Save Your Breath: Oxygen Bars May Not Be Much Help
Trendsetters that we are, we finally visited West Hollywood’s O2Bar, a full year after it opened. This is the place where you pay $15 to get 20 minutes’ worth of oxygen blown up your nose through a “nose hose”--which is desirable because, says 02’s menu, “Oxygen is the health food for the lungs!” The fun part is you get to feel like a total reprobate because you’re lying back surrounded by strangers in a dimly lit room, receiving gas from ornate, bubbling hookahs.
Our evening began with $2 glasses of “ozone water” (something we imagine one could also make at home, such as sun tea, by leaving water out in L.A. air for a spell). Then we moved on to oxygen infused with an “energy” aroma, a brain-blast of pine up both nostrils. The room was filled with O2enthusiasts, though we suspect the man two hookahs down--the one muttering about the placebo effect and telling David, our oxygen waiter for the night, “It’s all psychosomatic, you know!”--was a bit of a Doubting Thomas.
We admit it: We are Doubting Thomasinas. What’s with this ozone water? (We thought ozone was something that air-pollution experts worry about.) Do we need extra oxygen? We got on the phone to find out.
Dr. Richard DeAndrea, founder of O2, says the ozone water contains ozone, O3, a chemical containing three oxygen atoms, which improves the body’s health and vigor.
“Very strange,” says David Bates, professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, who’s an air pollution expert. Los Angelenos, he adds dryly, are probably getting “all the ozone they need--and more” from the air. But there was probably no ozone in my drink anyway, he says. Ozone--which is used to purify water in some parts of the world--quickly reacts to form regular old oxygen when bubbled through water. (Hey, at least it was all-you-can-drink.)
What about breathing extra oxygen? DeAndrea says that in polluted cities, because of competing carbon monoxide, we are oxygen-deprived, and that causes all kinds of ailments.
“No, no, no, no, no,” protests Bates: There’s not that much carbon monoxide in L.A. air, he says. (Experts are much more worried about other pollutants such as ozone and particles of soot.) And “giving someone supplemental oxygen, if they’re of normal health, should not make any difference,” says lung expert Dr. Ira Jeffry Strumpf, president of the California Thoracic Society. Our red blood cells are already saturated with pretty much all the oxygen they can hold, he says. (The occasional 20-minute bout of oxygen shouldn’t hurt, he adds, unless a person has certain lung ailments.)
DeAndrea stridently disagrees, but somehow I find my Doubting Thomasina-ness growing stronger and stronger. Like that energy scent. This much I know: I am never snorting pine up my nose again.
Unsuitable Gifts, Courtesy of the FDA
While we’re on the subject of things that probably don’t work, here are a couple of amazing products that we may not be adding to our Christmas shopping list (and yes, one can actually buy these things):
* A “magnetic mug,” which will magnetize beverages poured into it, thus making it easier for those fluids to flush toxins from your body.
* A “reflexology steering wheel,” which has “soft nubby pads” at strategic places on the wheel, which--as the car rolls along--massage key acupuncture points on your hands.
And, according to the Berkeley Wellness Letter, here are a few over-the-counter drugs that the Food and Drug Administration probably won’t be sending to any relatives this holiday season (not that these are very festive items anyway):
* Anti-fungal diaper rash products.
* Nail fungus remedies (prescription drugs do work).
* Sexual stimulants.
* Boil remedies.
* Topical hormone products claiming to remove wrinkles.
* Digestive aids such as cellulase, garlic and ox bile extract.
* Oral treatments for fever blisters and cold sores.
These are just some of the over-the-counter remedies that the FDA has been taking a look at ever since a 1962 law change decreed that drugs should be both safe and effective (they only had to be safe before). The above products flunked the test.
So that’s why I still have wrinkles.
