babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
Put down that pickle-covered pizza, prego!
A new study by Abigail Fraser of the University of Bristol says too much pregnancy weight gain raises the odds that ”your child will show signs of heart disease by age 9.”
According to the study, published in the June 1 issue of Circulation, “Children’s heart risk increased with any weight gain during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, and with any weight gain over 1.1 pounds per week during weeks 14 to 36 of pregnancy.” Any weight gain… into the second trimester?! Oh man, I can remember housing a salad, roll, steak, potatoes and veggies at TGI Friday’s during week five – the day I told my Dad I was pregnant. (The steak was made with Jack Daniels. Which is probably why my daughter fell all the time while she was learning to walk.)
After all was said and done over the course of my pregnancy, I gained about 30 pounds. The Institute of Medicine’s guidelines suggest women of normal weight gain 25-35 pounds and overweight women gain 15-25 pounds while pregnant.
WebMD reports that “the reason why these kids have a high heart risk by 9 years of age is their fat mass. But exactly why children tend to be fat if their mothers gain too much weight during pregnancy isn’t clear.” It seems pretty obvious, right? Continue reading »
A recent study has found that high blood pressure in kids often gets missed by health practitioners.
Researchers at John Hopkins Children’s Center studied 2,500 patient records, and discovered that blood pressure readings are skipped about 20 percent of the time. And because interpreting blood pressure readings is more complicated in children than adults, high readings in children are often ignored.
A certain type of heart defect found in newborns appears to be strongly linked to the time of year the baby is born, according to research presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology yesterday.
Dr. Pirooz Eghtesady from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital studied 1,500 newborns from 38 children’s hospitals throughout the United States born between 1996 and 2006 who had congenital heart diseases that affected the left side of the heart only. They found that one disease, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, was much more common in babies born in April through July. Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a serious birth defect that usually requires at least three surgeries to correct.
They concluded that environmental factors, likely an infection in the mother, was to blame. Continue reading »
Two is the magic number — at least when it comes to reducing your risk of heart disease. A Swedish study that followed 1.3 million women for as long as 23 years, and an average of 9 and a half found that those who’d given birth twice were at the lowest risk for cardovascular disease after the age of 50.
Those at highest risk Continue reading »
Before I had kids, I was distinctly not a germophobe. Since then, though, I have gotten a lot more worried about germs. I hate housecleaning more than pretty much anything else in the world, though, and I carry hand sanitizer, but way too frequently forget to use it.
A recent study from Northwestern University confirms that a laissez-faire attitude toward germ eradication can actually help kids, versus hurt them. Being too aggressive in keeping clean actually depresses a developing immune system, which leads to higher levels of inflammation later in life.
Continue reading »
If you think you are making a better choice for your kids by serving fruit juice instead of soda, you are only partially right. Drinks such as orange juice, apple juice and grape juice may offer more vitamins, minerals and other nutrients than soda, but they also contain a lot of fructose, high levels of which have been linked to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. In fact, a single glass of apple juice contains the fructose equivalent of six apples.
What’s more, juice contains more calories than soda: A cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114 and grape has 152. A same-sized serving of Coke or Pepsi has only about 100 calories. Continue reading »
When Hannah Clark of Wales was just two years old doctors transplanted a second heart into the girl to make up for the original heart’s inability to function. For 10 years the second heart beat but in that time Hannah developed tumors and could no longer take the immunosuppressive drugs that prevented her body from rejecting the donor heart.
The only choice the doctors had was to remove the working heart. Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
26