Skipping your workout or losing an hour of sleep? Eating a candy bar for breakfast or missing a meal? Experts weigh in on the better health choice when faced with two not-so-great options.
If achieving health was nothing more than following a fail-proof prescription, we’d always fill half our plates with vegetables, sleep soundly for at least eight hours a night, engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity each week and promptly show up for each physical, dentist appointment and flu vaccination. But we live in the real world, where vegetables rot, babies scream at night, ankles sprain and calendars get double-booked. So how can you make the best choice for your health when faced with two not-so-great options? U.S. News asked health experts to weigh in on eight such dilemmas:
Wash your face with hand soap or don’t wash your face at all?
You’ve put on your pajamas and brushed your teeth, but you can’t properly wash your face — which is dusted with makeup, coated with sweat or otherwise dirtied from living your life — because the only cleanser available is hand soap. “The products used to clean hands … are very drying and, for some, can lead to breakouts,” says Dr. Ranella Hirsch, a dermatologist in Boston. While a little hand soap on your face won’t kill you, in this case, Hirsch recommends splashing your face with water only and finding a suitable soap in the morning. “The best choice of all is to leave a small tin of wipes in your bag,” she says.
(WTOP/Rachel Nania)
WTOP/Rachel Nania
Eat a candy bar for breakfast or skip the meal?
This one is easy, says Felicia Stoler, a registered dietitian and exercise physiologist in Red Bank, New Jersey: “Eat the candy bar,” she says, and ideally one like Snickers that’s not all that different nutritionally from other “bars” marketed as healthy. “We need calories to start our brain and body.” While some research questions breakfast’s importance, most links breakfast with better health, including a reduced likelihood of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. More recent research suggests that eating carbs at breakfast might help minimize blood sugar spikes after lunch and dinner. “We can only store around six hours of glycogen, so whatever we can do to replenish carbohydrates is important,” Stoler says.
(WTOP/Neal Augenstein)
WTOP/Neal Augenstein
Suppress stress or relieve it with an extra drink?
Your boss slammed you with a last-minute assignment, your credit card statement doesn’t match up and you just locked yourself out of the house. You could bottle up your stress — or open another bottle of beer. Dr. Tiffany Lowe-Payne’s begrudging pick? The booze. “Although drinking in excess is not a great option to relieve stress, as it may increase the risk of dependency, heart and liver disease, to occasionally indulge with one too many drinks would be the lesser of two evils,” since chronic stress is strongly tied to illness and disease, says the osteopathic doctor in Raleigh, North Carolina. Just make sure you eat — and drink plenty of water — while imbibing.
(AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
AP Photo/Virginia Mayo
Sleep in your contacts or put them in water?
Whether you’re spontaneously crashing at a friend’s house or suspect you’ll fall asleep on the plane with no toiletries in sight, most contact wearers have been tempted to doze with them in — even though it’s ill-advised. Give in to temptation if your alternative is water, says Dr. Edward Bennett, chair of the American Optometric Association Contact Lens and Cornea Section. “Although there is a five times greater risk of a sight-threatening eye infection if you wear lenses overnight, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recommended not to use water of any kind with contact lenses because of the risk of a very serious eye infection, Acanthamoeba keratitis,” he says.
(Thinkstock)
Thinkstock
Get an hour less sleep or skip your workout?
If you don’t make tomorrow’s 7 a.m. spin class, you won’t have time to exercise at all. But missing that hour of sleep is also a health sacrifice. What to do? Sleep in, says Michael Grandner, a psychologist and director of the sleep and health research program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “One day of sleep loss or one exercise session won’t have a lasting impact on health,” he says, but a night of good sleep is probably healthier than one bout of exercise. Stoler’s solution: Schedule exercise so you don’t have to choose. “If you exercise more,” she tells clients, “you’ll have more energy.”
(Thinkstock
Drink soda or stay dehydrated?
Whoever was in charge of bringing the cooler to the picnic didn’t get the memo that soda is out and water is in. Do you wash down your sandwich and cool off after a Frisbee game with the sugary stuff, or ignore your thirst until you can get your hands on water? DeMetz would do neither: “I’d search for an oasis,” he jokes. But if such an oasis doesn’t exist, using soda or even beer to occasionally replenish fluids is better than dehydration. “At the end of the day, small amounts of soda won’t kill you,” Stoler says. “Just don’t make it your sole source of fluid intake.”
(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File
Go to bed right after screen time or delay sleep?
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: Power down electronics before bed to prepare your body to sleep quickly and soundly. But if you must be tied to your laptop in bed, do you keep yourself awake to wind down, or just power off and hope for the sand man? Again, Grandner chooses sleep. “The main reasons that screens keep you up are that the light from them suppresses melatonin and that the mental engagement is distracting and keeps you up later,” he says. Provided you can put the screen down, “it’s unlikely that the dose of light will delay your natural bedtime by a full hour,” Grandner says.
(Thinkstock)
