Floss regularly if you want to conceive

Gum disease delays pregnancy

Women who are trying for a baby should regularly brush and floss their teeth, research has found.

An Australian study found that women with gum disease took over seven months to become pregnant, compared to an average of five months for women without gum disease. The two month delay in becoming pregnant due to gum disease was of the same order of magnitude as being obese, a fertility conference in Sweden was told.

Blood test reveals baby's sex in seventh week of pregnancy

Detects foetal DNA in mother's blood

A blood test in the seventh week of pregnancy can accurately determine the sex of the baby, a study has found. The test, which looks for foetal DNA in the mother's blood, was found to be 98 per cent accurate.

Although similar blood tests are on sale in the UK and other European countries, few studies have assessed their accuracy at determining an unborn baby's gender, US researchers said.

Drinking when pregnant

Is it safe?

You're three months pregnant and barely showing a bump, when someone pours you half a glass of wine at the restaurant. Why deny yourself?

But look at it this way: If you drink when pregnant, then the unborn baby drinks too. Alcohol quickly enters your bloodstream and crosses into that of the baby via the placenta. But babies are slower at processing alcohol than adults, and so are exposed to its effects for longer.

Fish oils link to lower breast cancer risk

Reduces cancer risk by a third, study finds

Many claims have been made for fish oil supplements containing omega-3, some less credible than others. But a new American study suggests regularly taking omega-3 supplements can reduce a woman's risk of breast cancer by up to a third.

In the study, more than 36,000 postmenopausal women without a a history of breast cancer completed questionnaires about their non-vitamin, non-mineral "specialty" supplements. The women were then tracked for up to six years later. 

During this time, 800 women developed breast cancer.

Vitamin and calcium pills may cut risk of breast cancer

Helps in DNA repair

Taking vitamin and calcium supplements may cut the risk of breast cancer by a third, say US researchers.

A study of more than 700 women found that taking vitamin supplements appeared to cut the risk of developing breast cancer by 30 per cent.

And taking calcium supplements reduced a woman's chances of developing the disease by 40 per cent.

Lifestyle can lower family breast cancer risk

Works for all women

A family history of breast cancer may indicate a genetic factor in the development of the disease. Although this represents a minority of cases, for those women affected it may seem that there is no point in taking preventative steps.

But a new study has found that following a healthy lifestyle designed to reduce breast cancer risk has a positive effect on all women, regardless of their family history - at least in the case of late-onset breast cancer.

High fat, high cholesterol diet linked to increased breast cancer risk

Breast cancer rates are five times higher in Western countries than in other developed countries, and studies have shown that rates increase in immigrant communities who come from low-incidence areas. This has suggested to scientists that environmental factors play a high part in the progress of the disease.

Now a group of researchers from Jefferson University in the US has found that mice fed a western-style diet high in fat and cholesterol are more likely to develop breast cancer than mice placed on a control diet, and that breast cancer tumours are larger and grow faster.

Babies could inherit sweet tooth in the womb

Babies could inherit a taste for certain foods from their mothers while still in the womb, researchers believe.

A study by French scientists shows that newborns can recognise aromas they have been exposed to during the final days of gestation. It suggests that a mother's dietary choices could alter the way their baby's sensory system develops and influence their taste before they are even born. Researchers from the European Centre for Taste Science in Dijon tested 24 babies, half of whose mothers had eaten biscuits laced with aniseed in the ten days leading up to birth.

Male elite cyclists risk infertility

Intense training link to poor quality sperm

High intensity cycle training may lead to an increased risk of infertility, according to new research presented this week at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Scientists examined sperm samples from 15 healthy Spanish triathletes, average age 33, who competed at the national and international level. Athletes were asked to abstain from sex three days before giving samples.

Outdoor play 'halves chance of being short-sighted'

Letting children play outside reduces their chance of becoming short-sighted, British researchers have found.

Despite popular theories that bookworms were more likely to require glasses, a study has suggested that it is time spent indoors that has an impact on eyesight, rather than reading.

Cool down with cucumber

Scientists have confirmed that there’s only one filling when the heat is on

India, 1870. Struggling to cope with the relentless heat, a group of British Army officers take refuge in a tea house. To help them cool down, they order a quintessential English dish: crustless, dainty sandwiches containing paper-thin slices of cucumber. To drink, a steaming pot of freshly brewed Darjeeling tea.

Antioxidants improve male fertility

Taking supplements could increase chance of partner pregnancy

Men who take antioxidants may improve their fertility, according to recent research. This could be an important development, as male subfertility affects one in 20 men.

Does drinking cola affect sperm quality?

Study suggests it can

A large Danish study into the effects of caffeine intake on sperm quality has found that drinking large amounts of cola (rather than other sources of caffeine such as tea or coffee) has a negative effect on sperm quality.

Swimming can relieve asthma symptoms in children

It is effective for children and adolescents

Swimming is one of the best forms of exercise there is, and it can be enjoyed by a wide range of people, from the very youngest to the oldest. Now a new study has shown that swimming is also an excellent treatment for the symptoms of asthma.

Top five tips for a hygienic packed lunch

Experts have warned that children are at risk of taking toxic lunchboxes to school, because parents aren’t taking enough care during their preparation. The following tips are for a hygienically packed lunch

Safety tips to keep your kids safe at home

Big kids are learning to be more independent, growing up and trying new things. By the time children turn five, they sleep in bigger beds, eat new foods and play with different toys. They are also more likely to be injured riding a bike, crossing the street or by being burned in the kitchen. As your big kid becomes more adventurous and curious, learn safety tips to keep him safe.

Here are few tips to help keep your big kid safe at home:

Choking Prevention Tips

To avoid choking, always supervise young children while they are eating and keep small objects that are potential choking hazards out of their reach.

• Do not allow children under age 3 to eat small, round or hard foods, including small pieces of hot dogs, cheese sticks/chunks, hard candy, nuts, grapes and popcorn. Other hazardous food items include raw vegetables, jellybeans, raw unpeeled fruit slices, dried fruits, grapes or chunks of meat.

• Cut foods into small pieces and give infants soft foods that they do not need to chew.

• Do not let your child eat or suck on anything like candy while lying down or playing. Have children sit in a high chair or at a table while they eat.

• Get on the floor on your hands and knees, so that you are at your child’s eye level. Look for and remove small items such as jewellery, coins, buttons, pins, nails and stones.

White bread ‘is good for kids’

New research by Irish scientists has shown that white bread is good for children.

According to the study by the Irish Universities Nutrition Alliance (IUNA) despite many parents believing that white bread is nutritionally poor, white bread contains fibre, calcium, iron and folic acid – all essential parts of a child’s diet.

Gout diet: What's allowed, what's not

Definition

Gout, a painful form of arthritis, has long been associated with diet, particularly overindulgence in meat, seafood and alcohol. As a result, gout treatment used to include severe dietary restrictions, which made the gout diet hard to stick to. Fortunately, newer medications to treat gout have reduced the need for such a strict diet.

How To Manage A Nose Bleed

A bloody nose can happen to just about anyone, and it often happens at the most inopportune times. The trick is to calmly manage a nosebleed without panicking, because panic can make the situation much worse. There are many traditional techniques for dealing with a nosebleed, but many of those are really just old wives' tales. However, there are some things you can do to take care of a nosebleed quickly and effectively.

Reasons For A Nose Bleed

The nose warms and humidifies inhaled air, which keeps the membranes that line the inside of the nose moist. Many blood vessels lie close to the surface inside the nose and a nosebleed can occur from minor irritations to the lining. Nosebleeds happen at any age and most people will develop a nosebleed in their lifetime, according to the American Academy of Otolaryngology.

A Toddler With A Stuffy Nose

While few enjoy having a stuffy nose, the condition can be particularly irritating for toddlers. Although toddlers share a developmental quest for autonomy and often try to refuse parental help, many are not able to blow their own noses to clear nasal passages on their own. It may take a good deal of patience, but parents who learn about nasal congestion in toddlers can more effectively manage this condition.

Dehydration and the "Stomach Flu"

Kids with mild gastroenteritis (also called the "stomach flu," which can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea) who aren't dehydrated should continue to eat normally but should be encouraged to drink additional fluid to replace fluid losses. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), recent studies have shown that most kids with gastroenteritis can safely eat a regular age-appropriate diet while they're sick.

Dehydration in Kids

Dehydration in Kids

Under normal conditions, we all lose some body water every day in our sweat, tears, urine, and stool. Water also evaporates from skin and leaves the body as vapor when we breathe. We usually replace this body fluid and the salts it contains with the water and salts in our regular diet.

Is it Important to Know the Type of Blood You Have?

Knowing one’s blood type is important for a variety of reasons. The first is that in an accident, if one loses enough blood to require a transfusion, one can become severely ill if the wrong type is administered. Fortunately hospitals usually do a quick type test to avoid transfusing incompatible blood.

Prior to any surgery, blood is usually typed. These tests also used to be standard requirements prior to obtaining a marriage certificate in most states. This is no longer standard procedure in many states, but the reasons for requiring it were solid.

Teach your kids to manage their anger

Kids who can manage anger have a head start in life.

Managing anger is one of the biggest emotional issues that children face. Children who can learn to manage their anger have a head start on handling fears and other emotions. Our community is undecided about how to handle anger. We often see no place for it. "Civilised people don't get angry" seems to be the accepted wisdom, so we tend to encourage children to bottle up anger rather than letting it out. Anger needs to be managed, rather than avoided. Many people have the attitude that if anger is buried deep down it will go away.

Five ways to build kids' compassion

Teach your children compassion and empathy from a young age.

The experts out there agree: we're all born with the capacity for empathy and compassion but like language, it needs to be taught and witnessed at work in others.
In this highly competitive, fast-paced world how do we teach our kids to be happy for the happiness of others and to actually understand how others feel?

Maia Szalavitz, co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential – and Endangered, says kids need to be exposed to an empathetic environment in a bid to unleash their compassion potential.

"The most important of these is nurturing, responsive parenting," she says.

Learning Numbers in a Fun Way 2

This is the second part

Learning Numbers in a Fun Way

My 2 year old finds this fascinating. I thought I should share

Maintaining Good Eye Health

Don't take your eye health for granted. Protect your eyesight with these six tips for eye-healthy nutrition, lifestyle, and preventive care.

Smoking in pregnancy leads to asthma in children later on

Smoking during pregnancy is associated with wheeze and asthma in preschool children, a new study has found. The conditions also occurred where the child was not exposed to maternal smoking in late pregnancy or after birth.

The study, led by Dr Åsa Neuman of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, reviewed data on 21,600 children, including 735 who were exposed to maternal smoking only during pregnancy. "Epidemiological evidence suggests that exposure to maternal smoking during fetal and early life increases the risk of childhood wheezing and asthma, but earlier studies were not able to differentiate the effects of prenatal and postnatal exposure," said Dr Neuman.

Garlic compound 'fights food poisoning bacteria'

More effective than antibiotics

A compound found in garlic could be used in the fight against food poisoning, new research suggests.

US researchers say that a garlic-derived compound called diallyl sulphide is 100 times more effective than two popular antibiotics at fighting Campylobacter bacteria, the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK.

The bacterium is estimated to cause up to 400,000 cases of food poisoning a year in England and Wales.

"Killer heels" arthritis warning

Badly-fitting trainers don't help either

Women (and men!) who wear fashionable high heels or badly fitting trainers are running the risk of developing arthritis, warns the UK's Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists. Combined with growing obesity and the fact that we are living longer means that we could be facing an "arthritis crisis" in the near future, according to the Society.

Arthritis is more common in women, and the chances of suffering from it increase with age. The most common form, osteoarthritis, has over 8 million sufferers in the UK and causes pain and stiffness in the joints. It can be caused by injury or general wear and tear. It particularly affects the feet, a worrying fact given that a poll by the Society found that a quarter of the women responding said that they wear heels every day or frequently. But high heels can alter the body's natural posture and put high stress on the foot, ankle and knee joints.

Why allowing your teenager to experiment with alcohol is a bad idea

The younger a teenager is when they have their first alcoholic drink, the bigger the problems with drink abuse later, a new report today claims.

These findings appear to shatter the commonly held belief among some parents that introducing alcohol at an early age – such as a small glass of wine with a meal at the age of 14 or 15 – can help to stave off binge-drinking behaviour when full adolescence strikes.

What are the risks of sitting too much?

Researchers have linked sitting for long periods of time with a number of health concerns, including obesity and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that includes increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels. Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Back pain at work: Preventing pain and injury

Heavy lifting, repetitive movements and sitting at a desk all day can take a toll on your back. Get the facts about back pain at work and how to prevent it.

Whether it's dull and achy or sharp and stabbing, back pain can make it hard to concentrate on your job. Unfortunately, many occupations — such as nursing, construction and factory work — can place significant demands on your back. Even routine office work can cause or worsen back pain. Understand what causes back pain and what you can do to prevent it.

Bone health: Tips to keep your bones healthy

Protecting your bone health is easier than you think. Understand how diet, physical activity and other lifestyle factors can affect your bone mass.

Bones play many roles in the body — providing structure, protecting organs, anchoring muscles and storing calcium. While it's particularly important to take steps to build strong and healthy bones during childhood and adolescence, you can take steps during adulthood to protect bone health, too.

Top tips on gout

Some tips from Dr  Louise Warburton on identifying and relieving gout 

1 Be prepared to see more cases of gout. Gout is a common cause of arthritis in men over 40 and postmenopausal women. In an RCGP national morbidity survey in 1982, 2.7/1,000 patients visited their GP with an episode of gout. The incidence of gout is rising because of the explosion of obesity in the population, so be prepared to see more of it, especially in the run-up to Christmas. Fructose-sweetened soft drinks are also associated with increased risk of gout.

Fibroids and Fertility

Fibroids or leiomyomas are benign smooth muscle tumours of the uterus. These tumours are very common and approximately one out of every five women over the age of 30 years has a fibroid. Uterine fibroids tend to be more frequent in African/African American women and less frequent in women from other ethnic groups (i.e. Asian). Often fibroids cause no symptoms and are found during a routine gynaecological examination such as an annual exam. At that time an enlarged or irregularly shaped uterus is noted and later this finding is confirmed by ultrasound. Sometimes fibroids are found during an infertility evaluation when tests such as a pelvic ultrasound, hysterosonogram or hysterosalpingogram are ordered.

How to Maintain Joint Health

According to "Arthritis Today," preventing joint problems is essential to reducing your risk of developing arthritis later in life. If you sit or stand in the same position all day, make sure you change positions, stretch and take breaks throughout the day to prevent excess pressure on the joints. Anything that makes you move and increases flexibility will, in turn, also benefit your joints, according to "Arthritis Today."

Heavy Lifting During Pregnancy

It is not true that you can harm your fetus by lifting something heavy. You cannot dislodge it or tear the placenta from the wall of the uterus. But it's still not a good idea to heave two-ton grocery bags into your car. Your back won't like it. During pregnancy, the usually stable joints of the pelvis begin to loosen up to prepare for childbirth. This, combined with your growing abdomen, will throw your weight off balance and cause you to counterbalance by walking with a curved lower back. This puts strain on the lower-back muscles that will be aggravated by heavy lifting.

Give your back a break. If you have a young child at home, now is a good time to get some use out of the stroller and let her practice walking more often. Put your groceries in several lightweight bags. Ask someone else to carry heavy suitcases or packages. Your back muscles will be strained even more in the pregnancy later on; try to ease their burden now.

Family Education.com

Mothers Raising Daughters: 30 Critical Tips

Let's be a little more definitive on what moms can do to raise women who will achieve self-sufficiency in adulthood. The following list is compiled from research studies conducted by Dr. Sylvia Rimm (based on 1,000 successful women) and information from Sondra Forsyth, author of Girls Seen and Heard (Putnam, 1998).

You might be interested to know that in Dr. Rimm's study, 83 percent of the mothers of these high achievers were home full-time when their daughters were of preschool age. By the time they entered high school, 67 percent of these girls' mothers had established careers outside the home.

Based on Dr. Rimm's findings and those reported by Forsyth in her book, here is a comprehensive list of things you should do to nurture high achieving women:

Top 5 lifestyle changes to reduce cholesterol

Lifestyle changes can help reduce cholesterol, keep you off cholesterol-lowering medications or enhance the effect of your medications. Here are five lifestyle changes to get you started.

High cholesterol increases your risk of heart disease and heart attacks. You can reduce cholesterol with medications, but if you'd rather make lifestyle changes to reduce cholesterol, you can try these five healthy lifestyle changes. If you're already taking medications, these changes can also improve their cholesterol-lowering effect.

Cholesterol: Top 5 foods to lower your numbers

Diet can play an important role in lowering your cholesterol. Here are five foods that can lower your cholesterol and protect your heart.

Can a bowl of oatmeal help lower your cholesterol? How about a handful of walnuts or even a baked potato topped with some heart-healthy margarine? A few simple tweaks to your diet — like these, along with exercise and other heart-healthy habits — may be helpful in lowering your cholesterol.

How to Handle Back Talk

Did that Come Out of My Child's Mouth? 
Back talk: It stings, it shocks, it embarrasses, and it can turn your home into a battleground. Jim Bozigar, head of community outreach at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, runs a back-talk workshop for parents. He says that with a little understanding and self-restraint, parents can put a lid on talking back.

"The reasons for back talk are as varied as the personalities of the children who use it," says Bozigar. The child could be hungry, tired, or in a transitional period. But children who talk back usually do have one thing in common: They're trying to separate from their parents and exercise control over their lives.

Typical Teenage Behaviors and Attitudes

Most of the information written about adolescents and teenagers places a great deal of emphasis on the physical, social, and emotional changes, accompanied by confusion and uncertainty, that mark this developmental stage of a child's life. While it is certainly a difficult period for the child, it is likewise true that the parents are also experiencing stresses, changes, and confusion at this time. Not much has been written about the parents' problems and worries, as well as the changes they are undergoing as they approach midlife with a teenager in their household.

Talking to Our Sons about Sex and Limits

It's difficult enough to talk about sex with our kids, so it may add to your discomfort on the need to talk to them about date rape too. Boys need to know when sex is consensual and when it's not. Because when it's not and sex happens, it's rape.

Adolescents are going to experiment with their sexuality. And although their urges are normal and natural, we must teach our boys to be responsible about their urges.

What to Tell Your Teen About Sex

How do you feel about sex and your teenager? Perhaps you hold a very strong religious or moral opinion on the issue. If so, then this is what you'll convey to your teen.

Or maybe you feel that expecting you teenager to wait until after marriage to have sex isn't realistic. Yet you want guidelines and suggestions on how to make your teen wait as long as possible and to take good care of himself or herself (physically and emotionally) in the process.

Eat rye bread for a flatter stomach

Want to beat bloating? Try rye

If you're sick of that bloated feeling from eating bread, want to lose a few inches without going on an extreme diet, and fancy boosting your energy levels, the Village Bakery's 'Try Rye' eating plan might be for you.

Talking with Toddlers About Sexual Curiosity

The transition from baby to big kid  comes with it a whole slew of new topics that send families scrambling for that mythical parenting instruction manual. Some of the biggies that red-faced parents wonder: What's normal when it comes to sexual development (and interest!) for kids under two? How should you respond when you see your very young child, well, masturbating? First, keep these age-specific concepts in mind.