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Strollerderby
What did this bee eat?
Kids come out liking chocolate, hating pacifiers, with a personality. Or do they? Does a baby like a pacifier just because someone sticks one in her mouth? Is it nature or nurture that makes us who we are?
The debate is endless but it seems pretty clear that some third way is how it happens. We’re born with a set of genes and some get turned on and others don’t. This week, research on bees opens a window onto how that happens. In particular, on how bees’ diet determines whether or not a bee turns into a worker or a queen. What a bee eats — or is fed — decides its fate. Nurture changes nature. Enticing, right?
Whether you breast or formula feed your baby, at some point you are going to have to introduce solid foods. There is no magic age at which this should happen, but the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends waiting at least until your baby can sit independently and grab for things to put in her mouth. This usually occurs between the ages of four and seven months.
In addition, the AAP suggests starting baby off with simple and healthy foods like rice cereal and oatmeal. Once that has been established, it is recommended that you add vegetables and then fruits to the menu.
Of course, we all do things a little bit differently and there’s no reason to judge a parent who introduces solids at a slightly earlier or later age or serves fruits before vegetables.
But what about parents who skip the healthy stuff altogether and start their infants off on cookies, juice and chips? According to recent Australian research, many parents are doing just that. Continue reading »
Looking to lose some of the baby weight? Why not just eat baby food? Believe it or not, that’s what some women are doing. Personally, I think it’s a ridiculous idea. Any diet that requires grown women to eat pureed peas out of a tiny jar is seriously problematic.
According to The Kansas City Star, “dieters are going gaga over one of the most peculiar fad diets yet.” All you need to do is eat 14 jars of baby food a day and then a complete “grownup” dinner — assuming you haven’t already lost your appetite.
The fad took off after Marie Claire UK published an article in May about Jennifer Aniston’s recent 7-pound weight loss. Aniston’s trainer, Tracy Anderson, described her “baby food cleanse,” which incorporated easy-to-digest mini-meals such as smoothies, oatmeal and soups.
People took Anderson’s remark literally and soon everyone was asking Aniston about her baby food diet. Continue reading »
In the 19th century, the average age for a girl to hit puberty was 15 years old. By the 1960′s, that age had fallen to about 12.5. But a recent study out of the University Hospital in Copenhagen puts the average age for breast development to begin in girls at 9 years, 10 months. Other studies have reported similar numbers and the implication is clear: Girls today are reaching puberty at a much younger age than ever before. So, what gives? Why are girls’ bodies maturing so fast? Continue reading »
Ever wonder what would happen if your diet consisted of all of the foods you see advertised on TV?
The short answer is: you’d be really unhealthy.
And for the long answer, you’re in luck – a new report published this month in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association addresses this very question.
If you ate only foods you saw in TV commercials, you would consume 25 times the recommended amount of sugar and 20 times the amount of fat, but less than half the dairy, fiber and fruits and vegetables, according to The New York Times. Continue reading »
Earlier we explored the question of whether or not restaurant kids’ menus mark the death of civilization. Most of us would like our kids to be adventurous rather than picky eaters. How early can we start challenging those tiny taste buds?
In the womb. New Scientist reports on research that suggests your fetus can taste your food.
With last week’s International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia came new reports on autism research ranging from good to guilt-inducing: an inkling of hope from a clinical drug trial, research defying the persistent myth that divorce is one likely encore to an autism diagnosis, a rigorous study debunking claims that changes in diet can result in changes in a child’s behavior and two more studies linking common infertility treatments to a slight increase in autism risk. The real good news is that the research is being done, and the real bad news is that with all the headlines, we still don’t know much. (Although we do know that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose “research” supposedly linked the MMR vaccine to autism, lost his license to practice in Great Britain today, which won’t affect his Texas clinic.) None of the reported studies did much more than give researchers a lead on where to look next.
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Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
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Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
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Katherine Stone 
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