New from Consumer Reports comes a shopping guide for women with the best brands to buy and smart suggestions for home and personal items.

You can read sample articles at Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports doesn’t accept advertising so their reviews and advice are unbiased. All products tested are purchased at retail by Consumer Reports staff and no free samples are accepted from manufacturers.

Soon it will be Christmas season again – at least at the stores and the malls. It used to be that Christmas shopping season traditionally began the day after Thanksgiving but in recent years, desperate retailers have been hauling out the lights and the plastic santas earlier and earlier, encroaching even upon Halloween.

To get you started on choosing gifts for those hard-to-please people on your list, Neiman Marcus has issued its holiday catalog featuring gifts from $25 to $1.7 million. This catalog may finally answer the question “What do you get the man who has everything?”.

How about a trip into space? Or a BMW?

Neiman Marcus gift book offers space flight, BMW

Women and shopping. The image we all grew up with was one of a woman going from store to store, arms loaded with boxes and shopping bags.

But the sterotype of women as compulsive shoppers is not an accurate one according to a study to be published by Stanford University Medical Center. According to their study, the rates of compulsive and binge buying are nearly the same for men and women.

Men and women with compulsive buying disorder get irrestible urges to buy unnecessary items and go on shopping binges, accumulating large debts which create financial hardship. The results can lead to broken relationships, bankruptcy and even suicide attempts.

Men,women have similar rates of compulsive buying

ABC News reports that researchers in Australia offered people participating in an Internet shopping experiment the opportunity to get dietary advice as they shopped for food. They could choose general advice or specific advice that offered lower fat alternatives to their food choices.

The researchers found that those who got tailored dietary tips bought lower fat foods on average than those getting the general advice. Read the article here.

Dr. David Katz, an ABC News Medical contributor and nutritionist at Yale University wants to see the technology make its way to America.

This could be the new wave of grocery shopping online. But do American consumers really want a nagging voice of conscience following them to the food aisle? How can we sneak that purchase of Dove bars with our Internet shopping service looking over our shoulder and shaking its disapproving programming at us? Don’t we sometimes deserve those guilty pleasures?

If the programming can be used to help us make better nutrition choices, could it also be used to beautify the general population? Why not use it for clothes shopping online? We could get helpful advice like “those pants will make your butt look huge” or “don’t you think you’re too old to wear a mini-skirt?”. Perhaps it could rid the malls of overweight women in spandex.

I know, that’s just a dream.