you lose hair, you’re more sensitive to these changes in hormone levels. People whose parents experienced hair loss are more likely to lose their hair. One in four women loses some of her hair.
Because of a gradual decrease in adrenal secretion—which begins, for both men and women, in the late 20s—the cells that manufacture hair protein, the germ centers, are selectively destroyed or deactivated. When the affected hair is shed, no replacement occurs.
Forty million American men are bald. Thirty percent of 55-year-old men are bald; 60 percent of 65-year-old men have experienced significant hair loss. Both men and women view bald men as weaker and less attractive than men with a full head of hair. Seventy-five percent of men feel self-conscious about their baldness, and 40 percent wear a hat to hide their baldness. Hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men.
There’s no cure for baldness. The
Woody Allen says, “The best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald.”
Harlan Boll, a publicist for celebrities, says, “There wasn’t as much pressure on men like Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra to look young. Even today this is true. If they keep their hair, they pretty much have it made.”
While campaigning for Bush-Cheney, former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who’s bald, said about Kerry- Edwards, “Everybody is given a certain amount of hormones. If you want to spend yours growing hair, that is your business.”
My father has been bald since his early 40s, is unusually self-conscious about the fact, and is fond of saying that the only cure for baldness is a baseball cap, which he wears around the clock, indoors and out. Although I’ve repeatedly explained to him that a man inherits baldness at least in part from his maternal grandfather, he frequently apologizes for bequeathing to me a bald head. Throughout my 30s I did all the usual boring things: applied Rogaine, studied glossy brochures featuring color photos of weaves, transplants, and men and women in hot tubs. Several years ago, I stumbled upon the shaved-head-and-goatee approach, which I must say I like. It’s an acknowledgment of death rather than a denial of death (as, to take an extreme example, the comb-over is). Your head becomes an early memento mori.
The Trouble with Being Food
Your taste buds regenerate; cells within the taste buds die every ten days and are completely replaced. Even if a nerve that forms taste buds is destroyed, other buds will form around the new nerve that replaces it. However, it takes more molecules of a certain substance on your tongue for you to recognize the flavor later in adulthood. As you get older, you enjoy food less. Whenever I visit, one of the first things my father always wants me to do is drive him to a specialty market, where he buys gourmet health food. I’m not sure he enjoys food anymore, but he’s obsessed with efficient fuel for his body, that amazing machine. He talks with his mouth full and sprays food so often and so far that Natalie, Laurie, and I take turns sitting across from him at restaurants. Natalie has suggested building a portable sneeze-guard.
Nevertheless:
In Britain in 1991, 13 percent of men and 16 percent of women were obese—twice the number of 10 years before. Half the British population is now overweight; more than 20 percent are obese. In the U.K., snack-food consumption has risen 25 percent in the last 5 years.
More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese; 127 million people are overweight, 60 million are obese, and 9 million are severely obese. American adults are now, on average, 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960; the average man has gone from 166 to 191 pounds, while the average woman has gone from 140 to 164 pounds. I doubt my father has ranged more than a few pounds over or below 155 since World War II. More women than men are obese (34 to 27 percent). The average 10-year-old boy weighed 74 pounds in 1963; he now weighs 85 pounds. The average 10-year-old girl weighed 77 pounds in 1963; she now weighs 88 pounds.
In 1980, the government recommendation was 1,600 calories a day for women and 2,200 for men; women now consume 1,877 calories a day and men consume 2,618. In 1970, each person ate 1,497 pounds of food; in 2000, each person ate 1,775 pounds. In the United States, health care costs for treating obese adults amount to $100 billion a year. In 2004, obesity caused 300,000 deaths.
Was my father ever not as skinny as a (third) rail? His meals very nearly always consist of oatmeal and juice for breakfast, a sandwich and a bowl of soup for lunch, “a lean piece” of fish or chicken for dinner. Has he ever taken a second helping of anything? Has he ever not grumbled before reluctantly accepting an offer of dessert? Has a day ever gone by in which he didn’t exercise a couple of times? On long family car trips, did he ever not get out every few hours and execute a hundred jumping jacks, to the admiration and/or puzzlement of other travelers on the highway?
I live across the street from a fundamentalist church, and on certain melancholy Sundays I’m filled with empathy for the churchgoers. Adulthood didn’t turn out to have quite as much shimmer as we thought it would. For an hour a week, they’re hoping to get caught in a little updraft; who can blame them?
Leonard Michaels wrote, “Life isn’t good enough for no cigarette”—which is precisely how I’ve come to view my relationship to sugar.
When I’m happy, I consume sweets to celebrate. When I’m upset, I eat treats as consolation. I’m therefore rarely without a reason to be in the throes of sugar shock. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I do sugar, in massive doses. So what? Who doesn’t? What’s the harm? I still stutter slightly, and much of the glory of sugar overload is the way it mimics the biochemical frenzy of a full-blown block and crystallizes it into the pure adrenaline of a brief, happy high (followed quickly by a crash). To me, sugar consumption is a gorgeous allegory about intractable reality and very temporary transcendence.
Everything I Know I’ve Learned from My Bad Back
Intractable reality (ii): I’m not thrilled to acknowledge that I date the origin of my back problems to the period, 14 years ago, when I repeatedly threw Natalie, then an infant, up in the air and carried her around in a Snugli. It’s a dubious etiology, since another cause would surely have come along soon enough; my back, one physical therapist has explained to me, was an accident waiting to happen. It makes perverse sense, though, that in my own mind Natalie and my back are intertwined, because dealing with a bad back has been, for me, an invaluable education in the physical, the mortal, the ineradicable wound.
When he became a father, Jerry Seinfeld said, “I can’t get enough of my baby, but let’s make no mistake
