Health & WellnessS


Family

Study: Working moms have unheathier kids

Julie Deardorff
Chicago Tribune
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:59 UTC
Children whose mothers work outside the home eat fewer fruits and vegetables, drink more sugary beverages between meals and get less exercise than moms who have never been employed, new British research shows.

Dads weren't included in the study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, because the authors said their working patterns have changed relatively little in recent decades.

But about 60 percent of women in the U.K and U.S. are now working after having children, according to the researchers with Britain's Institute of Child Health. This means mothers may have less time to make sure their children eat right, exercise and don't spend too much time in front of the computer or television.
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People

Study Finds Women Wear Shoes That Cause Pain

Roni Caryn Rabin
New York Times
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:49 UTC
Some women love their shoes so much it hurts.

That is the conclusion of a new study that looks at the link between shoe choices and chronic foot pain. It was based on foot exams of 3,378 men and women from Framingham, Mass., who were questioned about the type of shoes they wore in the past as well as in the present. Their average age was 66.

The researchers found that smart shoe choices paid off in the long term: women who had mainly worn supportive footwear like sneakers or athletic shoes in their younger years cut their risk of common foot pain later in life by more than half, compared with women who had worn shoes that gave average support, like hard-soled or rubber-soled ones.
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Being Overweight Can Cut Women's Life Expectancy

Maria Cheng
The Associated Press
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:33 UTC
Being fat in middle age may slash women's chances of making it to their golden years in good health by almost 80 percent, a new study says. American researchers observed more than 17,000 female nurses with an average age of 50 in the U.S. All of the women were healthy when the study began in 1976. Researchers then monitored the women's weight, along with other health changes, every two years until 2000.

For every one-point increase in their Body Mass Index, women had a 12 percent lower chance of surviving to age 70 in good health when compared to thin women. Researchers defined "healthy survival" as not only being free of chronic disease, but having enough mental and physical ability to perform daily tasks like grocery shopping, vacuuming or walking up a flight of stairs.

Experts consider people with a BMI between 19-25 to be healthy, while those from 25 to 30 are considered overweight and those over 30 are obese.
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Key Mechanism in Development of Nerve Cells Found


ScienceDaily
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:00 UTC
Chaos brews in the brains of newborns: the nerve cells are still bound only loosely to each other. Under the leadership of Academy Research Fellow Sari Lauri, a team of researchers at the University of Helsinki has been studying for years how a neural network capable of processing information effectively is created out of chaos. The team has now found a new kind of mechanism that adjusts the functional development of nerve cell contacts.

The results were published in early September as the leading article of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The work carried out by Lauri's team and its partners at the Viikki campus sheds light on a development path that results in some of the large number of early synapses becoming stronger. The researchers found out hat the BDNF growth factor of nerve cells triggers a functional chain which promotes the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. BDNF enables the release of glutamate by prohibiting the function of kainate receptors which slow down the development of the preforms of the synapses. The activity of the kainate receptors restricts the release of glutamate and the development of synapses into functional nerve cell contacts.
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Toys

From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk

Jane E. Brody
New York Times
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:58 UTC
Baby
© Twitter
I recently stopped to congratulate a young mother pushing her toddler in a stroller. The woman had been talking to her barely verbal daughter all the way up the block, pointing out things they had passed, asking questions like "What color are those flowers?" and talking about what they would do when they got to the park.

This is a rare occurrence in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I told her. All too often, the mothers and nannies I see are tuned in to their cellphones, BlackBerrys and iPods, not their young children.

There were no such distractions when my husband and I, and most other parents of a certain age, spent time with our babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Like this young mother, we talked to them. We read to them and sang with them. And long before they became verbal, we mimicked their noises, letting them know they were communicating and we were listening and responding. (And we've done the same with our four grandsons, all born after the turn of this wireless century.)
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Heart

Lower Your Risk Of Heart Disease Without Drugs

Mark Hyman, M.D.
Huffington Post
Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:43 UTC
Last week, I explained how preventing heart disease has very little to do with simply lowering cholesterol with statin drugs. Our current thinking about how to treat and prevent heart disease is at best misguided, and at worst harmful. We believe we are treating the causes of heart disease by lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure, lowering blood sugar with medication. But the real question is what causes high cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar in the first place. (i) It is certainly not a medication deficiency!

If you say your genes are responsible, you are mostly wrong. It is the environment working on your genes that determines your risk. In other words, it is the way you eat, how much you exercise, how you deal with stress and the effects of environmental toxins (ii) that are the underlying causes of high cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. That is what determines your risk of heart disease, not a lack of medication.
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Mad Genius: Study Suggests Link Between Psychosis and Creativity


Medical News Today
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:00 UTC
Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven. History teems with examples of great artists acting in very peculiar ways. Were these artists simply mad or brilliant? According to new research reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, maybe both.

In order to examine the link between psychosis and creativity, psychiatrist Szabolcs Kéri of Semmelweis University in Hungary focused his research on neuregulin 1, a gene that normally plays a role in a variety of brain processes, including development and strengthening communication between neurons. However, a variant of this gene (or genotype) is associated with a greater risk of developing mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In this study, the researchers recruited volunteers who considered themselves to be very creative and accomplished. They underwent a battery of tests, including assessments for intelligence and creativity. To measure creativity, the volunteers were asked to respond to a series of unusual questions (for example, "Just suppose clouds had strings attached to them which hang down to earth. What would happen?") and were scored based on the originality and flexibility of their answers. They also completed a questionnaire regarding their lifetime creative achievements before the researchers took blood samples.
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Fruit and Vegetables Have 'Unacceptable' Levels of Pesticides

Harry Wallop
Telegraph
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:12 UTC
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Many fruit and vegetables sold in supermarkets and greengrocers contain pesticide residues that are above the maximum legal level, an in-depth report has said

Apples, peas, and grapes are sometimes covered in crop spray that is above the maximum allowed levels allowed under European law.

The findings come from the Pesticides Residues Committee, part of the Health and Safety Executive, after testing more than 4,000 samples of food and drink.
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Attention

Americans Threatened with Jail Time, Huge Fines for Refusing to Buy Health Insurance

Mike Adams
Natural News
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00 UTC
There's a popular video circulating on the 'net right now about how to escape handcuffs without using a key. Americans are watching the video to bone up on essential skills that will soon be needed for health care reform, it seems, since the new laws that are about to be put in place call for Americans to be arrested and thrown in jail if they refuse to buy health insurance.

This has now been confirmed by Tom Barthold, the Chief of Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. And it's not merely about jail time; it's also about the $25,000 fine that could be levied by the IRS against individuals who refuse to buy health insurance.

That this is even being considered just boggles the mind. If a person is too broke to afford health insurance right now, how are they supposed to be able to buy it after paying a $25,000 fine and spending a year in prison?

As Paul Craig Roberts brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay, this is like trying to solve the homeless problem by forcing homeless people to buy a home, then throwing them in prison when they can't afford to.
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Health

New Links Among Alcohol Abuse, Depression, Obesity In Young Women Found


Science Daily
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:46 UTC
There is new evidence that depression, obesity and alcohol abuse or dependency are interrelated conditions among young adult women but not men.

Using data collected when young adults were 24, 27 and 30 years of age, a team of University of Washington researchers found that nearly half the sample of 776 young adults tracked during the study met the criteria for one of these conditions at each of these time points.

"The proportion of people with all three of these conditions at any one point is small," said Carolyn McCarty, the lead author of a new study and a UW research associate professor of pediatrics and psychology. "For women there is a great deal of overlap between these common emotional and health problems that span early adulthood. Men may develop one of these conditions but they don't tend to lead another one later on."
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