Maura Rhodes

Senior Editor

Maura Rhodes is a senior editor at Sharecare. She has covered health, fitness, nutrition and well-being as both a writer and an editor at numerous print and on-line publications, including Self, Parenting, and Women's Health magazines, and iVillage and RealAge.com. Her goal as a journalist is to make complex information accessible and useful for readers. She maintains her own health by taking hip-hop dance and relying on her four kids and her energetic Sheltie to keep her on her toes physically and mentally.

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make-a-change

Grow Younger This Week!

Posted by: | July 9th, 2012 | 0 comments

A few days ago I walked into my dermatologist’s office for a skin cancer check and walked out with a prescription for Retin-A, a topical medication derived from vitamin A that serves a multitude of skin-improving purposes—among them, increasing collagen to plump up wrinkles and fading age spots. I’ve got tons of the latter. I grew up in the South at a time when primping for the prom started weeks before the big night: My friends and I would slather on baby oil and hit the deck to get a head-start on a “healthy” tan to complement our dresses and our dates’ color-coordinated tuxes. (Yeah, I’m that old). Not a good idea for anyone, but for someone like me, of Scotch-Irish descent, those sunning sessions yielded serious skin damage. Besides the splotches, I have an official history of squamous cell carcinoma: If you look real close at the bridge of my nose you can see the tiny dip where it was removed. View Full Post

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Happiness Is… Updating My Facebook Page

Posted by: | May 23rd, 2012 | 1 comment

I joined Facebook on February 13, 2008, solely to play online Scrabble with some coworkers. I had no idea what Facebook was and, honestly, all I wanted to do was shuffle my virtual tiles and satisfy my inner word-nerd. Fat chance! Before I knew it I was accepting friend requests and peeking at people’s walls until finally, on October 3, 2008 (I know this thanks to FB’s handy Timeline feature), I tentatively offered up my own first update: “… is feeling kind of lonely in her little office at the end of the hall” and, soon after, “…is purging Wyatt’s room of board books (and weeping ever so slightly…)” View Full Post

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Childhood Obesity: The 64-Calorie Solution

Posted by: | May 7th, 2012 | 2 comments

My daughter, who’s 13, has started asking a lot of questions about food. She wanted to know, for example, if the mango smoothies she likes have a lot of calories (and was crestfallen to learn that one bottle is actually two sugar-laden servings), and if the bangers and mash she orders at our local gastropub is healthy (uh, no, honey, the sausage has lots of saturated fat, the potatoes are swimming in butter and there’s nothing green on the plate). View Full Post

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The Cervical Cancer Vaccine: Timing Is (and Isn’t) Everything

Posted by: | January 28th, 2012 | 13 comments

At my 12-year-old daughter’s last check-up, the pediatrician asked if I wanted to give her Gardasil. I said no. I knew that Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine, works by providing immunity against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is... View Full Post