Just when you thought sunless tanning spray was good only for hiding pale skin, flabby flesh and varicose veins, scientists have come up with a new use for a compound in the body bronzer.

Turns out the sugar-based molecules that turn you brown and stick to your skin can be combined with a chemical goo to create a sticky gel bandage to help medical wounds heal better.

Plastic surgeons at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York have come up with what’s been described as an “internal Band-Aid” that can seal the gaps and holes that surgery leaves behind.

For instance, procedures to remove cancerous tissue or surgeries to reconstruct body parts often result in hollow spaces that fill with fluid, called seromas, that must be drained, either manually or with implanted shunts. By all accounts, it’s an unpleasant undertaking with the potential for pain and infection.

Using the new gel, however, doctors could simply fill the hole and let it heal, said Dr. Jason Spector, a plastic surgeon and co-author of a new study about the product published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The new substance would act to glue together the hole left behind to prevent seroma build-up,” he explained in a statement.

The gel, composed of polyethylene glycol and a polycarbonate of dihydroxyacetone – the stuff that turns you brown – is durable enough to stick to tissue, but also biodegradable and water soluble, so it won’t hang around forever.

The scientists have studied the gel in rats, where it reduced the chance of seromas and fluid build-up. Now they’d like to try it in bigger critters, and, finally, on clinical trials in humans.

That’s good news for surgery patients. Next, maybe the scientists can do something about the orange palms and streaky ankles that regular tanning spray leaves behind.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Foreign accents conjure images of an exotic Ingrid Bergman, the mysterious lilt of socialite-turned- newshound Arianna Huffington, British heiresses like Jemima Khan and beautiful people from anywhere but here.

Glamorous, no? No, according to Robin Vanderlip.

The Fairfax County, Va., woman suffered a true slip of the tongue when she fell and hit her head in a stairwell at a 4-H youth conference. Two days later, after being released from the hospital, she suddenly began speaking English with a foreign accent. Now she’s suing for $1 million in damages from the National 4-H Council, the Washington Post reported this week.

While it seems the stuff of “Gilligan’s Island,” a very real condition can cause people who hit their heads, like Vanderlip, to suddenly develop Foreign Accent Syndrome. The rare malady occurs when a part of the brain affects speech is damaged, causing many patients to sound like they’re from Sweden due to the way they pronounce vowels.

The first widely known case was in World War II when a Norwegian woman was hit by shrapnel and developed an unfortunately strong German accent, which caused her to become an outcast in her country.

More recently, 35-year-old Sarah Cowell of England, who has never so much as been to China, suffered a migraine this spring and began speaking with a Chinese accent, according to The Guardian.

After Linda Walker, a U.K. woman, suffered a stroke she developed a Jamaican accent. “I’ve lost my identity because I never talked like this before,” she told the BBC in 2006. “I’m a very different person and it’s strange and I don’t like it.”

Still, for some, it can be even worse.

In April, a 13-year-old Croatian girl reportedly woke up speaking only German, a language she’d been studying in school but wasn’t fluent in. She completely lost the ability to speak in her native tongue. She likely had a condition known as bilingual aphasia, where people lose one of their two languages because different parts of the brain are involved, according to a Discovery News article.

That may also explain what happened to Sun Kwon on ABC’s “Lost” this season. The character, who spoke both Korean and English, lost her ability to speak English after hitting her head, although she could still read and write it.

Or maybe it was just the island’s mysterious mojo.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Of all the body functions that humans have to contend with, throwing up has got to be the least favorite.

Unless you’re Matthew Clemmens, the Cherry Hills, N.J., man who pled guilty this week to committing “vomit assault” on police captain Michael Vangelo and the officer's 11-year-old daughter during a recent Phillies game.

Dubbed “Pukemon” by the press, Clemmens stuck his fingers down his throat and purposefully puked on Vangelo, who referred to the experience as the “most disgusting thing” he’d ever seen.

As grotesque as the incident was, things could have been worse. Much like yawning, vomiting can be contagious in humans, triggering a chain reaction like the one depicted in the movie “Stand by Me.”

While some speculate that “viral” vomiting is a survival trait that’s evolved in primates – if an ape eats a poisonous plant and pukes, the other apes eating that plant will do the same and survive – others believe the reaction is more of a toss-up.

“With yawning or vomiting or passing out when you see blood, it’s a variable degree of nature and nurture,” says Dr. Paul Kassab, who practices internal medicine at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center. “Vomiting is more nurture than nature, I would say, but for those who are sensitive to smell, it’s more nature.”

It mainly depends on the individual.

“If you and I and 10 other people are sitting in a room and one person vomits, I wouldn’t say everybody would automatically vomit,” he says. “One person may turn their head, another may try to help; another may gag or vomit because of the smell. It’s something you can’t predict, although you can predict it for yourself by knowing your own sensitivities.”

Alisha Holdener, 33, of Seattle, says she doesn’t get easily queasy, but her husband is a different story.

“My husband has a really bad gag reflex,” she says. “My daughter puked the other day and he was like, ‘I have to go!’ It just triggers something in him. He can’t smell it or see it, because he’ll throw up, too.”

As for Clemmens -- aka Pukemon -- he won’t be sentenced until July 30, but the consensus seems to be unanimous: he’s a chuck-up.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

JoNel Aleccia writes:

Imagine worrying that you smelled bad – that you had horrid halitosis or unbearable body odor – only to find that no amount of mouthwash, deodorant or aggressive showering could get rid of the stench.

That's the reality for sufferers of a strange and agonizing condition called olfactory reference syndrome, in which people believe they emit foul or offensive odors – when they really don't.

This week, scientists at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting are hearing that the problem is serious enough to warrant its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible for assessing mental trouble.

"This disorder causes a lot of pain, shame and self-consciousness among its victims," said Dr. Katharine A. Phillips, a psychiatrist with Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University who studies ORS.

It's difficult to estimate the prevalence of the disorder, which is probably less than obsessive compulsive disorder, which affects about 2.3 percent of adults in the U.S., or some 3.3 million people.

"ORS is very under-recognized, but I would say it's more common than we know," Phillips said When I mention it to clinicians, they say, 'Oh, I have a patient like that.'"

Phillips conducted a close study of 20 ORS patients and chronicled the toll the disorder takes on their lives. About 60 percent of the victims are women and most started worrying about their smell as teenagers, usually about age 15. 

The sufferers became preoccupied with bodily odors, with 75 percent worried about their breath, 60 percent worried about their armpits and 35 percent worried about their genitals. Most are convinced that other people – at work, out in public – are aware of and disgusted by their scents.

On average, victims spent between three and eight hours a day occupied with the perceived smells, with 80 percent sniffing themselves, 68 percent excessively showering and 50 percent changing clothes multiple times. Sufferers trying to quell the scents turned to perfume (90 percent), gum (60 percent) and deodorant or mints (55 percent each), to no avail.

Eighty-five percent of the ORS sufferers reported actually smelling the bad odors, an olfactory hallucination. About 40 percent of victims had been housebound for a week because of the problem. More than two-thirds had suicidal thoughts and nearly a third had attempted suicide.

With awareness and intervention, ORS can be treated. Drugs used to curb obsessive-compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder, two related problems, are often useful, Phillips said. So is therapy that helps patients halt the thoughts and actions that make the obsession worse.

First, though, it has to be better researched – and better recognized, Phillips said.

Meanwhile, Phillips confirmed that there's still no syndrome for the opposite problem: People who actually smell terrible and don't do anything about it.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Diane Mapes writes:

Ugly Betty may have done all right, but for most homely folks, life can be one long kick to the curb.

Cute kids not only get more tender loving care from their parents than less toothsome babes, when they grow up, the unattractive get hired less often and earn 12 percent less than the so-called "beautiful people" of the world, research shows.

Now, it turns out having an ugly mug makes you more 22 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime, according to a Cornell University study. And to make it even worse, convicted blockaways (you know, the ones who look better a block away) are more likely to get hit with a longer, harsher sentence than the average-looking defendants of the world.

The study, which involved 169 Cornell psychology undergrads, determined that potential "impartial" jurors fall into two camps: those who process information in a rational manner (R-Processors) and those who process it by relying on emotions and personal experience (E-Processors). 

The study found that rational processors – the ones who rely on analysis, fact and logical argument – didn't allow looks to factor in. Hot or not, defendants were convicted the exact same way.

But emotional processors – people who are compelled by intuitive hunches or emotional feelings ("Just look at the guy; he looks like a crook!") – were not only more likely to find homely defendants guilty, they were more likely to give them harsher sentences (on average, study participants recommended 22 more months in prison for the unattractive).

Convicted defendants who were easy on the eyes, however, got easier sentences from the emo crowd.

The new finding echoes the research of two economists who announced four years ago that bad-looking people are more apt to grow up to be criminals. The economists didn't know why the facially disadvantaged were more likely to be crooks, but maybe some of these ugly ducklings weren't so much guilty of a crime as not living up to society's exacting beauty standards.

The bottom line? If you've been busted for a crime, it would be smart to call for a makeover, as well as a lawyer.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

JoNel Aleccia writes:

Eating extra veggies is a good goal, but an 88-year-old Chinese woman took the quest too far, consuming enough raw bok choy to send herself into a life-threatening, thyroid-induced coma, doctors say.

The woman showed up at a New York emergency room last summer, complaining she couldn't walk or swallow. But the real trouble, according to a report in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine, was that she'd been chowing down on 2 to 3 pounds of bok choy every day for several months in hopes of controlling her diabetes.

For those unfamiliar with the vegetable also known as Chinese white cabbage, that's the equivalent of eating two or three large heads a day of the stiff, leafy stalks. And the woman apparently munched them plain, without a dab of dressing or a sprinkle of salt, according to Dr. Michael Chu, a resident at the New York University School of Medicine who helped care for her.

"I am not sure if she had trouble consuming so much bok choy," Chu said. "It never came up that it was difficult to do so."

What was difficult was keeping the woman's thyroid working after the bok choy spree basically shut it down. It turns out that raw vegetables in the Brassica rapa family, which includes bok choy, release an enzyme called myrosinase, which triggers a process that puts the brakes on thyroid function.

Cooking deactivates the enzyme, but by eating so much bok choy raw, the woman sent her system into a severe form of hypothyroidism. She went into respiratory failure and then into a myxedema coma, a rare and usually deadly complication of too little thyroid hormone. 

It took massive intravenous doses of a synthetic thyroid hormone and a powerful anti-inflammatory medication to save her life, according to Chu's report. 

The case could serve as a warning to others, but Chu said he's not sure how many people would consume enough raw bok choy to put themselves in that position.

As for the woman, she recovered and was sent to live in a skilled nursing home for further care. There's no word on whether bok choy ever shows up on the menu.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Diane Mapes writes:

You'd think that surgery, scars, chemotherapy or even death might be enough to scare young women away from those ever-popular tanning booths, but new research says not so much.

Cancer's a bummer, for sure. But wrinkles? Those puppies are truly terrifying.

"They're not worried about skin cancer, but they are worried about getting wrinkled and being unattractive," says Dr. June Robinson, a dermatology professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and senior author of a new paper published today in Archives of Dermatology.

According to the National Center Institute, melanoma rates among 15 to 39-year old Caucasian women rose 50 percent between 1980 and 2004, enough to prompt the World Health Organization to bump indoor tanning beds to its highest cancer risk category -- up there with arsenic and mustard gas.

But informing young women that indoor tanning raises their risk of contracting the most deadly form of cancer by 75 percent hasn't packed much of a punch, since 25 to 40 percent of tween and teen girls still visit tanning salons.

With deadly melanoma so easily shrugged off, Robinson and her team of researchers decided to find out what would truly scare young women.

Getty Images stock

They produced a 25-page book that focused on the effects tanning had on appearance -- explaining that tanning and its ultraviolet rays destroyed collagen in the skin -- and distributed it to a group of 435 diehard tanners ages 18 to 22.

This time, the message clicked.

Robinson says no matter why the young women tanned (some did it because they hated pale skin, other were self-treating their seasonal affective disorder), the fact that it would turn them into walking alligator bags resulted in a 35 percent drop in indoor tanning visits.

"The fear of looking horrible trumped everything else," she says.

Darby Roeder, who's tanned off and on since she was 18, says crow's feet and facial furrows certainly score higher on her fear scale.

"Wrinkles are scarier because it's the more immediate consequence," says the 24-year-old food worker from Seattle. "Although cancer can be a deterrent, too."

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

JoNel Aleccia writes:

Here's a warning you probably thought you'd never need: The federal Food and Drug Administration is urging consumers not to swallow Benadryl Extra-Strength Itch-Stopping Gel after receiving reports of people chugging the lotion that's meant to be used only on the skin.

At least 121 people have reported gulping the gel, which they confused with other over-the-counter Benadryl products that are actually intended to be swallowed, between 2001 and 2009. FDA officials said they had received reports of serious side effects from drinking the lotion. In large amounts, the active ingredient in the gel, diphenhydramine, can cause numb lips, unconsciousness, hallucinations and confusion.

One man reported that he simply grabbed the wrong medicine from the kitchen cabinet where he stored the cough medicine.

"One small swig and he knew he had made a mistake," reported the patient safety site www.consumermedsafety.org. "He threw it up and his lips were numb for two hours."

Some of the confusion is understandable. The anti-itch gel comes in bottles that are similar in shape and size to the oral medication, and the consistency of the products is similar.

Still, the product's manufacturer, Johnson and Johnson, has taken steps to prevent serious injuries. They've changed the product label to add a new, bold statement that says "For Skin Use Only," and added a sticker to the cap that says the same thing.

They're also planning to research the problem further to understand why consumers may be mistakenly swallowing a lotion that's only meant to be rubbed into the skin.

The FDA's best advice? Store skin gels and oral medications separately. And, read the labels, folks.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Diane Mapes writes:

Being a "supertaster" may sound like a foodie's dream come true, but in reality, it's no picnic.

Coffee and alcohol are unpalatable – along with tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, strawberries, condiments and most sweets.

"I can't stand cake," says Michelle Triplett, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom and supertaster from Olympia, Wash., who spoke, coincidentally, on her birthday.  "It's too sweet for me. And when I drink beer, I gag. It's like drinking urine."

Supertasters detect components – like salt or bitterness -- in food that others can't, says Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.

"[Supertasters] have densities of taste buds that are 10 to 100 times greater than the normal population," he says. "As a result, supertasters are much more sensitive to spicy foods and they can taste … very mild flavors."

Triplett, whose favorite meals are turkey sandwiches and macaroni and cheese, says the blander the better, since most everything else is, as They Might Be Giants put it in their song "John Lee Supertaster," simply "too much." 

The condition is genetic, tends to affect women more than men and affects 25 percent of the U.S. population; non-tasters (people with a reduced ability to taste) make up another 25 percent with the rest of the population described as medium or normal tasters.

While there are some benefits -- supertasters tend to avoid sugars, salts and fats, so they suffer less from obesity and cardiovascular disease – there's a potential downside. Supertasters often avoid green vegetables because of their bitter taste, so they miss out on cancer-fighting flavanoids and other nutrients.

 "Many vegetables have bitterness in them -- like green pepper – so a supertaster may avoid [them]," says Hirsch.  Other problem veggies include broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, olives and spinach.

 "When I get Brussels sprouts on my tongue, I immediately want to pull that whole patch of tongue off," says Triplett. Tomato-based foods, apples and blueberries are also too potent for her.

Supertasters are also more prone to burning mouth syndrome, a condition in which a person's tongue or mouth feels like it's on fire.

"It's horribly disabling," says Hirsch. "You can't eat food, you can only drink water and it can be quite painful.

If you think you're a supertaster, a five-minute survey developed by Cornell University can help. There's also a home test involving blue food coloring. Or a simple taste test – available for a small fee -- that uses a filter paper impregnated with a chemical known 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP).  Non-tasters won't taste anything on the paper; medium tasters will taste a small amount of bitterness. Supertasters, however, will find the chemical "stomach-wrenchingly bitter."  

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Brian Alexander writes:

Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian yogi, is making headlines by claims that for the past 70 years he has had nothing -- not one calorie -- to eat and not one drop of liquid to drink. To test his claims, Indian military doctors put him under round-the-clock observation during a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, news reports say. During that time he didn't ingest any food or water – and remained perfectly healthy, the researchers said.

But that's simply impossible, said Dr. Michael Van Rooyen an emergency physician at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital, an associate professor at the medical school, and the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative – which focuses on aid to displaced populations who lack food and water.

Van Rooyen says that depending on climate conditions like temperature and humidity, a human could survive five or six days without water, maybe a day or two longer in extraordinary circumstances. We can go much longer without food – even up to three months if that person is taking liquids fortified with vitamins and electrolytes.

Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican convicted of firearms possession and imprisoned by the British, died in 1981 on the 66th day of his hunger strike. Gandhi was also known to go long stretches without food, including a 21-day hunger strike in 1932.

Sterling Hospitals / AFP - Getty Images file

Prahlad Jani was studied for two weeks.

Jani, dubbed "the starving yogi" by some, did have limited contact with water while gargling and periodically bathing, reported the news wire service AFP. While researchers said they measured what he spit out, Van Rooyen said he's clearly getting fluid somehow.

"You can hold a lot of water in those yogi beards. A sneaky yogi for certain," he said. "He MUST take in water. The human body cannot survive without it." The effects of food and water deprivation are profound, Van Rooyen explained. "Ultimately, instead of metabolizing sugar and glycogen [the body's energy sources] you start to metabolize fat and then cause muscle breakdown. Without food, your body chemistry changes. Profoundly malnourished people autodigest, they consume their own body's resources. You get liver failure, tachycardia, heart strain. You fall apart."

The yogi, though, would already be dead from lack of hydration. If he really went without any liquids at all, his cardiovascular system would have collapsed. "You lose about a liter or two of water per day just by breathing," Van Rooyen said. You don't have to sweat, which the yogi claims he never does. That water loss results in thicker blood and a drop in blood pressure.

"You go from being a grape to a raisin," Van Rooyen said and if you didn't have a heart attack first, you'd die of kidney failure.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Kavita Varma-White writes:

Oh, the tough decisions we face each day. Work or stay home with a sick child? Paper or plastic? Raspberry or peach jam?

Jam?

In the grand scheme of moral dilemmas, you'd think jam would rank somewhere below, say, choosing whether to drill or protect the environment. 

But it's one of the confounding choices researchers gave college students in a study exploring "cognitive dissonance," the uncomfortable feeling we get when we hold two opposing ideas in our minds, or regret a decision we've made.

In the way that a religious baptism symbolically gives us a moral clean slate, University of Michigan professors Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz discovered that washing our hands after making a choice actually helps us alleviate the discomfort of accepting the decision.

As part of the study, a group of college students had to choose one of two different fruit jams, and then rated how they expected both jams to taste. Those who washed their hands after choosing expected both jams to taste roughly the same, while those who didn't wash hands expected the jam they chose to taste much better than the other one. The research suggests that had this group washed their hands, they would not have needed to rationalize their initial choice by saying it was better than the other one. 

In another experiment, researchers had the students rank 10 CDs and then chose one to take home. They found the same result as with the jam: those who didn't wash their hands seemed to feel they needed to justify the way they ranked them.

While decisions about CDs and jams are admittedly lightweight, Schwarz said there was no need to expose research participants to dramatic, emotionally charged decisions that could have upset them, given that previous research has shown that small decisions are sufficient to induce dissonance.

The research is important, Schwarz says, because it illustrates that metaphors have a powerful effect on human thinking.

"We often talk about a 'clean slate' or 'washing one's hands of something,' and it seems that hand-washing can indeed wipe one's slate clean," Schwarz said.

So the next time you want a clean conscience after making a simple decision, head to the nearest sink and wash away the second-guessing.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.