May 10th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in News
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About 9% of infants are given dietary botanical supplements or teas as young as 1 month old, prompting government researchers to warn physicians to look for side effects and other health risks.
Supplement use is common. Parents use them to help with fussiness, digestion, colic, and relaxation. Parents like them because there’s no prescription required, they’re traditional to many cultures, and they’re marketed as “natural.”
But, caution the authors of a paper that appeared in the journal Pediatrics, such supplements’ purity and potency are unregulated, they can interact with prescription medicines, they may contain heavy metals or other contaminants, and they may not adapt well to a newborn’s metabolism and body weight.
Supplement use is also common as a cause of emergency room visits. And they’re linked to seizures and death.
Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used data from the Infant Feeding Practices Study II, a longitudinal survey of 2,653 women studied from late pregnancy through the first year of the child’s life. The sample was drawn from a nationally distributed consumer opinion panel of healthy adult mothers with healthy term or near-term infants.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
May 3rd, 2011 by KerriSparling in Humor, True Stories
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Growing up, we had these large, potted plants in our dining room, within throwing distance from the dining room table. (Stick with me – this is an important detail.) The plants were big and had wide, draped leaves and they made the corner of the dining room look like a veritable jungle.
Also, these suckers were really convenient for hiding food.
When I was little, the “diabetic diet” school of thought was based on the exchange program. This meant that my meals were structured around my calorie needs and the needs of my (then) peaking insulin doses. An average dinner would include one meat exchange, two starch exchanges, a dairy exchange, a fat exchange, and a fruit exchange. (Exchange, exchange, exchange.) When I was on insulins like Regular, NPH, and Lente, I needed to consume these portions in proportion, or I would end up with a very high, or very low, blood sugar.
So my mother (bless her anecdotal-medical-degree’d heart) would carefully measure out these exchanges and that would be my dinner. EXACTLY one meat exchange, and those two starches, etc. She worked very hard to make sure my meals were calculated and well-balanced.
And in response, I would hide my vegetables – aka “gross things” – in the dining room plants. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
April 28th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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Everyone knows about “Octomom” and her octuplets born after in-vitro fertilization (IVF). That was an extreme case, but multiple births resulting from unregulated artificial reproductive technologies have skyrocketed over the last decade. The increased rate of twins, triplets and even higher multiples are due to in-vitro treatments and those women and infants are at much higher risk of pregnancy complications, premature birth and long term health problems.
New research, published in theJournal of Pediatrics, looked at admissions at just one hospital in Montreal, Quebec and found multiple embryo transfers was responsible for a significant proportion of admissions to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). These infants were born severely preterm. Six babies died and 5 developed severe intraventricular hemorrhage or bronchopulmonary dysplasia. The researchers extrapolated their data to the entire country of Canada and said that a universal single-embryo transfer policy would have prevented 840 NICU admissions, 40 deaths and 42,488 days in the NICU. The cost was $40 million annually. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
April 23rd, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Research
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Based on their experience during countless schleps to the market, moms know that kids pick cereals whose boxes have cartoon characters on them. Previous research by Yale scientists explained the phenomenon: kids say that the stuff poured from such boxes tastes better than the same stuff when poured from a cartoon-less box. The same thing happens when kids pick graham crackers, carrots and gummy fruit snacks.
Pictures of Shrek, Dora the Explorer, Scooby Doo and their kin make just about anything taste yummier, it seems.
Can this observation be leveraged to encourage kids to select healthier foods? Yes, it turns out. But the story isn’t as straightforward as you’d think.
To study the impact of licensed media spokescharacters and other nutrition cues on kids’ taste assessment of food products, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania fed cereal from a box that had been labeled either “Sugar Bits” or “Healthy Bits” to 80 kids. Half the boxes in each “brand category” were adorned with cute cartoon penguins, while the other half were not. The kids were between 4 and 6 years old. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
April 23rd, 2011 by KerriSparling in Opinion, True Stories
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(Alternate tittle: “Bring out yer bread!”)
Now that the little bird is the big O-N-E, we have completed one year as parents. And one year doing the gluten-free diet with our baby. This was important to me because I felt strongly about the ties between the early introduction of gluten and type 1 diabetes diagnoses. And after doing some research and discussing this as a family, Chris and I decided to keep our BSparl gluten-free for her first year.
It was pretty easy, to be honest, keeping a little baby off gluten. (Especially since she doesn’t have celiac, so our decision was elective instead of required.) The ease came mostly from the fact that BSparl breastfed for almost six months, and didn’t start on solid foods until just after she turned six months old. All breastmilk and/or formula made for a pretty streamlined food schedule for that first half year. When we introduced solid foods into her diet, we went with organic rice cereal and formula first, then mushed up fruits and assorted other mushed up items (like avocado and shredded chicken breast) mixed with food pouches like these from Ella’s Kitchen. Her diet was pretty mushy for a good long time, since it took about 8 months for her first tooth to bust through. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
