A growing number of analyses have found a convincing link among a heavier mother-to-be, increases in her baby’s birth weight, and the child’s later risk of obesity. In many past observational studies, however, basic genetics or environmental factors could be blamed for this association.

A new study of 513,501 mothers and 1,164,750 of their children born across 15 years aimed to take genetics out of the equation by assessing maternal and infant weight only for those women who had more than one child. “By making comparisons of two or more infants born to the same mother, we were able to factor out the role of genetics,” says David Ludwig, an associate professor of pediatrics, director of the Obesity Program at Children’s Hospital Boston and co-author of the new study.

Women who gained more than 24 kilograms during a pregnancy (which occurred in about 12 percent of pregnancies) added an average of 147.4 additional grams to their baby’s birth weight than those who gained about 7.5 to 10 kilograms. In other terms, pregnant women who gained 22.5 kilograms had double the risk of having an infant with a high birth weight compared with those who only gained about nine kilograms. And every kilogram gained during pregnancy increased a baby’s weight by about 9.5 grams, according to the analysis, which published online August 4 in The Lancet.

Being heavier at birth increases the odds that an individual will be overweight or obese as a child—as well as an adult. And the excess weight has been linked to a range of chronic conditions, including asthma, diabetes and metabolic syndrome (a group of metabolic risk factors).

Although previous studies had correlated high BMI moms with heavier babies, “the direct effects of excessive weight gain on the fetus have never been conclusively demonstrated,” notes Ludwig, who worked on the study with collaborator Janet Currie, a professor of economics at Columbia University.

The importance of grams
The ill effects of undernourishment on fetal development have been well documented. A pregnant woman who does not get ample calories for her and her fetus increases the risk the baby will have stunted physical growth, poor cognitive development, and be more susceptible to diseases. The health risks of too many calories, however, are just beginning to come to light.

To be sure, a heavier fetus will tilt the pregnant mother’s scale slightly, and the amount of weight typically put on my moms gaining too much during pregnancy far exceeds the additional ounces their babies typically take on.

Nevertheless, although 0.2 kilogram of additional baby fat might not sound like much, in the context of a three- to 3.5-kilogram infant, every 0.03 kilogram changes the odds ratio, according to Ludwig.

Other research indicates that infant birth weight is also heavily determined by a woman’s weight even before she becomes pregnant. A study published in June in the European Journal of Pediatrics reported that being overweight or obese before getting pregnant meant that a mother’s future child was 1.4 times more likely to be overweight or obese by age four. “It means preconception health screening and intervention for overweight and obese [women] is extremely important,” says Panagiota Kitsantas, an assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at George Mason University’s Department of Health Administration and Policy and lead author of the June paper.

Although her investigation did not specifically look at women with more than one child and thus could have been colored by other genetic and environmental factors, Kitsantas says that the results from her work and The Lancet report are complementary. “Both studies pointed to one direction: mothers’ body weight affected their offspring’s weight.”

Underlying changes
Extra birth weight might not be the only change many of these infants face. Excessive maternal weight during pregnancy is also likely changing the metabolic and hormonal environment of the developing fetus, Ludwig says.

Even if an infant has a few extra ounces due to a mother’s excessive gestational weight gain, “the infant developed in a metabolically abnormal intrauterine environment,” Ludwig explains.

Excessive caloric intake by a pregnant woman can stimulate the overgrowth of fetal tissues, change hormonal balances, alter metabolic pathways, “and perhaps even structures in the brain that regulate appetite and metabolism,” he says. And those changes might stay with an individual for life.

Many adults have a difficult time losing weight and keeping it off, and if the body is predisposed to putting on the pounds, fighting obesity on both individual and societal levels will be even more challenging.

Researchers are still working to understand just how some of these pathways and hormones can influence disease risk, primarily through animal studies in the lab. And until more chemical links are found, a direct cause-and-effect relationship cannot be established, Kitsantas notes.

She applauds the new work, noting that Ludwig and colleagues used apt statistical models to try to avoid confounding effects and excluded subjects with other risk factors such as gestational diabetes or extremely high birth weight. Kitsantas is not entirely convinced, however, that genetics can be erased from the picture, and asserts that more lab work remains to be done to parse out nature, nurture and nutrition.

Prepregnancy health
Not every baby born on the heavy side will battle obesity or related chronic diseases. But, Ludwig points out, “on a population basis, [increased birth weight] is shifting risk upward.”

The amount of weight pregnant women are putting on has been growing—as has their prepregnancy weight in the past few decades, Ludwig notes. Alongside that trend are signs that average birth weight is also headed upward.

“If we don’t stop the vicious cycle at some point, we’ll just keep going and going,” Kitsantas says. If female babies are born more prone to obesity, the likelihood of their gaining too much weight before or during pregnancy increases, thus putting their offspring at greater risk.

Even though the specific mechanisms at work remain poorly understood and there is still not enough evidence to draw a cause-and-effect conclusion between maternal weight and a child’s risk for obesity, Kitsantas says that is not reason enough to delay action. “We really have to jump in based on the findings we have to create specific interventions to fix the problem.”

Ludwig acknowledges that the challenge of getting Americans to stay fit is great but says that changing the habits of mothers-to-be might be a little easier. “Women tend to be especially motivated during pregnancy because it’s not just their health [that is] at stake—it’s their children’s,” he notes. “Almost every mother instinctively wants to give their children a healthy start in life.”

And, along with physical activity, food quality is just as important as quantity, he says. “The higher quality of diet consumed, the easier it is to maintain a health body weight,” says Ludwig, who has been working on a new study comparing the effects of two different diets on maternal and infant health. “The best time to begin obesity prevention efforts for the next generation is actually prior to birth,” he says.

Kitsantas extends that recommendation, suggesting that all women of childbearing age establish healthy lifestyle habits and healthy weights: “The sooner the better,” she says.

While one-day fasts pose no serious threat for healthy adults, longer fasts (more than 24 hours) can have grave results. Whether it’s a ‘water-only’ detox fast, skipping meals or surviving on just cabbage soup or grapefruit, the body only recognizes one thing – starvation.

Low calorie dieting slows your metabolism making it progressively more difficult to lose weight and keep it off. Quite simply, your body goes into ‘starvation mode’. This mechanism means the body becomes very efficient at making the most of the calories it does get from food and drink. The main way it does this is to protect its fat stores and instead use lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning.

This loss of muscle lowers the metabolic rate so that the body needs fewer calories to keep ticking over and weight loss slows down. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue. It requires a certain number of calories each day to maintain itself. Therefore, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn even when you’re just sitting around. As your muscle mass drops, so does your daily calorie requirement.

So, before you skip a meal, ‘feast’ on a bowl of cabbage soup, or finish that first and only grapefruit of the day, read about the top three dangers of starvation dieting, and find out what you should be doing to keep your metabolism revved up and burning calories.

Starvation dieting dangers

1. Starvation results in rapid initial weight loss
Under normal circumstances, the principle fuel for the body is glucose. The brain, in particular, must receive a constant supply of glucose in order to function properly. During a period of calorie restriction (such as during a fast), glucose, which is stored in the liver as glycogen, is used first to supply energy.

Glycogen is stored with water, so when it is broken down for energy, water will be released as well. It is this fluid that is responsible for the rapid weight loss that occurs in the first one to two days (anywhere between three to five pounds per day) of severely calorie-restricted diets, such as the Hollywood Miracle Diet, Cabbage Soup Diet and The Grapefruit Diet, all of which claim that you can lose ten pounds in two days.

Consequences: If it sounds too good to be true, it is. This weight loss doesn’t last. When normal eating is resumed, glucose and water stores will be replenished and the original body weight will be attained.

The rapid loss of fluid can also lead to the loss of electrolytes and dehydration, so the only things ‘cleansed’ from the body are the minerals needed for muscle contractions, nerve transmissions, regulation of body fluids and other physiological functions.

The sudden drop in sugar in the blood, as glycogen stores are diminished, will result in tiredness, confusion and mood swings. These are the symptoms that are often mistakenly thought to be the first step in the cleansing process of a detox diet.

2. Cutting calories slows down weight loss,
The liver only stores enough glycogen to last for one day, so when fasting lasts longer than 24 hours, the body will turn to muscle to produce glucose for energy. After following a very low-calorie diet or fast for one week, 30 per cent of the total weight loss is muscle, the rest is fluid.

The amount of muscle in the body sets your metabolic rate (the rate at which you burn calories). So, as muscle is lost, they perform less metabolic work, saving calories and energy. In short, your rate of weight loss will slow down.

In fact, most two or three-day crash diets that claim to burn fat, only burn away metabolically active muscle tissue and actually hinder long-term weight loss. When you eat a meal, overall metabolism is increased due to the energy required for digestion and absorption of the meal. Skipping a meal will have the reverse effect, decreasing the metabolism, which lasts until you eat something.

Overall, the body will save, rather than burn, calories to ensure it has adequate energy during the times of fasting. So, meal skipping to avoid unwanted calories is a counter-productive method for sustained weight loss.

Consequences: When the fast is over and calorie levels are increased to a normal level, weight gain will happen faster and the weight will come back as fat, since your metabolic rate has slowed, so you may even end up heavier than before you began dieting! The loss of muscle will have an effect on your ability to maintain weight loss in the long term, unless muscle is regained by exercising.

3. Starvation leads to low amounts of nutrients for liver function
The Liver is the main organ of detoxification and requires nutrients to help this happen. When you have a healthy liver, your body allows fat stores to diminish. Excess toxins in the blood that can’t be removed from circulation due to low nutrient status means that the body will create increased fat stores to “save or store” the processing for later when the body has more of these important nutrients which allow the liver to function properly.

On starvation calorie low diets, this time never comes, and as soon as more normal eating pattern is resumed the fat stores replenish more rapidly than before, this is why most calorie reduction diets leave dieters heavier than before they started, a common theme in over 90%.

4. Starvation results in fatigue
Body protein provides most of the energy needed during the first few days of a fast, but after that the body will adapt to using fat for energy in an attempt to preserve muscle.

Fat is then metabolised to ketones, which can be used by the brain for energy. However, prolonged inadequate carbohydrate intake results in the build-up of ketones, which become toxic, resulting in an unpleasant condition called ketosis.

Consequences: The kidneys and liver become burdened with toxic waste from the breakdown of fat and muscle tissue so the body?s normal functions are disrupted. Ketosis can cause fatigue, constipation, nausea and vomiting. The potential long-term side effects of ketosis include heart disease, bone loss and kidney damage.

In addition, the lack of calories will deprive your body of essential vitamins and minerals, so hair, nails and skin will show signs of deterioration. So if you try fasting as a means of detoxifying or cleansing the body, you will actually achieve the opposite effect.

5. Starvation leads to fat around the middle
The stress hormone cortisol is known to be associated to umbilical fat, also known as hard to shift fat around the middle. Cortisol is a gluco-corticoid which means that its released to help mobilize glucose in times of emergency, such as starvation, to allow the muscles to act if you needed to move or work. It is designed to help you survive.

So when your body is void of calories from food and you have to move, work, think, your body will send out cortisol to help you achieve these short term “emergencies”. In the long term this leads to hard to lose fat around your waistline, also known as a “muffin top”

The true fast-track to weight loss

The safest, most sensible route to achieving long-term weight loss is adopting healthy eating habits, which endure long after the pounds have been lost. You’ll also want to keep your metabolism revved up to burn calories rather than save them. This can be achieved by:

Having breakfast

A balanced morning meal kick-starts your metabolism after your body has been deprived of food throughout the night. Skipping breakfast keeps your metabolism running slow and you will save rather than burn any calories you eat later in the day.

Snacking frequently

Eating smaller, frequent meals will keep your metabolism busy throughout the day. Snacking also prevents you from becoming too hungry. The hungrier you are, the less control you have over what and how much you eat.

Exercising

Cardiovascular fitness activities such as walking, jogging, swimming, cycling, aerobics and dancing, speed up your metabolism for several hours after your workout, so additional calories will be burned off long after you stop moving.

Resistance or Lifting weights

Body weight exercise or lifting weights will build and tone muscle, which burns up to five times more calories than fat, even when your body is at rest. More muscletone means more calories burned and more weight lost over time.

Eating according to your activities

If you do most of your physical activity during the day, make breakfast and lunch larger meals than your evening meal, so you have enough energy to get everything done throughout the day.

Drinking plenty of water

Your metabolism needs water to function properly. Remember, the recommendation is to drink between one and two litres per day.

NOTE: Fasting and fad diets can be very dangerous for individuals with chronic conditions such as diabetes, coronary heart disease, liver or kidney disease, infection or pregnancy.

References

by Annie Leonard
Director, the Story of Stuff Project

As a mother, I want to be sure that the shampoo, sunscreen, bubble bath and other personal care products my daughter uses are safe. If I stick to products in the children’s aisle at the drugstore — stuff that’s made and marketed specifically for kids — those should be OK, right?
The labels are reassuring: “Gentle.” “Pure.” “Natural.” “Free of Harsh Ingredients.” “Recommended by Pediatricians.” “Dermatologists Approved.” And of course, “No More Tears.”

But when you turn the bottles around, get out a magnifying glass and read the fine print on the back (and get online to do some research) it’s a different story: sodium laureth sulfate, diazolidinyl urea, ceteareth-20, PEGs, quaternium-15 — all these are typically contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals like formaldehyde or 1,4 dioxane.

Carcinogens in baby shampoo? Are you kidding me?

I asked some scientists what was going on, and what they told me was scary, and not just for our children. It turns out the average American bathroom is a minefield of toxic chemicals. Sunscreens, lipstick, moisturizer, shaving cream — many cosmetics and personal care products for babies, kids, moms and dads contain chemicals linked to cancer or other health problems like learning disabilities, asthma and even damaged sperm.

I got so mad about this I joined with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics to make a new video, The Story of Cosmetics.

It turns out that while you and I can choose to buy the safer products made by responsible companies, the really important decisions don’t happen when we take a product off the shelf. What counts is when companies and government agencies decide what should be allowed on the shelves.

Here’s just some of what I learned while making The Story of Cosmetics:

• All those sudsy products like shampoos and body washes that contain sodium laureth sulfate have as a byproduct 1,4-dioxane, a known carcinogen that’s suspected to also cause kidney, nerve and respiratory problems. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. government does not limit formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane, or most other hazardous substances in personal care products. As a result, independent lab tests found these chemicals in dozens of brands, including Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and Sesame Street Bubble Bath. The companies claim that the chemical levels aren’t large enough to worry about, but I’d prefer not to have any cancer-causing chemicals in my daughter’s shampoo — or mine.
• Protecting yourself from the sun shouldn’t be dangerous. But a number of common sunscreen chemicals are linked to cancer, and may also disrupt estrogen and thyroid hormones. Well over half of all sunscreens contain the potential hormone disruptor oxybenzone that readily penetrates the skin and has been found in the bodies of 97% of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control.
• Dabbing on a little bit of lipstick seems harmless enough – if you don’t mind a little lead. Tests commissioned by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics found lead in almost two-thirds of top-selling red lipsticks. Highest lead levels were in top-selling brands L’Oreal, Maybelline and Cover Girl. Lead, a proven neurotoxin for which there is no safe level of exposure for children, was also found in every brand of kids’ face paints tested.

You’d think the government would be working to keep hazardous chemicals out of cosmetics. Think again. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t assess the safety of personal care products or their ingredients. Since the federal cosmetics law was written more than 70 years ago, the FDA has banned just eight out of the 12,000-plus ingredients used in cosmetics. The FDA doesn’t even require all of the ingredients to be listed on the label.

Instead, the government lets the cosmetics industry set up its own committee to self-police its products – and compliance with the committee’s “recommendations” is voluntary. The cosmetics industry is making the rules and deciding whether or not to follow them.

Women, parents, workers, people all over the country are demanding that Congress overhaul the outdated cosmetics law to give the FDA the power to make sure that our personal care products are safe. And Congress has heard them.

Today, Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) are introducing the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010, which would close the gaping holes in federal law. It would phase out the most dangerous chemicals, set up a system to assess cosmetic ingredients for safety, require companies to be transparent about what’s in their products, and provide adequate resources for the FDA to do its job. It will also help small businesses in the cosmetics industry meet the new regulations, while spurring the development of greener chemicals that will help companies compete for customers who value safety and openness.

As you can imagine, the personal care product industry isn’t so excited about this. The big cosmetics companies have already spent millions of dollars trying to defeat real reforms and proposing meaningless alternatives. Pass The Story of Cosmetics around to family and friends and together, we can tell the industry it’s time to come clean.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com and www.storyofstuff.org/cosmetics

One time when the hazardous effects of foodstuffs has particular relevance is during pregnancy. Foods and drink provides the basic building blocks of the growing foetus, and at the same time can exert toxic affects that can affect the pregnancy and future health of the child. I was interested to read a study published this week which looked at the relationship between soft drink consumption and pregnancy outcome in almost 60,000 Danish women [1]. The pregnancy outcome assessed in this study was ‘pre-term delivery’ – defined as delivery before 37 weeks of gestation (normal gestation is 40 weeks).

For sugar-sweetened beverages, there was no relationship between level of consumption and risk of pre-term delivery (in other words, higher levels of sugary soft drink consumption were not associated with an increased risk of pre-term delivery).

It was a different story for artificially sweetened drinks though:

Compared to those drinking no artificially sweetened drinks, those having 1 or more servings of artificially sweetened drinks a day were found to be at a 38 per cent increased risk of pre-term delivery. Consumption of 4 or more servings a day was associated with an increased risk of 78 per cent.

So-called ‘epidemiological’ studies of this nature cannot be used to conclude that artificially sweetened drinks cause pre-term delivery. However, as the authors of the study point out, length of gestation may be affected by exposure to methanol [2,3]. Methanol is a known nerve toxin, which can be metabolised in the body to form formic acid (another never toxin), as well as formaldehyde (which is what is used to preserve dead bodies). It’s also a constituent of aspartame (the most ubiquitous artificial sweetener).

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know if artificial sweeteners worsen pregnancy outcomes. However, given their ability for a myriad of toxic effects within the body, my advice would be to avoid them like the plague (pregnant or not).

References:

1. Halldorsson TI, et al. Intake of artificially sweetened soft drinks and risk of preterm delivery: a prospective cohort study of 59,334 Danish pregnant women. Am J Clin Nutr 30 June 2010 [epub ahead of print]

2. Burbacher TM, et al. Chronic maternal methanol inhalation in nonhuman primates (Macaca fascicularis): reproductive performance and birth outcome. Neurotoxicol Teratol 2004;26:639-50

3. Trocho C, et al. Formaldehyde derived from dietary aspartame binds to tissue components in vivo. Life Sci 1998;63:337-49

Researches Advice – Buy Organic And Wash Produce

Exposure to pesticides used on common kid-friendly foods — including frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries and celery — appears to boost the chances that children will be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, new research shows.

Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.

Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.

“I think it’s fairly significant. A doubling is a strong effect,” said Maryse F. Bouchard, a researcher at the University of Montreal in Quebec and lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard:  “I would say buy organic as much as possible,” she said. “I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible.”

Diet is a major source of pesticide exposure in children, according to the National Academy of Sciences, and much of that exposure comes from favorite fruits and vegetables. In 2008, detectable concentrations of malathion were found in 28 percent of frozen blueberry samples, 25 percent of fresh strawberry samples and 19 percent of celery samples, a government report found.

ADHD affects 4.5 million U.S. kids
Bouchard’s study is the largest to date to look at the effect of pesticides on child development and behavior, including ADHD, which affects an estimated 4.5 million U.S. children. About 2.5 million kids take medication for the condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bouchard and her colleagues measured levels of six pesticide metabolites in the urine of 1,139 children ages 8 to 15 selected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2000 and 2004. The study included 119 children who were diagnosed with ADHD.

Unlike other studies of pesticides’ impact, Bouchard’s sample provided a glimpse into average insecticide exposure in the general population of children, not a specialized group, such as children of farmworkers. Because certain pesticides leave the body after three to six days, the presence of residue shows that exposure is likely constant, Bouchard said.

She found that kids with a 10-fold increase in the kind of metabolites left in the body after malathion exposure were 55 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Because the researchers didn’t review the kids’ diets, they couldn’t say why some children had such high levels of pesticide residue. Children are at greater risk from pesticides because their young bodies are still developing and may not metabolize chemicals as well as adults’.

The most alarming finding was a near-doubling in odds of ADHD diagnoses among kids with higher-than-average levels of the most common of the six metabolites detected. Kids with high levels of dimethyl thiophosphate were 93 percent more likely to have the disorder than children with with undetectable levels of the marker.

The research may add to anxiety about ADHD, which has no known cause, said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

“It does seem to suggest that at non-extreme or more typical levels, there does seem to be some increased risk,” said Adesman, who is on the professional advisory board for Children and Adults with ADHD, an advocacy group.

Pesticides prey on nervous system
Boucher studied organophosphate pesticides, which account for as much as 70 percent of the pesticide use in the U.S. They work by interfering with the nervous systems of insects, but have a similar effect in mammals, including humans. Most people in the U.S. have residues of the products in their urine.

Cheminova, the Danish firm that is the leading manufacturer of malathion in the world, declined to comment on the conclusions of the new research. Diane Allemang, vice president for global regulatory affairs, said she hadn’t seen the study.

Parents of children with ADHD, however, said Bouchard’s work will give them one more thing to worry about.

“We’re all completely obsessed with food,” said Jamie Norman, 32, of Freeburg, Ill., whose 6-year-old son, Aidan, was diagnosed with ADHD six months ago.

The stimulant medication Aidan takes, Adderall XR, depresses his appetite, so Norman said she’s always trying to find good foods that he’ll want to eat. Other parents of kids with ADHD choose to use diet, not medication, to control the disorder and they’re constantly monitoring food, too.

News that some of the best foods for kids might be tainted with something linked to ADHD is worrisome, Norman said.

“I’ve known for some time that strawberries, in particular, contain high levels of pesticide, but as far as frozen fruit, I don’t give that a second thought,” she said.

Buy organic, make sure to wash
The best advice for parents — and anyone who wants to avoid pesticides — is to choose foods least likely to contain them. The Environmental Working Group, a consumer advocacy organization, advises shoppers to buy organic versions of a dozen fruits and vegetables that grow in the ground or are commonly eaten with the skin, because they’re most likely to be contaminated.

Make sure to wash all fruits and vegetables under cold running tap water and scrub firm-skinned produce with a brush. Be sure to rinse frozen fruits and vegetables, too.

But don’t wash produce with soap. The Food and Drug Administration says that could leave behind residues of detergent, yet more chemicals that everyone would do best to avoid.

Many doctors will tell you that at least 95 per cent of childhood illnesses are self limiting. In other words they will heal by themselves and do not require any medical intervention. Of course prevention is an important part of health care, but just-in-case medicine, given without any clinical basis, can make symptoms worse and produce a whole range of new and even more debilitating side effects.

Good examples of this idea abound in our approach to common experiences such as fever, earache and coughs.

Fever often develops during an infection. Although we generally think of fever as a bad thing, fever enhances the inflammatory response of the body, and certain components of the immune system work optimally at increased body temperature. Also fever helps to limit the growth of some germs that cannot grow well at higher temperatures.

Suppressing fever with medicines like Calpol interferes with this essential mechanism.

For children, fever can serve another important function. Our children are not born with mature immune systems and fever is one way of activating and ‘educating’ the immune system to respond when needed. Because of this, temperatures up to 39 C (102 F) don’t usually provide sufficient grounds for action unless your child is prone to convulsions.

There is even research to show that warm sponging can be just as effective at reducing skin temperature as paracetamol.

Other ingredients

Calpol of course doesn’t just contain paracetamol. It is a veritable cocktail of sweeteners, flavourings, preservatives and colourants to make the product appealing and palatable to infants. These additives include strawberry ‘flavouring’ and carmoisine (E122- suspected carcinogen, banned in Austria, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the US) to produce its pink colour.

It also contains, Maltitol (a mild laxative), glycerol (E422 – large quantities can cause headaches, thirst and nausea), sorbitol (E420 – large quantities can cause stomach upset), the paraben preservatives methyl parahydroxybenzoate (E218 – suspected hormone disrupter and allergen), propyl parahydroxybenzoate (E216 – suspected hormone disrupter and allergen), ethyl parahydroxybenzoate (E214 – suspected hormone disrupter, banned in France and Australia), and a thickener xanthan gum (E415 – no known adverse effects).

Being such an interesting E-cocktail, it’s not surprising that it can cause allergic reactions (such as skin rashes and hayfever-like symptoms), tiredness, unexpected bleeding or tendency towards bruising as well as headache, nausea.

Using paracetamol to treat fever may also result in your child having a seemingly endless round of colds, since the body’s natural fever reaction was not allowed to kill the virus causing the illness leaving your child to be reinfected again and again.

E122 and E218 can lead to hyperactivity, and the Hyperactive Children’s Support Group identifies them as likely causes of mysterious and sudden cases of ADHD-like hyper-activity.

Is neurofen better?

So is Calprofen, the childrens’ neurofen suspension, a better option? Not really. The manufacturers of Nurofen, the UK’s best selling adult ibuprofen, list the following adverse effects in their packaging:
Stomach discomfort or pain, nausea, stomach ulcer with or without bleeding, black tarry stools, worsening of asthma, unexplained wheezing or shortness of breath, liver and kidney problems, headache, dizziness, hearing disturbance and rarely skin rash, itching, peeling, easy bruising and facial swelling.

Putting it in a lower dose in a sweet syrup, with a reassuring picture of a happy baby on the packaging, may not be enough to protect your child from such effects. In fact in the US concern was heightened in 2003 when an 11 year old girl developed Stevens Johnson Syndrome – a devastating inflammatory disease that can result in serious gastrointestinal problems, blindness and death – soon after being given a children’s ibuprofen for a mild fever.

In 2008 a jury decided, bizarrely, that although manufacturers Johnson & Johnson failed to adequately warn of risks of contracting Stevens-Johnson syndrome on the label, this lack of adequate warning did not make the manufacturers liable for the girl’s blindness.

Nevertheless the Stevens Johnson syndrome foundation still insists that the number of reported cases of ibuprofen-related SJS has risen in recent years.

Watch and wait

The medical model of care is action oriented. It pursues germs and suppresses symptoms with single-minded determination. When learning how to take care of their children, parents are encouraged to take this model on board.

The idea of ‘watch and wait’ caring is still not widely encouraged. Not surprisingly, when faced with the combination of medical opposition to a watch and wait approach and the blind panic whipped up by the media about things like swine flu, many parents end up toeing the line. Calpol is dispensed and all is right with the world – until of course it isn’t.

To be health conscious is to understand that there is always ‘something going around’ which is ‘probably a virus’. There are viruses and bacteria in us and around us all the time.

The virus that causes flu or measles may be inside you or your children right now. But you are not ill because your immune system is working efficiently. What makes your child susceptible to these things – allergies, run-down immune system, diet, sleep, emotional distress – is the real question and all play a part in susceptibility to infection and in the course of healing.

Addressing these things first, before you reach for the Calpol, is the most important part of prevention and combined with cuddles, kisses and patience is probably the best way to ensure the speedy recovery of a child with a cold.

by Pat Thomas

Practically speaking, swine flu is not all that different from seasonal flu in symptoms and treatment. And children aren’t at any particularly increased risk, above that they face from normal flu, but somehow the word ‘swine’ before flu has got parents in a panic – fuelled by the media – and feeling more helpless than ever.

Enter Calpol, uncritically accepted by parents – and bizarrely by doctors too – as a kind of sticky pink magic bullet for whatever ails your child. As far as we at the Ecologist know, Calpol is not a cure for swine flu but you wouldn’t know if from the conversations floating around on parental e-forums:

‘Not much we can do, except keep shovelling in Calpol and keep an eye on them’.

‘I called the doctors and was told to give him Calpol and call back in the morning’.

‘They told us there [at the A&E] to carry on with Calpol, it most likely is swine flu and that we can put the Tamiflu in her strawberry milk’.

No wonder profits are soaring.

In the UK the whole of the children’s medicine category is currently worth £137 million a year and is predicted to grow by more than £20 million in the next five years. This growth is apparently due to a greater emphasis on parents self-selecting over the counter (OTC) medicines to treat children’s minor ailments.

The sickness business

Calpol, the number one selling children’s medicine, has a commanding 70 per cent share of the ‘pain and fever’ sub-market, which accounts for around half of the total children’s medicine market.

This lofty position, according to former manufacturers Pfizer (the medicine is now marketed by McNeil Healthcare UK), is testament to Calpol’s ‘heritage and commitment to meeting the changing needs of twenty-first century parents’.

Or maybe it is just a testament to parent’s general feelings of fear and vulnerability when their kids get sick.

The Calpol range has grown considerably in recent years to include not just the original infant suspension (which contains paracetamol as its active ingredient and is now also available as handy Calpol Infant Suspension Sachets). It now includes Calprofen (with ibuprofen as its active ingredient) as well as Calpol Six Plus Fastmelts (melt in the mouth paracetamol for the over 6s) as well as Calcold (contains paracetamol and diphenhydramine), Calcough Chesty (contains guaifenesin) and Calpol Night (contains paracetamol and diphenhydramine).

Worrying research

So, there’s something for everybody. And if it brings down fever and gives parents a better night’s sleep what’s the harm?

Well, late in 2008 a paper published in the respected medical journal The Lancet challenged many parent’s perceptions of the harmlessness of Calpol. Researchers who analysed data on more than 200,000 children found strong links between their exposure to paracetamol as infants and the development of asthma, eczema and other allergies at age 6-7.

In fact using the drug in the first year of life increased the risk of hay fever and eczema at the age of 6 and 7 by 48 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.

The more paracetamol a child had in the early years of life, the higher the risk. Thus children under 12 months who were given a paracetamol-based medicine at least once a month more than tripled the chances of suffering wheezing attacks by the age of 6 or 7. The researchers noted that increased use of paracetamol – because of earlier fears about giving children aspirin – could be a factor in worrying rise in rates of asthma in many countries.

Fever phobia

The problem is that because it is so widely available, and recommended by everyone for everything, we don’t tend to think of Calpol as medicine. Parents are not encouraged to be thoughtful or frugal in their use of Calpol.

Nor are they encouraged to understand the basic mechanisms of illness with which medicines like paracetamol interfere. In particular parents’ fever phobia is something that urgently needs to be addressed

by Pat Thomas

At Cornell University’s department of food science and Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, researchers randomly divided rats treated with a known mammary carcinogen into different groups, feeding them either low, middle or high doses of Red Delicious apple extracts (the equivalent of one, three and six apples a day in humans, respectively) or a control extract. Rats fed the strongest apple extract experienced the lowest cancer rate (40% developed cancer)… followed by the group fed middle-strength extract (43%)… and the lowest strength extract (59%). In comparison, 71% of those fed the apple-free control extract developed mammary cancer over the 24-week study period. The study appeared in the December 10, 2008, online edition of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

WHAT’S THE SECRET?

According to researcher Rui Hai Liu, MD, PhD, associate professor of food science at Cornell University, the study demonstrated not only that apple extracts effectively inhibited the growth of mammary tumors in the rats but that the more administered, the greater the anticancer effect. “Not only did animals treated with apple extract have fewer tumors overall, the tumors were smaller, less likely to be malignant and grew more slowly when compared with tumors in the untreated animals,” he said.

Why are apples so powerful against breast cancer, I wondered? Dr. Liu explained to me that apples are one of the best sources of phenolics and flavonoids, which are phytochemicals (bioactive compounds) that have powerful antioxidant and anti-proliferative (antigrowth) effects in the body. In two previous studies, Dr. Liu and his colleagues discovered that phytochemicals from apples effectively inhibited the growth of human breast cancer cells. In another study, Dr. Liu found that phytochemicals from apple peels inhibited an important inflammation pathway, NFkB, in human breast cancer cells, thereby reducing the proliferation of the cancer.

Dr. Liu told me that although other fruits and vegetables also contain phenolics and flavonoids, apples are one of the best dietary sources of fruit phenolics. In fact, of the top 25 fruits consumed in the US, apples provide 33% of the phenolics that Americans consume annually. “Americans love to eat apples, so it makes sense to encourage them as part of a balanced diet for optimal health,” he said, adding that this doesn’t mean anyone should forsake other fruits and vegetables. “It’s clear that regular consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains can help to prevent chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer,” Dr. Liu said.

Source(s):

Rui Hai Liu, MD, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of food science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Some great information on how food is definitely affecting your and your children’s behaviour. This powerful message may help you and give you some answers. It is indepth, but an important message none the less from a Dr who has studied the effect of food on our brains for over 30 years.