The bad news is, you may have wasted your money.
The good news is, you probably didn't do any harm.
That is the take-away from report on whether all those "educational" videos, which claim to make baby smarter, make any difference at all.
Gigi Stone
ABCnewsWed, 04 Mar 2009 07:47 UTC
Clinic's Service to Custom-Design Baby's Hair and Eye Color Sparks Controversy
Imagine if you could choose your baby the same way you pick out a new outfit from a catalogue. Perhaps some blue eyes, a bit of curly hair, and why not make her tall, lean and smart? One fertility doctor now says that he may be able to deliver.
Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg has already helped thousands of couples choose their child's gender at his fertility institutes in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Within six months, he says, the clinic will offer a new service: allowing couples to select the physical traits of their babies. Steinberg says he cannot promise that people will get their selections, but claims he can dramatically increase the probability.
Organic milk is now as readily available as conventional milk as more consumers and companies are recognizing its benefits and demand. A recent estimate by the USDA says organic products are now available in nearly 20,000 natural food stores and nearly 3 of 4 conventional grocery stores.
If you and/or your children drink organic milk, you've already heard about "rBGH", which may have prompted you to switch from conventional milk to organic milk in the first place. Organic milk is produced by cows who eat feed free of animal by-products from slaughter, and free of antibiotics, pesticides and hormones, like rBGH.
Sweet reversal: Harmful effects of fructose traced to one protein in a study of mice.
Knocking out a liver protein in mice can reverse the damaging effects of a super-sweet diet. Diets loaded with high-fructose corn syrup wreak havoc on metabolic processes, but how fructose does its damage has been a mystery. The new study, appearing in the March 4 Cell Metabolism, identifies a possible culprit, a protein in the liver called PGC-1 beta.
The new research is "putting together things that we know and making a link," comments Carlos Hernandez of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The paper highlights the importance of PGC-1 beta in the whole process, says Hernandez, who wrote a commentary in the same issue of Cell Metabolism on the new research.
Over the past decade, high-fructose corn syrup has made its way into Western diets through soda and processed foods in ever-increasing amounts. Diets high in fructose are linked to a slew of metabolic disorders, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, high blood levels of triglycerides, and insulin resistance, which is tied to type 2 diabetes, says study coauthor Yoshio Nagai, a physiologist at Yale University School of Medicine. "Many people think fat is the enemy, but they don't care about sweeteners."
With assistance from the classic book character Where's Waldo?, researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center have recently made a major advance in understanding how the brain searches for objects of interest.
Susana Martinez-Conde, PhD, and fellow researchers Jorge Otero-Millan, Xoana Troncoso, PhD, Stephen Macknik, PhD, and Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza, PhD, recently conducted a study asking participants to find Waldo. As participants searched, their eye movements were simultaneously recorded. Results showed that the rate of microsaccades tiny, jerk-like fixational eye movements dramatically increased when participants found Waldo.
"This discovery helps explain human searching behavior, which can assist us in finding keys on a cluttered desk or recognizing a child's face on a playground," says Dr. Martinez-Conde.
Here's another reason to eat your broccoli: UCLA researchers report that a naturally occurring compound found in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may help protect against respiratory inflammation that causes conditions like asthma, allergic rhinitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Published in the March edition of the journal Clinical Immunology, the research shows that sulforaphane, a chemical in broccoli, triggers an increase of antioxidant enzymes in the human airway that offers protection against the onslaught of free radicals that we breathe in every day in polluted air, pollen, diesel exhaust and tobacco smoke. A supercharged form of oxygen, free radicals can cause oxidative tissue damage, which leads to inflammation and respiratory conditions like asthma.
"This is one of the first studies showing that broccoli sprouts - a readily available food source - offered potent biologic effects in stimulating an antioxidant response in humans," said Dr. Marc Riedl, the study's principal investigator and an assistant professor of clinical immunology and allergy at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Children and teens of parents with bipolar disorder appear to have an increased risk of early-onset bipolar disorder, mood disorders and anxiety disorders, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
As many as 60 percent of patients with bipolar disorder experience symptoms before age 21, according to background information in the article. Identifying the condition early may improve long-term outcomes, potentially preventing high psychosocial and medical costs. Having family members with bipolar disorder is the best predictor of whether an individual will go on to develop the condition, the authors note. "Therefore, carefully evaluating and prospectively following the psychopathology of offspring of parents with bipolar disorder and comparing them with offspring of parents with and without non-bipolar disorder psychopathology, are critical for identifying the early clinical presentation of bipolar disorder," they write.
One week on, and we are now beginning to hear predictions of even less growth, and the likely length of the depression increasing.
It's a little unfortunate that the only people who can get a word into the newspapers or onto the television, are in fact prime candidates for being helped by the men in white coats.
All they succeed in doing is causing confusion amongst those of us who are in the process of evolving into a more sensible human being.
The old "modern" paradigm has lived its life - bring on the new paradigm.
Finding a way to bypass the molecular events involved in autoimmunity - where the body's immune system mounts a self-directed attack - could lead to new treatments for autoimmune disorders and chronic infections. A study published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology describes genetic evidence that two distinct molecular pathways control the formation of regulatory T cells (Treg), a cell type vitally important in limiting undesirable immune responses.
Treg cells are like the peace-keepers of the immune defence system - they limit the actions of effector T cells, the foot-soldiers of the body. If the body lacks sufficient numbers of Treg cells, it loses the ability to tone down immune responses once invading pathogens are cleared. In addition, the body is unable to suppress T cell responses that recognize and target the body itself. The latter can lead to autoimmunity, which can destroy vital tissues and organs.
Under normal healthy conditions, the majority of Treg cells are derived from an organ called the thymus. New work from researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and The Scripps Research Institute in California, shows that if a gene called Carma1 isn't expressed normally, Treg development is impaired in the thymus. Mutations in Carma1 can result in a failure of the thymus to produce Treg cells, said senior investigator Kasper Hoebe, Ph.D., a researcher at Cincinnati.
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"The first thing I knew about it was from the woman downstairs, who was banging on the door of our flat and asking about the water pouring through her ceiling. I went into the bathroom, and saw that the bath was overflowing. I'd forgotten to turn it off, and, even worse, had no recollection of ever running it," says Louise, a copywriter and mother of two, who has been an insomniac since the age of seven.
You would normally put Louise's erratic behaviour down to a case of extreme forgetfullness due to lack of sleep, rather than a sign of mental illness, but a recent article in the
New Scientist now raises the possibility that insomnia could actually cause mental illness.
