And just because this is my lucky month, I'm quoted in this story from the October issue of Women's Health, which is on newsstands now.

I'll be referring to this one often in the months leading up to the book's release on December 27.

It's never too early to surprise that special someone with the perfect post-Christmas, pre-New Year ...

Okay, I can't think of any compelling reason to pre-order NROL for Women so many months before its release. So I'll just quote my role model: "It'd be a lot cooler if you did."

By the way, if you came here looking for my new, improved, fully networked and interactive and optimized blog, just click here.

Speaking of me and my big mouth, I did a new Internet show, Big Butt Radio, earlier this month. You can find the hour-long program here. I was on third, following Donnie Osmond and boxing trainer Rob Pilger. I give it high marks for entertainment value, as the conversation veered to MILFs, breast implants, Jack Nicholson, and ab training.

If listening to me isn't enough, be sure to check out the new and technologically functional Male Pattern Fitness here.

Last I heard, there were still a few seats left. So if anyone just happens to be in Little Rock on Friday or Saturday and wants to drop in to hear some very smart folks talk about our favorite subjects, you could still make it.

Unfortunately, if you get there by 9 a.m. on Friday, you'll have to listen to me before the smart people begin speaking. But after that it's nothing but the best and brightest.

I've started a new blog, which like this one is called Male Pattern Fitness.

Why a new MPF?

As many of you know, I've been unsatisfied with this site from the get-go. I was frustrated with the blog's inability to accept comments from readers (except those Dan Brown fans who'd figured out how to crack the comment-posting code), the site's lack of connectivity to the greater blogosphere, and the expense involved in making even the most minor modifications to the site.

I can't say when I reached the tipping point, but I do know that in the past year or so I've started telling friends and colleagues that I really needed two sites: one for promoting my books, articles, interviews, and appearances, and one for blogging. This site works just fine for promoting my work, so what I really needed was a new place to blog.

Most of you know that I'm a pretty serious seamhead. I occasionally post on baseball message boards. (Please don't share that fact with my wife or any of my former employers.) In fact, I got the idea for starting a fitness message board at menshealth.com from my clandestine experience with online sports argumentation. For the past few months, my favorite baseball site has been Viva El Birdos, which is part of Sports Blog Nation. SB Nation, just to take things full circle, is run by Tyler Bleszinski, a former colleague of mine at Men's Health.

So I asked Tyler if I could join his blogging collective, and I guess I caught him on a good day, because he agreed. His folks designed the very cool site, and I should soon be blogging away on the new and (vastly) improved MPF. Meanwhile, I'll continue to update this site when I do something worth promoting, and of course you can find me for at least a few minutes a day over at JP Fitness.

Thanks for your time and attention here, and I look forward to continuing our conversation over there. And this time, you should find it easy and fun to hold up your end of that conversation.

As a fan, my favorite team has four championships in my lifetime: 1964 (when I was seven), 1967, 1982, and 2006. The only one I publicly celebrated was in 1982, when I was in downtown St. Louis, watching the climactic Game Seven in a bar that was less than a mile from the stadium. The post-game scene was both giddy and weird. Everyone out on the streets that night was smiling and shaking hands with everyone else. Race, politics, social class, hygiene -- nothing seemed to matter at the moment.

Given that experience, I've never understood why fans of winning teams feel compelled to riot. But I guess that says more about me, and perhaps about my hometown, than it does about typical sports fans:

A Cardiff University team quizzed 197 male rugby supporters going in and out of the city's Millennium Stadium.

They found those who had seen their team win or draw were more aggressive than those who had seen their team lose or had been questioned before the game.

Researchers said fans may get caught up by the euphoria of a win and lose perspective, increasing aggression.

I love that polite, nonjudgmental choice of words: "lose perspective." As in, "When I robbed a convenience store, beat five innocent people unconscious, and then set that police car on fire, I seem to have lost perspective."

The reason why fans lose perspective after their team's victory is both obvious and oft-cited:

"It is known that winning causes an increase in testosterone, which has been associated -- although far from established -- to increases in aggression."

I guess I just didn't have enough in me to make me think of looting.

That's not the only testosterone news this week. At the opposite end of the age spectrum is this:

Researchers monitored the amount of nighttime sleep for 12 healthy men, ages 64 to 74, and then measured their morning testosterone levels.

The study found that the amount of sleep was an independent predictor of the men's total and free testosterone levels in the morning.

"The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning," study author Dr. Plamen Penev said in a prepared statement.

This does have some interesting implications, since we also know that poor sleep is associated with an increase in diabetes risk. But when we look at it side-by-side with the first story, we get a clear-eyed picture of the adult male's rise and fall:

1. Soccer hooligan

2. Work, marriage, kids, stress, more work, more stress

3. You'd rather sleep than have sex.

The more you think about it, the more you realize this isn't as crazy as it once seemed.

But I have a serious problem with a workout feature in the latest issue.

If you click on the link, you'll see a middle-aged guy who appears to be robust and in perfectly good health. And he's doing bench presses with eight-pound dumbbells.

A grown man. Eight-pound dumbbells.

Let's assume the man weighs 200 pounds, and he can do at least one push-up. A push-up forces you to move about 60 percent of your body's weight, which in his case would be 120 pounds. So the photo in the magazine shows a man capable of pushing at least 120 pounds off his chest doing an exercise with 16 pounds.

Here's the article's advice on how to select the weights to use:

Beginners should start with one set -- 8 to 12 repetitions -- of each exercise, using 5- to 8-pound weights (you can find them for $20 or less at any sporting-goods store). More advanced exercisers should shoot for two sets of each exercise, using 10- to 12-pound weights.

So I'm the magazine's reader, and I'd consider myself a "more advanced exerciser." That means I'm supposed to use 12-pound weights for bench presses, as well as the other exercises in the workout -- squats, one-arm rows, biceps curls, lateral raises, and triceps extensions. (The triceps extensions show the model using a single dumbbell, held in both hands.) I could see how those weights might start to feel heavy on lateral raises, especially since it's an exercise I rarely do. But bench presses? Squats? What possible benefit would I get from that?

According to the article, I'd get all these:

Strength training has been shown to decrease insulin resistance, decrease resting blood pressure, reduce arthritis pain, even improve memory. Some experts believe it's as essential as aerobic training: "As good as walking is for a variety of things, it does not address the loss of muscle that accompanies the aging process," says Wayne L. Westcott, Ph.D., fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts, and coauthor of Strength Training Past 50 (Human Kinetics, 2007). That loss of muscle -- about seven pounds per decade for men and five pounds per decade for women -- causes a slowdown in resting metabolism that then translates into a host of health problems.

Yes, but where's the research showing that grown men working out with Barbie weights get any of those benefits?

It's hard enough to convince women to use weights that will increase their strength and muscle mass, which of course are the only ways they can get the promised benefits of strength training. You don't increase your metabolism unless you challenge your body. But now here's a magazine that goes out to millions of people telling men to work out with weights that wouldn't challenge my six-year-old daughter.

Grrrrr ...

For example, I love this story on the therapeutic powers of dirt. Getting down and dirty boosts your mood, improves your immune system, and gives new resonance to the phrase "happy as a pig in shit."

Then there's the National League Championship Series, Game 8, otherwise known as baseball's opening night. The Mets looked good and the Cards looked bad. It was essentially an even game in terms of the number of runners on base (each team got 13 hits and walks, although one additional Met reached when the Cards' left fielder dropped a ball any of us reading this could've caught). But the Mets managed to score five more runs. The Cards hit into four double plays, lost a runner at third on a failed bunt attempt, and had another thrown out at the plate ... with Albert Freakin' Pujols on deck.

Diamond Mind Baseball, a traditionally accurate computer simulation game, picks the Cards to win 85 games this year and the Mets to win just 82, with the Cards winning their division and the Mets finishing out of the money. But if the Cards have many more games like last night's, they'll be home watching the playoffs this October. And my guess, based on the way the Mets turned what should've been a very close game into a blowout, is that the Mets will be one of the eight teams the 2006 World Champions are destined to watch.

But the tastiest blog meat this Monday morning is a story about politics and the human decision-making process, which, if you'll indulge a digression, has resonance to me in other areas.

Apples, oranges, and rotten peaches

Recently, someone of my acquaintance, a pre-adolescent male, started asking me some tough questions about how to meet, converse with, and, in a perfect world, impress a pre-adolescent female. Anybody who knew me in my youth would tell this pre-adolescent male that he's asking the wrong person.

But I happened to be the only one in the room, so I was obliged to answer. I fumbled around through all the lessons I learned the hard way ("it's not what you say, it's what she hears"; "chicks dig the long ball"; etc.), and finally came up with a riff that went something like this:

"Attraction is really a mystery. It's almost magical when it works out that two people meet and end up liking each other more or less equally. Most of the time, the girls you like won't feel the same way about you. And the girls who do like you won't necessarily be the ones you find attractive. So when it works out and you're attracted to each other, you have to enjoy it while it lasts."

When I repeated that conversation to my wife, she told me it was too negative a message to give to someone contemplating the man-woman thing for the first time. Why scare him off now? There's plenty of time for that later.

So I shifted from probable outcomes to tactics. I emphasized the need to be excellent. If a girl figures out you like her, but isn't sure yet if she likes you, just about anything you do might tip the balance. If you call attention to yourself, make sure it's for something that shows you at your best -- being good, being kind, being funny or proficient. Don't let the first impression be the deal-breaker.

My guess is that he found all that more bewildering than helpful. After all, when you're 11, what can you do that's excellent? How much control do you have over those brief, transient moments when you're in the spotlight?

Fortunately, this morning's Washington Post has the ultimate take on tactics. It's a political story, as I said, but the potential applications are much more universal:

Front-runners are usually focused on racing each other. They often do not realize that when people cannot decide between two leading candidates -- and it doesn't matter whether we are talking about politicians or consumer appliances -- our decision can be subtly swayed by whoever is in third place.

Psychologists call this the decoy effect: In a perfectly rational world, third candidates should only siphon votes away from one or both of the leading contenders. Under no circumstances should they cause the vote share of either front-runner to increase. In the actual world, however, third candidates regularly have the unintended effect of making one of the front-runners look better than before in the minds of undecided voters.

Joel Huber, a Duke University marketing professor, showed how the decoy effect works with restaurants. Huber asked people whether they would prefer to eat at a five-star restaurant that was far away or at a three-star restaurant nearby. As with many choices in life, each restaurant had different advantages. If the better restaurant was also nearby, there would be no dilemma. But the question forced people to compare apples and oranges -- trade off quality against convenience -- which ensured no automatic answer.

The human brain, however, always seeks simple answers. Enter the third candidate. Huber told some people there was also a choice of a four-star restaurant that was farther away than the five-star option. People now gravitated toward the five-star choice, since it was better and closer than the third candidate. (The three-star restaurant was closer, but not as good as the new candidate.)

Here's how I think it could work in our Wonder Years example. It's not an exact comparison, but it exploits a similar decoy effect:

Let's say Boy A likes Girl A. Girl A doesn't yet know this, but occasionally seems to notice Boy A. He catches her looking at him from time to time, and thinks that there might be a chance. The problem is knowing how to get her attention on his own terms.

So Boy A recruits Boy B, a person of lesser stature, intelligence, charm, and/or hygiene. Boy B approaches Girl A, but does so awkwardly, in a way that's guaranteed not to work. Girl A looks for any excuse to get away from Boy B, and Boy A just happens to catch her eye at that moment. She wasn't prepared to make a choice before Boy B commanded her attention, but now that she's on the spot, hey, Boy A is looking damned good.

Would it work? If I'd tried it at that age, probably not. And if anyone else tried it, I get a sneaking suspicion that I'd have been cast as Boy B, wittingly or otherwise.

Still, I'm intrigued by the question: If a teen or preteen really were devious enough or desperate enough to try to set up a favorable-comparison scenario, would the object of his affection fall for it? Would she see through it and be angry? Or would she see through it, but be charmed that he went to so much trouble just for her? Or, in the Hollywood scenario, would she end up falling for Boy B, since he's the plucky underdog?

What do you think?

Today, the anti-antioxidant backlash is in full swing; rarely is heard an encouraging word. My doctor asked me what vitamins I supplements I use during my last checkup, and scolded me for including vitamin E on the list. (I confess I stopped taking it after that.)

So it's remarkable, in the midst of this backlash, to read that antioxidant supplements might be good for something after all:

In a study published recently in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, University of Michigan scientists appear to have found a dietary approach to reducing noise-related hearing loss.

They fed five groups of guinea pigs vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium or a cocktail of all four nutrients, then exposed the unfortunate rodents to five straight hours of jet-level noise. Those in the cocktail group had better hearing afterwards.

The researchers think the compounds worked synergistically to absorb free radicals before they'd done damage, and expect to start testing an ear-saving dietary supplement within two years.

Okay, it's an animal study, has limited application, and appears to be linked to a profit motive on the part of whoever patents and produces this new supplement. But it is one small step back to respectability for a downtrodden nutritional wonderkind.

Green ... with envy

Green tea is the cutest girl at the panacea ball these days, with a new study showing it might actually help fight HIV. But is it all too good to be true? That's the question Jonathan Brown asks in The Independent:

In Britain, sales of green tea have been growing at the rate of 25 per cent a year, fuelled in no small part by the celebrity endorsements of stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez. ...

[N]ot everyone is convinced by the many health claims. Professor Mike Williamson of Sheffield University, whose laboratory tests this week suggested that epigallocatechin, a component of green tea, could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by coating immune cells, is unconvinced.

"There is a lot of rubbish talked about what green tea does and most of it I don't believe," he said. "I think a lot of claims have been exaggerated and the main way they have been exaggerated is that they have used far too much green tea. This can amount to several hundred cups a day -- something that presents its own toxicity risk. If you throw enough green tea at something you can show any effect you like," he said.

According to Professor Williamson, whose own study suggested benefits could be gained from drinking two to three cups a day, there is at least one other exciting area of research. Green tea has been found to have the ability to "switch off" stomach cancer cells, something which could one day inform a treatment, he said.

Dr Philip Coan, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, is if anything even more skeptical. He argues that there has yet to be a sufficiently large study conducted outside the laboratory with the correct controls to establish green tea as a bona fide medicine. "People tend to believe that there are cures for things in simple old remedies but there really is no scientific basis for this," he said.

Smells like yet another backlash brewing.

The omega code

Which brings me to fish oil, the alpha-dog panacea. Will it, too, travel the familiar path to Backlash City? If it does, it probably won't be anytime soon. Fish oil, for the moment, still has legs, according to a recent Japanese study.

The study looked at whether fish oil, in addition to statins, would help prevent people from having heart attacks. The sample size was huge -- 18,600 adults with high cholesterol, 3,660 of whom had established heart disease -- although the duration, four and a half years, seems kind of short.

Two keys:

1. Everyone in the study was taking statins.

2. Half the people took a purified form of EPA, one of the omega-3 fats in fish oil. So it wasn't the stuff you get by the jug at Sam's Club.

As for the results, they sound good until you look at the details:

During the study, the vast majority of patients had no major heart problems. However, 2.8 percent of those taking EPA along with statins experienced a major coronary event, compared with 3.5 percent of those only taking statins.

That's a 19 percent difference, note the researchers, who included Mitsuhiro Yokoyama, MD, of Kobe University in Kobe, Japan.

EPA pills weren't linked to any difference in fatal heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.

When Yokoyama's team took a closer look at the data, they found the EPA advantage only applied to patients with a known history of coronary artery disease.

Patients with high cholesterol but no history of coronary artery disease may also get some heart protection from EPA, but that's not certain, since so few of them had major heart problems during the study.

So if you have diagnosed heart disease, a purified form of one of the fats found in fish oil might help, when used in conjunction with statins. That's a pretty tepid finding, but I guess it's better than a backlash.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the study showing that Diet Coke prevents ... well, I'd settle for anything. Paper cuts? Good enough.

Some doctors and researchers say that in a few years the use of primitive stem cells from infants’ umbilical cord blood could grow new knee ligaments or elbow tendons creating a therapy that becomes the vanguard of sports injury repair.

Already, some sports agents are preparing to advise clients about banking stem cells from their offspring or from tissue taken from their own bodies as an insurance policy against a career-ending infirmity. Stem cell blood banks are promoting the benefits of stem cell therapies for the practical healing and rehabilitation of tendons, ligaments, muscle and cartilage.

I love the line I put in bold -- could any statement possibly be more speculative than "preparing to advise"? I mean, I'm preparing to advise my publisher to pay me a million-dollar advance for my next book. And if my talent and popularity increase a hundredfold in the near future, I just might follow through.

This, though, is the scariest part of the New York Times piece:

“If you have a child who has exceptional athletic talent at the age of 5 or 6, you might want to get a muscle or fat biopsy to draw and freeze some young stem cells,” said Dr. Johnny Huard, the director of the Stem Cell Research Center of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and a leading gene therapy researcher. “To have a pool of stem cells already removed would be enormously valuable. The practical use might be years away, but that’s the future of sports medicine.”

I hope that would qualify as child abuse.

A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." ...

The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.

So how do you "intervene" when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?

I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks.

If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:

According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...

It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.

Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn't change with marriage.

Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:

[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.

So we're all screwed, which is only fair.

About the only time I ever liked her was when she was pregnant. She told me she'd started craving beef, and had to back off from her militant vegetarianism for a while. I liked hearing that, not because I care one way or the other what vegetarians do, but because it seemed to give her an insight into what it means to be human. Sometimes you have to do what your instincts tell you to do, and instincts rarely follow a strict ideology.

I bring that up because of this story about the perils of maternal meat-eating:

U.S. women who eat a lot of beef while pregnant give birth to sons who grow up to have low sperm counts, researchers reported Tuesday.

They believe pesticides, hormones or contaminants in cattle feed may be to blame. Chemicals can build up in the fat of animals that eat contaminated feed or grass, and cattle are routinely given hormones to boost their growth.

"In sons of 'high beef consumers' (more than seven beef meals a week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction.

More than seven burgers or steaks a week? How many pregnant women actually eat that much beef? Turns out, that's a telling question:

The team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York studied data on the partners of 387 pregnant women in five U.S. cities between 2000 and 2005, and on the mothers of the fathers-to-be.

Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.

"The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers' beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions," said Shanna Swan, who led the team.

You start with 387 pregnant women. You track down their baby daddies. Then you track down the mothers of the baby daddies. Of those, you find 51 who remember eating beef more than seven times a week when pregnant. And you discover that nine* of the men who sprang from the loins of those 51 women have low sperm counts.

Quick show of hands: If you asked your mother what she ate when she was pregnant with you, do you think she'd remember accurately?

Dr. Swan thinks she would:

"When you are pregnant you are very aware of what you eat -- you are watching your weight and some things make you sick and you need to get enough of x and y so you focus on that," she said.

The mothers of the men were asked only if they ate beef more than once a day or less -- something Swan believes they could remember accurately.

She's studying something important -- low sperm counts in contemporary men -- so I'll give her some slack on this. But still, it seems like a pretty big conclusion to make based on such shaky evidence. Pregnant women are already freaked out over the mercury in fish. Is it really worthwhile to get them freaked out over the hormones in beef?

* Reader Rob Siders pointed out a typo in my original version of this post. I misread the article I was quoting, and thought it referred to 18 people, when it clearly said 18 percent of 51 people. He did the math for me -- that's nine moms who bore sons with low sperm counts, which actually makes a better argument against taking the study seriously.