Month: September 2016

Allergic passengers beware: Nuts on a plane

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Preparing for air travel can be highly challenging for nut-allergic passengers, a Short Report published in the Medical Journal of Australia has found.

Over 90 million passengers are carried on Australian flights each year, with 1-2% reporting they have documented food allergies. Dr Mark Hew and colleagues from the Alfred Hospital conducted a survey of all domestic and international airlines that fly from Tullamarine to assess their nut allergy policies.

The researchers found that 61% of airlines had online or telephone hotline information about nut allergy policies. Only a minority of airlines were able to provide nut-free meals. “Nine airlines (27%) offered nut- free meals, two routinely and seven on request. For the other airlines, nut-allergic passengers would need to fast (only practical on short domestic routes) or bring their own food,” the authors wrote.

A third of the airlines could restrict the distribution of packaged nuts on flights if required.

Only one airline operating from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport confirmed that emergency adrenaline was available on all flights.

For nut allergic individuals, the authors recommended that they contact their airline before travelling, develop an allergy plan with their doctor, carry their own emergency adrenaline, and consider bringing their own food. “Airlines should make their nut allergy policies more accessible and consider carrying emergency adrenaline on all flights,” the authors concluded.

Article: Airline policies for passengers with nut allergies flying from Melbourne Airport, Stephanie Stojanovic, Celia Mary Zubrinich, Robyn O’Hehir and Mark Hew, Medical Journal of Australia, doi: 10.5694/mja16.00384, published 20 September 2016

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/312988.php

Are infant cereals really the best first food for babies?

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Rice cereal with a bit of breast milk, infant formula or water has been the first food many parents feed their babies. It’s cheap, easy to mix with other foods and portable. It’s also easy for babies to digest and unlikely to cause an allergic reaction. “Babies have been eating grains for decades and they are well tolerated, which is one of the reasons why they are a good first food,” said Karen Ansel, a registered dietitian nutritionist in Syosset, New York, and co-author of “The Baby and Toddler Cookbook: Fresh, Homemade Foods for a Healthy Start.”

Rice cereal has also been touted as a healthy first food because it gives babies the nutrients they need, particularly iron and zinc. At around 6 months of age, breast milk iron stores naturally decrease. Plus, when both breastfed and formula-fed infants start solids, they get less of these nutrients and need to replace them with solids, which support their rapid growth, said Sara Peternell, a master nutrition therapist in Denver, Colorado and co-author of “Little Foodie: Baby Food Recipes for Babies and Toddlers with Taste.”

In recent years however, rice cereal has become less popular.

“What we’re realizing is that grains really don’t need to be a first choice,” said Dr. Anthony F. Porto, a board-certified pediatric gastroenterologist and assistant professor of pediatrics and associate clinical chief at Yale University.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) states that there’s no medical evidence that starting solids in any particular order has any advantages.

“This idea of giving them ‘smooshy,’ bland, wallpaper-tasting rice cereal because we believe it’s either easier on their taste buds or easier on their digestive system is becoming a very outdated first-foods-for-babies recommendation,” Peternell said.

In fact, studies show babies’ food preferences actually start in utero. Babies whose mothers drank carrot juice during pregnancy and while breastfeeding had fewer negative expressions when they started to eat carrots than infants who had not been exposed to the flavor, a study in the journal Pediatrics found.

Amylase, Arsenic and Allergies

“We’re learning that grains may have somewhat of a detrimental effect,” Peternell said, adding that amalyse, the enzyme which allows babies to digest and break down complex grains isn’t present in their salivary glands until their molars come in.

“Babies have very immature digestive systems, so to speak, so when we introduce something that’s more of a refined grain, that takes a lot more energy from the digestive system to try to break it down and also to extract the nutrients,” she said.

Often times when babies start both gluten and non-gluten varieties of grains, they can experience stomach pain, become constipated and have changes in their stool patterns.

“They may even potentially develop some food intolerances because their gut is just not prepared yet for some of the protein components in that particular food,” she said.

More on this…

Is rice cereal the best food for baby?

‘World’s smallest baby’ thriving after premature birth

Comparison of commercial and homemade infant meals finds flaws in each

Another concern about feeding babies rice in particular is the high levels of arsenic that it contains. In April, the FDA proposed a limit of 100 parts per billion (ppb) for inorganic arsenic infant rice cereal.

Although wheat shouldn’t be offered as a first food, it shouldn’t be avoided either and offered only after your baby can tolerate other foods.

“What we’re finding actually is that if you are strictly avoiding those foods, you may actually be encouraging your child to develop allergies because their bodies are not coming in contact with these allergens and when they finally do, they really don’t know how to handle them,” Ansel said.

Variety is the spice of life

Although babies do not need grains, they do need to eat complex carbohydrates, Peternell said, adding that butternut squash, zucchini and sweet potatoes are all excellent choices.

If you’re concerned about arsenic in rice, you don’t need to avoid rice altogether.

“What you wouldn’t want to do is rice cereal three times a day, every day,” Ansel said.

If you choose to feed your baby grains, choose a variety such as oats, multigrain cereal, barley, quinoa and millet.

Traditionally, first foods around the world have been meat, which have the same level of fortification of iron and zinc as fortified cereals, Porto, who is also the author of “The Pediatrician’s Guide to Feeding Babies and Toddlers,” said.

In fact, breastfed infants who were fed pureed meat had higher levels of iron and zinc than those who were fed an iron-fortified infant cereal, according to a study in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.

If you’re raising your baby as a vegetarian, egg yolks are also a good option. Although legumes are iron-rich, they’re not a complete protein unless they’re combined with grains and they should be offered occasionally and when your baby is older, Peternell said.

If you decide to offer grains and you find it makes your baby constipated, foods such as prunes, plums, pears, peaches and apricots can help combat it.

Also, keep in mind that no matter what types of foods you introduce, you should start to offer a new first food every three to five days.

“The most important thing is you want to give your baby a wide variety of solids,” Ansel said.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/09/11/are-infant-cereals-really-best-first-food-for-babies.html

 

No more than 6 teaspoons of sugar a day for kids

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While food accounts for a large portion of the added sugar in our diet, many experts recommend cutting back on sugary beverages to reduce daily intake. Consumption of sugary drinks might lead to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year worldwide, according to research published in the journal Circulation, an update of a 2013 American Heart Association conference presentation. In the following slides, we compare the amount of sugar found in some of America’s top-selling beverages — according to Beverage Industry magazine’s 2013 State of the Industry Report — to the sugar found in common sugary snacks.

Children 2 to 18 should consume no more than about six teaspoons of added sugars in their daily diets, according to new recommendations from the American Heart Association.

Researchers called limiting a child’s added sugar consumption to six teaspoons — equivalent to about 100 calories or 25 grams — “an important public health target” in a paper published in the journal Circulation on Monday. The paper outlines the new recommendations.

“A diet high in added sugars is strongly associated with weight gain, obesity, insulin resistance, abnormal cholesterol and fatty liver disease in children and all of these increase future cardiovascular risk,” said Dr. Miriam Vos, an associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and lead author of the paper.

“I hope that this statement helps parents and organizations that help care for children by providing an achievable goal,” she said. “How much sugar is OK for kids has been a confusing issue for parents, and this statement provides a target that parents can understand, and that will make a huge difference for the health of children.”

The researchers reviewed and analyzed more than 100 previous papers and studies on the cardiovascular health effects of added sugars on children published through November.

They also analyzed dietary data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on how much added sugar was consumed in the United States from 2009 to 2012.

he researchers concluded that children are currently consuming more than the newly recommended 25-grams-or-less of added sugars daily, on average.

The latest national dietary guidelines released by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion recommends limiting sweets so that added sugar makes up 10% or less of your daily calories.

That amount is “closely aligned with the new recommendations,” Vos said. “The AHA statement provides a fixed amount, 25 grams, that is less than 10% of calories for most children and is easier for parents to understand.”

Understanding added sugar

What counts as added sugars? Any table sugar, fructose or honey used as an ingredient in processing and preparing foods or beverages, eaten separately or added to a meal at the dining table. Some foods that contain added sugars are soft drinks, candy, cookies, cakes, ice cream and pies.

“A plain whole grain bagel with cream cheese can have no added sugar, while a frosted doughnut has 23 grams of added sugar,” Vos said. “A bowl of cereal can range from 1 gram to 12 or more grams, depending on the brand. One soda typically has 33 grams. A healthy breakfast of a low added-sugar, whole-grain cereal with a piece of fruit and a glass of low-fat milk would have about 1 gram of added sugar [but] varies by the cereal.”

If the six-teaspoon recommendation becomes difficult to follow, that’s because many processed foods in the supermarket are engineered to be high-sugar and low-fiber, said Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new paper.

“We now have the data to show that sugar is different from starch, unrelated to its calories, and is causative for four diseases: type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease and tooth decay,” he said. “It’s like alcohol but for kids. … It activates the brain’s reward center to make you consume more.”

The new paper not only provides a comprehensive review of the current data, it reveals “profound” and “deeply disturbing” links between the amount of added sugars American children consume and their risk of heart diseases, said Dr. Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, who was not involved in the paper.

“I am very concerned, as a parent, that my child shouldn’t be consuming as much added sugar as I did as a child,” he said, “and this AHA statement goes a long way toward helping parents like me understand the implications of what I give to my child to eat.”

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/23/health/sugar-kids-recommendations/index.html

Ivory Coast re-opens western borders closed during Ebola epidemic

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Ivory Coast has re-opened its western borders with Liberia and Guinea two years after they were closed to prevent the spread of an Ebola epidemic that killed thousands across West Africa, an Ivorian government spokesman said on Friday.

Around 29,000 people contracted the hemorrhagic fever during the more than two-year long outbreak, the worst on record. Over 11,000 died before it finally ended in June, nearly all of them in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“We had to take these measures to protect our country. And the fact we didn’t have a single case must be considered a real success,” Bruno Kone said, referring to the border closure measure.

Ivory Coast, French-speaking West Africa’s largest economy, shut its borders in August 2014.

It came under criticism at the time from some health organizations that argued the closure risked aggravating the epidemic and would worsen hardship in countries already struggling with the economic fallout from Ebola.

Several other regional nations, including Mali and Senegal, also shut their borders temporarily as a precaution.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/09/09/ivory-coast-re-opens-western-borders-closed-during-ebola-epidemic.html

Coffee Cravings May Spring From Your DNA

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Genes appear to influence how much caffeine you need

Anybody up for a steaming cup of Joe? Turns out your DNA may hold the answer.

New research suggests that your genes influence how much coffee you drink.

Researchers analyzed genetic data from more than 1,200 people in Italy, who were asked how much coffee they drank each day.

Those with a gene variant called PDSS2 drank one cup less a day on average than those without the variation, the investigators found.

Research involving more than 1,700 people in the Netherlands yielded similar findings, according to the study authors.

The findings suggest that PDSS2 reduces cells’ ability to break down caffeine. That means it stays in the body longer.

The upshot: People with the gene variant don’t need as much coffee to get the same caffeine hit as those without it, the researchers said.

“The results of our study add to existing research suggesting that our drive to drink coffee may be embedded in our genes,” said study author Nicola Pirastu. He is a chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

“We need to do larger studies to confirm the discovery and also to clarify the biological link between PDSS2 and coffee consumption,” Pirastu added in a university news release.

By Robert Preidt

Source: https://medlineplus.gov/news/fullstory_160628.html

Sodas Linked to Gallbladder Cancer

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People who drink lots of soda or other sugary beverages may have a higher risk of developing rare cancers in the gallbladder and bile ducts around the liver, a Swedish study suggests.

Little is known about the causes of biliary tract and gallbladder tumors, but emerging evidence suggests obesity as well as elevated blood sugar levels that are a hallmark of diabetes may increase the risk of these malignancies.

Because sodas and other sugary drinks have been linked to high blood sugar and weight gain, researchers wondered if these beverages might play a role in these types of cancer, said lead study author Susanna Larsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

To explore this possibility, researchers analyzed survey data on the eating and drinking habits of more than 70,000 adults then followed them for more than 13 years on average to see whether cancers got diagnosed.

Only about 150 people developed biliary tract or gallbladder cancers during the study period.

But compared with people who avoided sugar-sweetened drinks altogether, individuals who consumed two or more juice drinks or sodas, including artificially sweetened sodas, a day had more than twice the risk of developing gallbladder tumors and 79 percent higher odds of getting biliary tract cancer, the study found.

“Soda consumption has been inconsistently associated with risk of biliary tract cancer (only one prior study) and other cancers in previous similar studies,” Larsson said by email.

The current study “is the first study to show a strong link between consumption of sweetened beverages, such as soda, and risk of biliary tract cancer,” Larsson added.

At the start of the study, participants completed food and drink questionnaires that asked how many sodas or juice drinks they had consumed in the past week and how much they typically consumed during the previous year.

When they answered these questions in 1997, participants were 61 years old on average. About half of them were overweight and roughly 25 percent were current smokers.

Researchers excluded people with a previous cancer diagnosis or a history of diabetes.

The people who drank two or more sodas or sugary beverages a day were more likely to be overweight and eat a higher-calorie diet with more sugar and carbohydrates and less protein and fat.

The increased risk of gallbladder and biliary tract tumors persisted, however, even after researchers adjusted for whether participants were overweight.

Because the study is observational, the findings don’t prove soda and sugary drinks cause cancer.

It’s also possible that because researchers only had data on drinking habits at the start of the study, the findings might have been influenced by changes over time in the beverages people consumed, the authors note in JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers also lacked precise data to assess how often the drinks people chose were diet sodas, said Dr. Margo Denke, a former researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas who wasn’t involved in the study.

Even so, “this study suggests that there is more than a plausible link; the incidence of biliary and gall bladder cancer was higher among individuals who consumed more sodas and juices,” Denke said by email.

The exact reasons for the connection between sodas and these tumors may be unclear, but the message for consumers is still simple, said Dr. Igor Astsaturov, a medical oncologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Obviously, this finding signals again and again that healthy lifestyle is the key to cancer-free life,” Astsaturov said by email. “Regardless of the cause, it is easy enough to quench the thirst with water to stay fit and healthy.”

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/sodas-linked-gallbladder-cancer-n608716