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      PCOS Diets Are Unlikely to Ease Symptoms

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      Patients were told for years that cutting calories would ease the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome. But research suggests dieting may not help at all.For years, people who had polycystic ovary syndrome and were also overweight were told that their symptoms would improve if they lost weight via a restrictive diet. In 2018, a leading group of PCOS experts recommended that overweight or obese women with the hormonal disorder consider reducing their caloric intake by up to 750 calories a day. That guidance helped to spawn questionable diet programs on social media, and reinforced an impression among people with PCOS that if only they could successfully alter their diets, they would feel better.But the recommendations were not based on robust PCOS studies, and researchers now say that there is no solid evidence to suggest that a restrictive diet in the long-term has any significant impact on PCOS symptoms. Dieting rarely leads to sustained weight loss for anyone, and for people with PCOS, losing weight is particularly difficult. Beyond that, the link between sustained weight loss and improved symptoms is not very clear or well-established, said Julie Duffy Dillon, a registered dietitian specializing in PCOS care.In 2023, the same group, called the International PCOS Network, revised its guidance based on a new analysis of the research and dropped all references to caloric restriction. The group now recommends that people with PCOS maintain an “overall balanced and healthy dietary composition” similar to the Mediterranean diet, which is associated with a reduced risk of the health issues that are linked to the disorder, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It’s not known whether eating this way might improve symptoms of PCOS. The changes in the guidelines reflect “the PCOS literature and the lived experience of people with the condition,” said Dr. Helena Teede, an endocrinologist at Monash Health in Australia and lead author of the 2023 guidelines. “It’s no longer about blaming people or stigmatizing them, or suggesting that it’s their personal behavioral failure that they have higher weight.”What is PCOS?PCOS is a hormonal disorder that affects as many as five million women in the United States. It’s characterized by irregular periods, infertility, excessive facial hair growth, acne and scalp hair loss — symptoms that are common with other health conditions, too, making diagnosis tricky. People with PCOS usually ovulate less than once a month and often also have higher levels of androgens (male sex hormones) or multiple underdeveloped follicles on their ovaries (not, as the name suggests, cysts) or both.Typically, when a woman is experiencing symptoms, a doctor will either scan the ovaries to look for those follicles or draw blood to test hormone levels. There is no cure for PCOS; the first line of treatment is often some form of birth control to help regulate the menstrual cycle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MLB The Show Will Include Women Players for the First Time

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      MLB The Show 24 will feature a career mode that allows gamers to create a female player and steer her journey to the big leagues. The game draws on the experiences of female baseball players.For the first time, women will don Major League Baseball jerseys in MLB The Show, the long-running popular video game.MLB The Show 24 will debut the option to create and play a female player in a reinvented version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which gamers direct a custom character’s ascent from the minors to the big leagues. The game’s developer, Sony San Diego Studio, announced the new mode Tuesday.The game, which comes out March 19, calls the new career mode Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way. It includes a storyline that follows the ascendence of two women into the major leagues and touches on the unique challenges they face, according to Sony San Diego Studio.MLB The Show joins other high-profile sports video game franchises that have moved to include women, such as FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and NBA 2K. But the gender dynamics in baseball are far more complicated, because most women and girls play softball instead.Some hoped MLB The Show 24 would help change that.“I think that in the United States especially, we’re brainwashed to think that boys play baseball and girls play softball, when in reality both exist in both worlds,” said Veronica Alvarez, manager of the U.S.A. Baseball Women’s National Team, which will compete in this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup.Ms. Alvarez, a former national team player herself, and some of her players provided Sony with input for the game’s development.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Global Warming Is Particularly Bad for Women-Led Families, Study Says

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      New U.N. research shows that climate change disproportionately erodes income in households led by women in poorer countries. But there are ways to fix it.Extreme heat is making some of the world’s poorest women poorer.That is the stark conclusion of a report, released Tuesday, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on weather and income data in 24 low- and middle-income countries.The report adds to a body of work that shows how global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, can magnify and worsen existing social disparities.What does the report find?The report concludes that while heat stress is costly for all rural households, it is significantly more costly for households headed by a woman: Female-headed households lose 8 percent more of their annual income compared to other households.That is to say, extreme heat widens the disparity between households headed by women and others. That’s because underlying disparities are at play.For instance, while women depend on agricultural income, they represent only 12.6 percent of landowners globally, according to estimates by the United Nations Development Program. That means women-headed households are likely to lack access to essential services, like loans, crop insurance, and agricultural extension services to help them adapt to climate change.The report is based on household survey data between 2010 and 2020, overlaid with temperature and rainfall data over 70 years.The long-term effect of global warming is also pronounced. Female-headed households lose 34 percent more income, compared to others, when the long-term average temperature rises by 1 degree Celsius.The average global temperature has already risen by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial age.Flooding similarly suppress the incomes of female-headed households more than it does other kinds of households, according to the report, but to a lesser degree than heat.“As these events become more frequent, the impacts on peoples’ lives will deepen as well,” said Nicholas Sitko, an economist with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the lead author of the report.Why does it matter?There’s been growing attention in recent years to the disproportionate harms of extreme weather, sometimes aggravated by climate change, on low-income countries that produce far less greenhouse gas emissions, per person, than wealthier, more industrialized countries.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Grow Old Like Isabella Rossellini

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      If you go to Isabella Rossellini’s Instagram page — and I recommend you do — you will see the 71-year-old actress/director/model/farmer wearing a giant woolly hat and vest, beaming with joy in the sunshine at her farm on Long Island. Another photo shows her staring off into the distance, her face proudly unretouched. Scrolling through, I often wonder how Rossellini is so comfortable in her own skin at an age when many women struggle in theirs.Rossellini’s early life was, in some ways, defined by other people’s fame. She looks strikingly like her mother, the Swedish Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman. Her father, the director Roberto Rossellini, was a giant of Italian cinema. She was married to Martin Scorsese, and another partner, David Lynch, famously directed her in the 1986 film “Blue Velvet.” But she also built her own interesting and varied career, becoming one of the most recognizable models in the world as the face of Lancôme until, in her 40s, the beauty brand dumped her for being too old. Rossellini was suddenly faced with a question, she told me, that she’s still working through today: “Who am I, and how do I fulfill the rest of my life?”The short answer is that she wrote books, went back to school, bought a farm, learned to be single, got rehired by Lancôme and kept acting. In the film “La Chimera,” directed by the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and opening in theaters on March 29, Rossellini plays a Tuscan matriarch who’s aging with a lot less equanimity than Isabella herself. (She also has a small part in the new film “Spaceman,” starring Adam Sandler.) Rossellini just started “a little experiment with sheep” at her farm, partnering with design schools to help students better understand wool, and describes herself as diligently following whatever amuses her. “I just play,” she says. “I’m playful. And I became increasingly more playful with age.”I will confess that I have been slightly obsessing over your farm, where you are right now. It’s clearly both a refuge and also hard work. Did you always think this is what you’d be doing in your 70s? Because when I dream of my 70s, I’m not working quite as hard as you are. Well, you know, I say you need two ingredients to open a farm: optimism and ignorance. Optimism is like: Oh, it’s a piece of a dream, wouldn’t it be great to have it? Sure, I can do a farm! And ignorance is how hard it is — how hard it is workwise, but also to make it financially viable. All these little farms in the Hudson Valley or in Long Island, we are all struggling. How do you make it? Yet it’s such a contribution to the community, and it opened up so many possibilities and fills my mind with wonder, and I have to study hard to understand how to run it well.What is it about the hard work that you find so compelling? There are little farms that don’t exist anymore, because there’s no money and it’s a lot of work. So why do it? It started with my love for animals. I always had dogs and cats, and then my father, when I was 14 years old, gave me Konrad Lorenz’s book “King Solomon’s Ring.” Lorenz is a founder of the science of ethology — the science of animal behavior — and I read that book. It was like an illumination. This is what I want to do. And when I became older and there was less work as a model and as an actress and my children were grown up, I thought, Well, maybe I’ll go back to school and study ethology. And so in my 60s, I signed up.Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini in 1954 with their children, Isabella, Ingrid and Roberto.Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men

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      This box represents a real photo of a 9-year-old girl in a golden bikini lounging on a towel. The photo was posted on her Instagram account, which is run by adults. 1 🔥🔥🔥 wooowww Mama mia ❤️❤️🥰💯🤗 Great body😍🔥❤️ Love 😍😍😍😍 Perfect bikini body ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😋😋😋😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Mmmmmmmmm take that bikini off 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ You’re sooooo hot ❤️🤗💋🌺🌹🌹💯 […] More

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      Don’t Underestimate the Mobilizing Force of Abortion

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      Poland recently ousted its right-wing, nationalist Law and Justice Party. In 2020, a party-appointed tribunal severely restricted the country’s abortion rights, sparking nationwide protests and an opposition movement. After a trip to Poland, the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg came to recognize that similar dynamics could prevail in the United States in 2024. In this audio essay, she argues that Joe Biden’s campaign should take note of what a “powerful mobilizing force the backlash to abortion bans can be.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday, and can be found in the audio player above.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Jean Carnahan, First Woman to Represent Missouri in U.S. Senate, Dies at 90

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      Ms. Carnahan was appointed to the seat after her husband was posthumously elected to it just weeks after he was killed in a plane crash in 2000.Jean Carnahan, who in 2001 became the first woman to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate after being appointed to fill her husband’s seat following his posthumous election, died on Tuesday. She was 90.Her family released a statement saying that Ms. Carnahan died following a brief illness.“Mom passed peacefully after a long and rich life,” the statement said, without specifying the cause of death. “She was a fearless trailblazer. She was brilliant, creative, compassionate and dedicated to her family and her fellow Missourians,” her family said in the statement.Ms. Carnahan, the wife of Mel Carnahan, was appointed to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in December 2000, following the posthumous election of her husband, who was killed just weeks beforehand with their son and a longtime aide in a plane crash. She was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2001.Ms. Carnahan, a moderate Democrat who had never held public office before being appointed to fill in for her husband, served for nearly two years. She lost to Jim Talent, a Republican, by 22,000 votes in November 2002.Following her defeat, Ms. Carnahan told The New York Times that despite the tumult and heartache she had endured, she had always pushed bitterness aside. “It’s an acid in your life that corrodes your soul,” she told The Times.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      For ‘Barbie’ Fans Online, a Bitterly Ironic Oscar Snub

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      Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed Academy Award nominations for director and actress, respectively — a fact that was a little too on the nose for some.When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced this morning, the snubs of the two most prominent women involved in “Barbie” — the director, Greta Gerwig, and the lead actress, Margot Robbie — became the breakout story.The top-grossing film of 2023, passing the $1 billion mark worldwide, is based on the imagined life and times of the iconic Mattel doll. A cultural phenomenon on its own terms, “Barbie,” along with “Oppenheimer,” became half of an unusually thoughtful summer blockbuster duo released on the same day in July (“Barbenheimer”): nothing to sneeze at.As it turns out, the internet has strong opinions about today’s announcement.“Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated ‘Barbie’ for Best Picture (eight nominations total) — a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures — but not the woman who directed the film. Okay then,” read a viral X post by the writer Charlotte Clymer.The film wasn’t completely shut out — it was nominated for best picture, while Ms. Gerwig picked up a nomination with Noah Baumbach for adapted screenplay, Ryan Gosling for supporting actor, and America Ferrera for supporting actress. But the fact that Mr. Gosling was tabbed for his towheaded Ken, who discovers the idea of patriarchy and then attempts to dominate Barbieland, before Ms. Robbie’s character destroys gender-based oppression, was too much for some to take.“We’re actually doing patriarchy very well,” the writer Jodi Lipper wrote in an Instagram story, quoting a Ken line from the film.(In a statement released today, Mr. Gosling wrote, “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”)Indeed, because “Barbie” functions as a commentary on sexism and a metacommentary on its own place in feminist discourse, the movie itself was the first place some of its fans reached to express their outrage over the snubs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More