Home News Nuggets News Digests News digests on matters related to parents, parenting, marriage, family, and more.
|
|
Breakfast keeps U.S. teens lean |
|
Health and Fitness
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Tuesday, 04 March 2008 |
|
Teenagers who regularly eat breakfast tend to weigh less, exercise more and eat a more healthful diet than their breakfast-skipping peers, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The study involved 2,216 adolescents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota whose eating patterns, weight and other lifestyle issues were tracked for five years. They were just under 15 years old when they entered the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics.
The more regularly the teens ate breakfast, the lower their body mass index was, according to the study. BMI is a measure of body weight relative to height. Those who always skipped breakfast on average weighed about 5 pounds more than their peers who ate the meal every day.
"What we found in the study was that kids who eat breakfast frequently, and especially every day, they're more healthy overall in terms of their lifestyle," Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
"They're much more physically active and they have a better diet overall. So they have lower fat intake, lower cholesterol intake, higher fibre intake."
An estimated 25 percent of U.S. children regularly skip breakfast, the researchers said. This comes amid rising obesity rates among young people.
Full report: Breakfast keeps U.S. teens lean |
|
|
Pregnant woman uses train toilet, baby slips out |
|
Trying to Conceive and Pregnancy
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Friday, 29 February 2008 |
|
AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - A newborn baby girl survived an ignoble birth after slipping down the toilet bowl of a moving Indian train onto the tracks when a pregnant woman unexpectedly gave birth while relieving herself on Tuesday.
"My delivery was so sudden," said the Bhuri Kalbi, the mother of the infant, born two months prematurely. "I did not even realize that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet."
Kalbi, a 33-year-old woman from a village in Rajasthan, fainted on the toilet seat after the birth for a few minutes before waking up and alerting her family.
"They stopped the train and ran on the tracks to find the baby," she said, speaking from her hospital bed in the western city of Ahmedabad.
Full report: Pregnant woman uses train toilet, baby slips out |
|
|
Diet change gives hyperactive kids new taste for life in Norway |
|
Special Child
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Tuesday, 26 February 2008 |
|
Tears streak Rita's cheek as she recalls what it was like trying to figure out what was wrong with her son more than a decade ago, but she breaks into a smile when she explains how changing his diet made all the difference.
"I could tell something was wrong with him as soon as he began eating solids as a baby. It was if the food was draining him," says Rita, 50, describing how her son Christoffer had yoyoed between passive and hyperactive behaviour until she had removed several staples from his diet including milk and grains.
Christoffer, today a normally developed 14-year-old, is one of 23 children suffering from hyperactive disorders who were put on milk-free diets in 1996-1997 and whose development has been tracked ever since by a small group of educators and researchers in the southwestern Norwegian town of Stavanger.
The group set out to prove a theory by Oslo-based scientist Karl Ludvig Reichelt that a metabolic disorder making it difficult to break down certain proteins, including casein (the protein in milk that makes it possible to make cheese), could cause mental problems like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
"One of the kids I worked with started on the diet on Wednesday and by the weekend his parents said they saw a huge positive change in his behaviour," says special educator Magne Noedland, who helped spearhead the diet project.
Full story: Diet change gives hyperactive kids new taste for life in Norway |
|
|
Marriage and Relationship
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Monday, 25 February 2008 |
|
HONEY attracts. And 'honey trappers' attract wayward men.
There is also a sting. These men have been set up by their wives, who hire women to test their husbands' fidelity.
Last week, a British media report said that honey trapping was a growing trend in Britain, with more private investigators there using sexy women as bait to test the faithfulness of their clients' spouses.
It is happening in Singapore too.
When The Sunday Times rang up 10 private investigator (PI) firms here last week, four readily offered the honey-trapper service.
One even claimed that its honey trappers would 'go all the way'. But the others drew the line at physical intimacy.
Lawyers and the six firms that did not touch such jobs said that although 'entrapment' of this sort is not illegal, it raises ethical questions.
Full report: Beware of the honey trap |
|
|
Jennifer Lopez & Marc Anthony Welcome Twins! |
|
Trying to Conceive and Pregnancy
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Saturday, 23 February 2008 |
|
It's double the baby joy for Jennifer Lopez and husband Marc Anthony: They're the proud new parents of twins, a boy and a girl, Lopez's manager tells PEOPLE exclusively.
The babies were born early Friday in Long Island, N.Y. The girl was born at 12:12 a.m. and weighed 5 lbs. 7 oz., and the boy followed at 12:23 a.m., weighing 6 lbs.
"Jennifer and Marc are delighted, thrilled and over the moon," Lopez's manager Simon Fields tells PEOPLE exclusively.
They're the first children for Lopez, 38, and the fourth and fifth for Anthony, 39. The couple celebrated the impending births with a baby shower in New York on Jan. 19. "They were just beaming the entire time," said one partygoer.
Full report: Jennifer Lopez & Marc Anthony Welcome Twins! |
|
|
Spouses Who Fight Live Longer |
|
Marriage and Relationship
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Friday, 25 January 2008 |
|
A good argument with your spouse could be just what the doctor ordered.
Preliminary results from a survey of married couples suggest that disputing husbands and wives who hold in their anger die earlier than expressive couples.
"When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict," said researcher Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Psychology Department. "Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that's fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict."
So while conflict is inevitable, the critical matter is how couples resolve it.
"The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?" Harburg said. "When you don't, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don't try to resolve the problem, then you're in trouble."
The findings add to past research showing that the release of anger can be healthy. For instance, one study revealed when people are angry they tend to make better decisions, perhaps because this emotion triggers the brain to ignore irrelevant cues and focus on the meat of the matter. Individuals who express anger might also have a sense of control and optimism over a situation, according to another past study.
Full report: Spouses Who Fight Live Longer |
|
|
PE: Focus on Exercise, Not Team Sports |
|
Health and Fitness
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Tuesday, 15 January 2008 |
|
With music pumping in the background, the kids in Terry Wade's physical education class are in constant motion, going from sit-ups to jumping jacks to curls with light weights.
After their 45-minute session, the sixth-graders who are sweating the most, or as Wade calls it, "burning butter," get stickers.
"My main goal and emphasis is getting these kids up and moving," said Wade, who teaches at Northrich Elementary in the Richardson school district in suburban Dallas. "It's 'Can this kid do this for a lifetime?' I don't care how good they are. I care if they're having fun."
Instead of team sports, Wade and other physical education teachers across the country are focusing more on individual activities that students can incorporate into their lives long after their school days are over.
Experts say the shift also helps gym teachers include children who are struggling with their weight. With individual activities, overweight students can work at their own pace, and not be left on the sidelines. And they can take part in lower impact activities like weightlifting, yoga or martial arts.
Full report: PE: Focus on Exercise, Not Team Sports |
|
|
World Outsources Pregnancies to India |
|
Trying to Conceive and Pregnancy
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Monday, 31 December 2007 |
|
Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.
The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.
More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.
Full report: World Outsources Pregnancies to India |
|
|
Child Shot Protecting Mom Hailed a Hero |
|
Misc
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 |
|
As the gunman was about to open fire, 7-year-old Alexis Goggins lunged from the back seat of the SUV and threw herself across her mom, crying, "Don't hurt my mother!"
Six bullets from the 9 mm handgun slammed into Alexis, one piercing her right eye. Two slugs hit her mother.
Alexis' mother pulled through. But two weeks later, Alexis lies in critical condition, blind in one eye. And to her classmates and many people in this city so depressingly familiar with violence, the little girl is a hero.
"She was trying to save me,'' her mother, Seliethia Parker, 30, told The Associated Press on Monday. "My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I'd be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me.''
Alexis has undergone three operations since the shooting, and her mother sits by her bedside at Children's Hospital of Michigan.
As for the mother, she was seriously wounded, with one slug grazing her head and the other entering her chest and stopping just short of an artery. But she was released from the hospital just a few days later.
Full report: Child Shot Protecting Mom Hailed a Hero |
|
|
Why pregnant women don't topple |
|
Trying to Conceive and Pregnancy
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Thursday, 13 December 2007 |
|
With all that growing weight up front, how is it that pregnant women don't lose their balance and topple over? Scientists think they've found the answer: There's are slight differences between women and men in one lower back vertebrae and a joint in the hip, which allow women to adjust their center of gravity.
This elegant evolutionary engineering is seen only in female humans and our immediate ancestors who walked on two feet, but not in chimps and apes, according to a study published in Thursday's journal Nature.
"That's a big load that's pulling you forward," said Liza Shapiro, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas and the only one of the study's three authors who has actually been pregnant. "You experience discomfort. Maybe it would be a lot worse if (the design changes) were not there."
Harvard anthropology researcher Katherine Whitcomb found two physical differences in male and female backs that until now had gone unnoticed: One lower lumbar vertebrae is wedged-shaped in women and more square in men; and a key hip joint is 14 percent larger in women than men when body size is taken into account.
Full report: Why pregnant women don't topple |
|
|
US warns about bed-wetting drug after two deaths |
|
Health and Fitness
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 |
|
U.S. health officials alerted the public on Tuesday about the deaths of two patients who were treated with a prescription drug to control bed-wetting.
The Food and Drug Administration said it was unclear whether the drug, desmopressin, had contributed to the deaths. But the agency said nasal versions were no longer approved for treating bed-wetting and doctors should consider other options.
Desmopressin is sold under the names DDAVP Nasal Spray, DDAVP Rhinal Tube, DDVP, Minirin and Stimate Nasal Spray. Makers include Sanofi-Aventis and several generic companies.
Other forms of the drug "should be used cautiously" in patients at risk of sodium imbalances that can be caused by over-hydration, the FDA said.
The agency reviewed 61 reports of patients treated with desmopressin who developed seizures related to hyponatremia, when sodium is too low. Two of the patients died.
Full report: US warns about bed-wetting drug after two deaths |
|
| | << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
|
|
|