Tag: Health

A breakfast high in protein – like eggs – keeps children fuller longer than cereal or oatmeal, causing them to eat fewer calories at lunch, says a new study.

“It is really important that we identify certain types of food that can help children feel full and also moderate caloric intake, especially in children who are prone to excess weight gain,” said lead researcher Tanja Kral, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the US.

The study, published in the journal Eating Behaviours, also found that the effects of a protein-rich meal do not last throughout the day. It only impacts a mid-day meal.

The study recruited forty, eight to 10-year-old children to consume one of three, 350-calorie breakfasts (eggs, oatmeal, or cereal), then play games with research staff and then eat lunch once a week for three consecutive weeks.

On each occasion, every participant had to eat their entire breakfast, but could eat as much or as little lunch as desired.

According to the research, after consuming the egg breakfast (scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, diced peaches, and one percent milk) children reduced their energy intake at lunch by seventy calories – roughly equivalent to one small chocolate-chip cookie.

Moderately active children in the same age range as those who participated in the study generally need between 1,600 and 1,800 calories daily.

The 70-calorie drop at one meal equals about four percent of a child’s daily caloric needs.

Eating beyond the caloric threshold, even by a little, can cause excess weight gain and obesity in children, if sustained, the researchers pointed out.

 

Here are some foods that can relieve stress – Gorging on food, when you’re stressed or upset, may seem like the natural thing for most, but instead of grabbing an unhealthy snack, why not opt for foods that can relieve stress? Here are some popular ones…

Sweet potatoes – Craving for carbs? Steer clear of French fries and junk sugar-rich foods. Have some sweet potatoes instead, which are known to release a slow, steady source of energy. They won’t leave behind that blood-sugar crash, which other carb-high foods can.

Blueberries – Blueberries have concentrated antioxidants and will pep you up in no time. They are also high in vitamin C, which, research shows, provides added reserves to help deal with stress. High on fibre, they also regulate blood sugar.

Turkey – Turkey contains amino acid tryptophan, which is known to release a feel-good chemical, serotonin, in the brain. Serotonin induces a sense of calm, making you feel relaxed.

Asparagus – Asparagus is high in folic acid, which is known to calm you down. When your body is stressed, it releases hormones, which affect your mood. Eating certain vitamins and minerals keeps your mood steady, as they produce the feel-good chemical serotonin.

Beef – Believe it or not, but beef has stress-busting properties because of its B vitamins and levels of zinc. It also contains unhealthy, saturated fats that raises chances of coronary heart disease and other illnesses, it is beneficial if you opt for leaner cuts. A healthy way to cook beef is to have it slightly seared on the outside, sliced very thin and served with a salad.

Weighed down by the responsibility of raising happy, health and respectful children, evidence shows that most parents and teachers want to help kids to be caring to others.

But while their carers might prioritise kindness children are apparently not getting the message -and instead value personal success over concern for others, according to a recent study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Despite their carers’ efforts, almost 80 per cent of young people picked high achievement or personal happiness when asked what is most important to them, while a fifth said caring for others.

Researchers at the Ivy League university made their findings by assessing survey of 10,000 middle and high school students from 33 schools representing a diverse range of young people from across the US. They also used hundreds of conversations with young people and their parents over a decade.

“Our youth’s values appear to be awry, and the messages that adults are sending may be at the heart of the problem,” was the authors’ bleak assessment of the situation.

Researchers said the problem lies in what they call the rhetoric/reality gap: between what parents say are their priorities and the message they put forward on a daily basis.

And parents in affluent communities who pressure their children to be high achievers did not increase a child’s attainment level or happiness, according to the study. In addition, not prioritising caring for others made it more difficult children to form strong relationships – a vital part of a person’s well-being.

In light of their findings, the team formulated five tips to help parents and teachers instill the importance of caring in their children.

“The guidelines can help shift the balance toward children and youth caring for others and help them become caring, ethical family members, workers, and citizens,” the researchers said.

“Children and youth need on-going opportunities to practice caring and helpfulness, sometimes with guidance from adults”

The team stressed that anyone can become a “good person” and that learning to be kind and fair is like “learning to play an instrument”.

“Daily repetition”, be it by helping a friend with the schoolwork or doing chores around the home, can “make caring second nature”.

“Children and youth need to learn to zoom in”

Young people must both listen to those around them, and try to understand the bigger picture, according to the experts. This enables a child to “expand their circle of concern” and makes it possible for them to “consider the justice of their communities and society.”

The researchers stress that this does not mean that parents and teachers needs to be perfect or “have all the answers.” Rather, they emphasise “grappling with our flaws”, realising when you are wrong, and listening to children and students. This means that parents and teacher also need to “continually practice and zooming in and out”.

“Children need to be guided in managing destructive feelings”

“Often the ability to care for others is overwhelmed by anger, shame, envy, or other negative feelings,” said the reserachers. Therefore, adults must teach children that while such feelings are normal, they must be dealt properly and in “productive ways.” The guidelines mirror the findings of a separate study, which showed that parents who manipulate their children into being who they want could turn them into mean adults. Researchers at the University of Vermont came to their conclusion by studying the manner in which 180 college students recounted a painful event, such as a breakup, alongside the results of a survey into parental control over their lives.

Source: The Independent

Denmark and Switzerland on Wednesday joined a growing number of European countries to report Zika infections among travellers returning from Latin America, where the mosquito-borne virus has been blamed for a surge in birth defects. “A Danish tourist who travelled to Central and South America was diagnosed on his return with the Zika virus,” a hospital in eastern Denmark said in a statement late on Tuesday. The Danish patient was a young man who was expected to make a full recovery, the head of Aarhus hospital, Lars Ostergaard, told public broadcaster DR.

Two people returning to Switzerland from Haiti and Colombia were also diagnosed with the virus, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said. Neither was pregnant and neither required hospital care, the statement said.

Health watchdogs in a string of European countries meanwhile said they had recorded Zika cases dating back to as early as March 2015. The Netherlands confirmed 10 cases and Britain five, all among people returning from South America.

In Italy, the Spallanzani National Institute of Infectious Disease said four cases were recorded in March 2015, while in Portugal, the health ministry said on Wednesday that five Portuguese had been infected. All eight had been travelling in Brazil. A woman in the Swedish capital Stockholm was diagnosed with the virus in July 2015, the Swedish Public Health Agency confirmed on Wednesday. “The symptoms were treated and the woman recovered,” said Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of microbiology at the health agency.

Health officials in Helsinki say that a Finnish tourist was infected by the Zika virus after visiting the Maldives last summer. Epidemiologist Jussi Sane at the National Institute for Health and Welfare says it was a minor infection and the man was well and had been allowed home soon after being treated by doctors in June 2015.

In Moscow, health minister Veronika Skvortsova said the Russia authorities had been “monitoring (Zika) since it appeared. Now we are working on controlling it as soon as any strange strains appear, to have domestic medication for prevention and treatment”.

Source: Reuters

Gluten-free diet has become the new fad among the health conscious, especially those with an athletic bent of mind. Many aspiring sportsmen forsake gluten in their diets for superior performance but a new study suggests that the benefits of a gluten free diet are greatly exaggerated.

More than 1000 athletes took part in a study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise last year which indicated that 41% of them followed a gluten-free diet. Only 13% of them, however, had been medically diagnosed with some form of allergy to gluten, indicating that most of them followed the diet mostly because of its purported health benefits, reported the New York Times.

The study, conducted by Dana Lis, a PhD candidate from Australia made an attempt to understand whether gluten, a protein found in bread, rye and barley, had any influence on the body at all.

Many participants in the study told researchers that they believed the diet would help them avoid digestive problems. Some estimates suggest that 90% of athletes, especially those who take part in endurance sports, experience some form of gastrointestinal problems after a workout.Lis devised an ingenious solution to solving this problem. She developed two sports bars, both indistinguishable in taste but with one of them containing gluten. Then, she invited cyclists to take part in an experiment where they would be fed random bars for one week each, neither the researchers nor the participants having any idea about which bar they were consuming.

The participants were asked to fill daily questionnaires about any gastrointestinal problems they may be facing. At the end of each week, they were put through a strenuous time trial session to test their athletic performance.

The results, surprisingly, showed no real differences. “An athlete’s nutrient intake and timing are so critical to performance,” Dana Lis concluded. “I hope that people learn to be more objective in terms of what they hear and read about gluten-free diets and nutrition in general.”

Of course, the study was small-scale and short term. Whether the results change over the course of a longer testing period remains to be seen.

Source: HT

 

NIGERIA (TIP): The World Health Organisation has called an emergency meeting to address the spread of the mysterious Zika virus, as health experts warned the outbreak is ballooning at an “extremely alarming” rate.

The disease has been linked with a birth defect known as microcephaly, which sees children born with abnormally small brains, as well as a neurological syndrome that can cause paralysis.

Margaret Chan, the director-general of the WHO, said board members would meet on Monday 1 February to establish if the Zika virus should be declared an international emergency.

And an official at the organisation’s office for the Americas, where the disease has spread to 23 countries in a matter of months, said we can “expect three to four million cases”.

HOW THE DISEASE SPREAD

Though it is possible the Zika virus originates in South East Asia, it was first documented in Uganda in 1947 (marked by (1) in the map above) in the antibodies of local people, meaning they had been exposed to it in the past.

It spread throughout Africa, with the first live case recorded in a human patient in Nigeria a decade later around 1960 (2). The outbreak only threw up around a dozen confirmed cases.

In 1966, the first case was confirmed in South East Asia, and in the late 1970s it was documented in Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Indonesia (3).

The first official epidemic was on the isolated island of Yap, Micronesia, in 2007 (4). It affected almost 200 members of the island’s small population, making it a relatively major crisis.

It hit French Polynesia in 2013, with a huge outbreak of 35,000 cases (5). Some led to instances of Guillain-Barre syndrome and paralysis, while recent retrospective research suggests there was also a corresponding spike in microcephaly.

In 2014, around the time of the football World Cup, Zika arrived in northern Brazil (6). Some suggest it could have been brought over during the World Canoeing Championships in Rio around the same time, an event which involved a large number of Pacific Islanders.

It spread slowly through Brazil for around a year, before the WHO reported the first outbreak outside the country – Colombia – on 21 October 2015.

Other countries then followed quickly, with transmission reported in Suriname, El Salvador, and Guatemala by the end of November.

In early December, the disease spread to Mexico for the first time, raising concerns in the US, as well as to Paraguay, Venezuela and Panama.

By the start of January, Honduras, Puerto Rico, French Guyana and Martinique in the Caribbean had cases.

And in the past week or so, cases have been confirmed in Guyana, Barbados, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

A handful of isolated cases have been reported locally in the US, the UK, Denmark and now Germany (7) -though experts stress these are all travel-related and full outbreaks in these countries are unlikely.

And meanwhile, there have been several thousand cases of Zika reported in Cape Verde of West Africa since September. It is not known for certain whether these were imported there from mainland Africa or from fellow Portuguese-speaking Brazil. If the latter is the case, the disease has circumnavigated the globe – and could legitimately be described as a pandemic.

WHY IS IT ONLY ‘ALARMING’ NOW?

In most patients, the Zika virus has relatively minor flu-like symptoms which subside without much incident in no more than a week. It has a lower mortality rate than winter flu, and seems limited to equatorial areas with high numbers of the Aedes biting mosquito.

Yet the unprecedented Brazil outbreak which began in 2014 has corresponded with a sudden spike in cases of microcephaly – 3,893 cases as of last week, more than 30 times greater than any other period since 2010.

Speaking to The Independent, University of Lancaster lecturer and virologist Dr Derek Gatherer said we know so little about the virus largely because its normal symptoms are so mild.

“We don’t even know exactly what time during pregnancy women are most at risk, beyond knowing what time the brain develops,” he said. “The effects could even come from before conception – that’s why we have to be so cautious with advice.”

The WHO says that while a direct causal relationship between the Zika virus and more serious complications has not been confirmed, it is “strongly suspected”.

“The possible links, only recently suspected, have rapidly changed the risk profile of Zika from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions,” she said.

WILL IT SPREAD TO THE UK, US OR REST OF EUROPE?

In theory, the WHO has warned that the virus has the potential to spread over the entire of the Americas with the exception of Canada.

Isolated cases related to travel to and from Latin America have been reported in the US, Britain, Denmark and Germany.

Dr Gatherer said that the Aedes mosquito, which carries the disease, occurs in southern Europe from Spain to France, Italy and Greece, and outbreaks there are possible.

But these would likely be limited in the number of transmissions, and the disease almost certainly won’t spread in more temperate climes like the UK where the Aedes mosquito doesn’t live.

“There’s a real North-South divide here between poor and rich countries,” he said. “The disease has been in Mexico since the start of December but it seems to have stopped at the American border, almost as if it hasn’t been allowed across.

(AP)