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It’s not simply that physicians and scientists don’t bother to seek out sex-specific data; it’s that until all too recently the data didn’t exist. From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of the animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects.
While recent research has demonstrated that women require higher doses of painkillers in order to feel the same level of pain relief as men, that knowledge isn’t currently built into dosage guidelines.
Most clinical studies show that across multiple drug types, women metabolize drugs more quickly than men.[*5]
Ask yourself this: Is it really acceptable that we only bothered to test sex differences for general anesthesia in 1999? Turns out women wake up faster than men, regardless of their age, weight, or the dosage they’ve been given.
For example, why are women fatter than men (to put it bluntly)? As a twenty-first-century American woman, I’d spent altogether too much time thinking about my fat, but I hadn’t the faintest clue that my adipose tissue is actually an organ, much less that it evolved from the same ancient organ as my liver and most of my immune system.
Some evolutionary biologists now believe that women evolved to have fatty hips precisely because they’re specialized to provide the building blocks for human babies’ big brains. Since we can’t get enough of those LC-PUFAs from our daily diet, women start storing them from childhood forward. Other primates don’t seem to have this pattern.
Most women’s bodies begin preparing for pregnancy in childhood, not because it’s a woman’s destiny to be a mother, but because human pregnancy sucks, and our bodies have evolved ways to help us survive it.
our adipose tissue and our livers and our immune systems all came from the same primordial organ, called the “fat body.”
“Sapiens”—Homo sapiens. Roughly 300,000 years ago to the present.[*16] Eve of human language, human menopause, and modern human love and sexism.
As such, these are also popular sites for women to get liposuction. Tummy tucks rank a close second. The so-called Brazilian butt lift combines the two and makes it worse, typically by sucking fat out of women’s stomach deposits and reinjecting that same fat into their buttocks. That’s particularly risky because women’s buttocks are especially full of blood vessels, which is precisely where you don’t want to inject a bunch of lipids, risking a fatty embolism, wherein fat breaks into the bloodstream, migrates to somewhere really vital like the heart or lungs or brain, and causes a blockage.
The milk and the crap and the egg scraps in that dark little burrow—these are the origins of breasts. Morgie is the real Madonna. Creatures like her nursed their young in a dangerous world, not only to feed them, but also to keep them safe.
But mammals seek the ocean in their mother’s abdomen; human breast milk is almost 90 percent water.
In fact, before we discovered penicillin, cow colostrum was commonly used as an antibiotic.[*5]
Just in the last decade or so, scientists have come to realize that maybe its nutritional value isn’t the biggest deal off the top. Milk is really about infrastructure. It’s city planning. Some combination of a police force, waste management, and civil engineers.
