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Video: Pesticides Tied to ADHD in Children


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Risks for Youths Who Eat What They Watch

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© Spencer Jones/Getty Images
Many factors influence children's food choices: where they eat; what their friends and siblings eat; what parents eat and drink and bring into the house; what is served at school; and, of course, what they like.

But if you are a parent, would you want your children's food and beverage choices determined by manufacturers whose primary goal is to make money by getting them hooked on products of questionable nutritional value? The issue is of particular importance now that rates of childhood obesity are soaring throughout the country, influenced in no small way by commercial interests.

Heart

New Dads Secrete Hormone That Tightens Baby Bonds, Israeli Study Shows

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© Getty ImagesProlactin and oxytocin prove to be present in male parents as well.
Studies conducted by an Israeli scientist suggest that, like women, new fathers secrete hormones that strengthen their attachment to their infants.

Prof. Ruth Feldman, a psychologist and brain scientist at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, and adjunct professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University School of Medicine, recently published a series of studies describing the hormonal activity in new fathers that enhances the feeling of fatherhood and their connection to the newborn infants.

Most research until now has sought to scientifically measure the bond of love between mothers and the newborn.

In contrast, in the study led by Prof. Feldman, as part of the doctoral thesis of Ilanit Gordon, and published this month in the journal Hormones and Behavior, researchers studied the levels of oxytocin and prolactin produced in fathers when interacting with their infants.

Magnify

Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest

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© Raul Touzon/National Geographic NewsA teenage boy naps on Marco Island, Florida's Tigertail beach
REM sleep boosts memory, creativity, and more, experts announce.

Dreaming may improve memory, boost creativity, and help you better plan for the future, new research suggests.

In a recent study, people who took naps featuring REM sleep - in which dreams are most vivid - performed better on creativity-oriented word problems. That is, the REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep helped people combine ideas in new ways, according to psychiatrist Sara Mednick, who led the study.

Part of the experiment's morning round involved a word-analogy test, similar to some SAT problems. For example, given "chips: salty::candy:_____" the answer would have been "sweet."

At midday, after the first round, the subjects were given a 90-minute rest period, during which they were monitored.

Magnify

Secrets of Sleeping Soundly Uncovered

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© Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic NewsCertain brain waves act as noise blockers during sleep. Above, a woman sleeps in an airport
Sound sleepers' brains have "blockades" against noise, study says.

Sleep like a log? You can thank your spindles, rapid-fire brain waves that act as blockades against noise during sleep, a new study says.

For the research, study co-author Jeffrey Ellenbogen of Harvard Medical School recruited 12 self-described sound sleepers to spend three nights in his "comfy" lab.

The first night, the sleepers were treated to quiet conditions. But during the next two nights, scientists bombarded the subjects with several types of sounds - including jet engine roars and toilet flushes - after the people had fallen asleep.

Brain wave readings revealed that the more spindles a person had, the more likely he or she could stay asleep through the barrage of noises, Ellenbogen said.

Alarm Clock

Cloned Meat May Already Have Invaded Our Food Supply, Posing Alarming Health Risks

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It's just a matter of time before we are eating clones, if we are not eating them now.

When Canadian agricultural leaders asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week after a scandal about unlabeled clone products in Europe if "cloned cows or their offspring have made it into the North American food supply," he said, "I can't say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don't know."

And when AlterNet asked the USDA this week if cloned products are already in the food supply, a spokesman said the department was "not aware of an instance where product from an animal clone has entered the food supply" thanks to a "voluntary moratorium" - but that offspring of clones, at the heart of the Europe scandal," are not clones and are therefore not included" in the voluntary moratorium.

Sounds like Europe is not the only place eating milk and meat from unlabeled clone offspring. In fact, the BBC, UK newspapers and even a US grocer all report that US consumers are digging into clone food, whether or not they know it.

Comment: To learn more about the ongoing issue of cloned meat and milk entering the food supply read the following:

How Would You Fancy Cloned Beef?
U.S. Unsure if Cloned Meat has been Sold in North America
'Cloned Beef' On Store Shelves Causes Stir In Britain
Illegal Cloned Cow's Milk On Sale In UK
European Union Votes for Labels on Nano, Cloned and GM food


Red Flag

Big Business Fights Against the Health of Children

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© schriftman.wordpress.com
The Children's Food and Advertising Beverage Initiative, initiated by the Better Business Bureau in 2007 and meant to curb what is advertised to easily-influenced children on television, has been delayed in Congress. The delay is being caused by an overdue report that is meant to define standards for what can be advertised to children in terms of a food's nutritional value, including calorie, fat, and sugar content.

The inherent problem of the initiative is that corporations, for now, voluntarily set their own standards for what is and is not acceptable to advertise to children. Many of the companies who voluntarily participate have agreed that half their advertising will be devoted to healthier foods, but the companies decide the acceptable limits for calorie, fat, and sugar content. That means that candy, sugary cereals and sodas, and fatty frozen dinners and fast-food meals can qualify as "healthy."

Magic Wand

Tai Chi beats stretching in fibromyalgia study

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© webmd.net
The slow, flowing movements of tai chi are better for relieving pain and other symptoms of fibromyalgia than conventional stretching exercises, doctors reported on Wednesday.

The improvements continued throughout the three months of lessons for 33 volunteers receiving the movement and breathing exercises, study leader Dr. Chenchen Wang of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston said in a telephone interview.

"Week by week they changed. The pain and depression improved, and a lot of people were depressed," said Wang, whose study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"They feel better. People said it changed their life. Only two or three feel it didn't help."

Health

Stomach Bacteria Need Vitamin to Establish Infection, Research Finds

Scientists have determined that Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes peptic ulcers and some forms of stomach cancer, requires the vitamin B6 to establish and maintain chronic infection, according to research published in the online journal mBio™. This finding, along with the identification of the enzyme the microbe requires to utilize the vitamin, could lead to the development of an entirely new class of antibiotics.

"Approximately half the world's population is infected with H. pylori, yet how H. pylori bacteria establish chronic infections in human hosts remains elusive. To our knowledge, this study is the first to describe a link between this vitamin and bacterial pathogenesis," says Richard Ferrero of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a researcher on the study which also included scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, Australia.

Umbrella

"Really Important" to Note That "Oil Mixed with Dispersants is More Toxic than Just Oil Alone" Says Valdez Expert

.Excerpt from Dispersants in Gulf concern Alaskan residents after Exxon Valdez, WWL-TV New Orleans, August 18, 2010:
“We’re living with a potential time bomb waiting to explode in our faces," said Rosina Phillipe, a Grand Bayou, Louisiana leader. …

[There] is concern about how poisonous dispersants are… “What’s really important is oil mixed with dispersants is more toxic than just oil alone… and now we have dispersants on an unprecedented scale put into the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico," [Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council executive director Mark] Swanson said…”
Read the report here.