Changing advice for childrens allergies. Doctors are changing their recommendations for childrens allergies. It used to be that they thought children’s allergies could be avoided by avoiding certain foods during pregnancy, drinking soy milk, or delaying solid food until after 6 month of age. Not any more. Pretty much the only advice that still holds true is that breast feeding does appear to prevent children’s allergies. As for the others, there is no scientific evidence to prove that they work.

Another good reason to eat together as a family. Studies show that girls who regularly eat meals with their families are less likely to have eating disorders. The same does not hold true for boys. Researchers are not sure why there is a gender difference, but speculate that this could be a result of girls being more influenced by interpersonal and familial relationships present at family meals, or perhaps that they are more involved in the food preparation process.

Poor piggies! Scientists in China have successfully bred florescent green piglets. These were born from a mother who was injected with this. Scientists are all happy because they now think they can breed special pigs, and especially ones that are suitable for human organ transplants. Honestly, this kind of creeps me out. I am still not sure how I feel about all of these amazing medical advances. On one side it sees like a great thing to cure all of these strange diseases, but the other side of me wonders if we wouldn’t have all these strange diseases if we weren’t constantly destroying our environments with all of the chemicals we produce in the first place? I mean, florescent green chemically altered pigs doesn’t seem too healthy now, does it?

The smaller the baby the sadder the adult? Researchers in Britain and Canada have released studies that show that lower weight infants have a higher risk of depression as adults. It was found that “…even people who had just mild or moderate symptoms of depression or anxiety over their life course were smaller babies than those who had better mental health.”

“Being born small isn’t necessarily a problem. It is a problem if you were born small because of adverse conditions in the womb — and low birth weight is what we looked at in this study because it is considered a marker of stress in the womb.”

Low birth weight has also been linked to diabetes and heart disease later in life.

Could anorexia be genetic? Studies on twins appear to show that male twins with a female sibling are twice more likely to become anorexic, possibly because of the exposure to female hormones in the womb. Researchers are hopeful to understand more about this so that they can work towards preventing this in the future.

“The one thing we are certain of is that there is a genetic disposition to anorexia, but at the same time this is not enough,” said Procopio, pointing out that if the eating disorder was due to genes alone, an identical twin of an anorexia patient would also have the disease, but this isn’t the case.

A magical fertility chair? Childless couples from all over are travelling to Naples, Italy where there is a church that is claiming to have a “magical chair” that will help fertility. It is the shrine of Saint Anna Maria Rosa Nicoletta Gallo, the first woman saint born in Naples over 200 years ago.

No one can explain why she helps fertility. Writings indicate that she carried the “stigmata” or wounds of Jesus. Whips on display are grim reminders of her “voluntary penance.” Buy hey, there are surely those who are trying to conceive who think “what can it hurt to give it a try…”

My husband forwarded me a rather freaky essay from the nerd site TCS Daily on how embryo testing and genius may intersect in the near future. Already, parents are using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to screen out embryos that carry the genes for certain diseases or conditions. As geneticists begin to understand which combinations of genes increase the likelihood for genius, choosing embryos for IQ will enter the picture.

Next step: Increasing the odds. Two British clinics have found a way to safely harvest thousands of eggs from a woman, which means that in the future, couples may be offered thousands of embryos to choose from when conceiving a child. If under normal circumstances, the couple has a 1% chance of having a baby with the potential for genius, with thousands of embryos to be screened the couple is virtually guaranteed a super-smart baby.

Now for the creepy late night reading part:

Embryo selection gets even more interesting when we consider how a nation such as China might use it. Imagine that in ten years China forces all its college students to get genetic tests. Students with intelligence genes in the top 1% of the top 1% of humankind are then forced to donate sperm or eggs. China then uses the sperm and eggs to create a billion embryos each year. The genetic intellectual potential of all these embryos is checked. Those in the top 10,000 are implanted into women. Each of these embryos has the intellectual potential to be in the top one-billionth of humankind. Now because of environmental factors many of these embryos won’t turn into intellectual titans. But let’s say that one in ten does. This means that each year 1,000 people with the scientific ability of Einstein will be born. By 2035 they will become adults and start doing scientific research. I imagine these Einsteins will be rather helpful to China’s economy and military.

Yes, I imagine so…

Posted by MommaSteph.

If you’ve ever thought, while chasing after your son, “This kid will be the death of me,” well…you may just be right! This according to Virpi Lummaa, a Finnish evolutionary biologist who searches through centuries-old birth, marriage and death records looking for patterns. What she’s learned from studying the premodern Sami people of Finland:

Among this group, she found that those who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This discrepancy has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—as well as testosterone. “Testosterone can compromise your immune system; it can affect your health,” Lummaa says, and the mothers of sons proved especially susceptible to endemic infectious disease, such as tuberculosis. “Boys are a little bit more costly” to raise than girls as well, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers, she adds, as has been seen in other mammals, such as the red deer. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life.

Boys may also be costly for their younger siblings. Those born after a son tend to be physically slighter, have smaller families, and are more likely to die from infectious diseases. These results held even if the older brother died in childbirth.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in twins where one is male and the other is female. Of 754 twins born between 1734 and 1888 in five towns in rural Finland, girls from mixed-gender pairs proved 25 percent less likely to have children, had at least two fewer children, and were about 15 percent less likely to marry than those born with a sister. This brotherly influence remained the same regardless of social class or other cultural factors and even endured if the male twin died within three months of birth, leaving the female twin to be reared as an only child.

In these cases, Dr. Lummaa believes that testosterone exposure in the womb is to blame.

Another odd finding: While the presence of a grandmother in the family home is associated with the survival and later reproduction of her grandchildren, grandpa provides no such service:

“If anything there’s a negative effect,” she concludes. This could be because of the cultural tradition of catering to men, particularly old men. “Maybe if you had an old grandpa, he was eating your food,” she speculates.

Of course, these findings are based on people who lived before modern medicine, and it’s rare in the developed world to find a grandfather wrestling a chicken nugget from a toddler. Interesting, nonetheless.

Gotta go, the boys are tearing the house apart…

Posted by MommaSteph.

Gain Weight, Get a Boy? A new study of 220,889 women who had successive pregnancies between 1992 and 2004 finds that an increase in body weight from the beginning of one’s first pregnancy to the beginning of a second seems to increase the chances that the second pregnancy will produce in a boy baby. “The results are provocative because few biological factors are known in humans to influence the chances of either conceiving or carrying to term a baby boy or girl. Our study suggests that maternal nutritional factors might play a role,” said Eduardo Villamor, assistant professor of international nutrition at HSPH and lead author of the study. However, the researchers caution against gaining weight in order to try to influence the sex of a baby. “Weight gain before pregnancy carries significant risks to the mother and the baby, and should not be practiced to influence the odds of having a boy,” said Villamor. “Other factors of which weight gain is only an indicator could be at play here.”

Good News for Barry White: A new study published in the journal Biology Letters finds that men with low-pitched voices have more offspring than those with higher-pitched voices. Previous studies have shown that men with low voices have more “reproductive success” because women tend to find them more attractive, dominant, and healthy-sounding. Men, meanwhile, have generally been found prefer women with higher-pitched voices, finding them to sound younger, more subordinate (hmmmmm…), and healthy than women with low-pitched voices. For this current study, the researchers looked at the Hadza of Tanzania, who have no birth control. Of these people, the men with low-pitched voices had more children than their high-talking peers.

Dumb Move: Former Australian cricket champion Shane Warne reportedly blew his last chance to save his newly-reconciled marriage because of an errant text message. Mr. Warne sent the following electronic missive out from his cell phone: “Hey beautiful, I’m just talking to my kids, the back door’s open.” The message that came back: “You loser, you sent the message to the wrong person.” It was from his wife.

Birth month and eyesight? A new study published in the journal Ophthalmology found a dramatic association between birth month and short-sightedness. By examining records of almost 300,000 Israeli youths, researchers found that those born in June or July were 24% more likely to be severely myopic than those born in December or January. The lead researcher notes that the amount of early life exposure to natural light is probably a key factor.

HFCS back on the naughty chair? A new study presented at the American Chemical Society presents new evidence that high fructose corn syrup could be a contributing factor to childhood diabetes. In a laboratory experiment, drinks containing high fructose corn syrup were found to have high levels of reactive compounds that have been shown in previous studies to trigger cell and tissue damage that may cause the disease.

If you’ve ever had a baby shower after finding out whether your bundle-to-be was a boy or a girl, you were probably up to your eyeballs in pink or blue - clothing, bibs, pacifiers, rattles - it all comes color-coordinated by gender!

In modern society, it is perhaps almost offensive to stereotype colors by gender. However, most of us still probably cringe at a man in a pink shirt, for example (my father-in-law wears pink sometimes and does it well, but DH won’t touch it) and my 2yo daughter is already showing fondness for that most frilly color. Why does pink seem to be such a feminine hue?

Well, it turns out that there may be scientific reasons for that preference. New research seems to suggest that, while there is actually a universal preference for blue, the sexes differ greatly when it comes to the color pink.

In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1,000 pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, [neuroscientist Anya] Hurlbert and colleagues plotted the results along the color spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.

Researchers speculate that there is evolutionary support for women’s preference for reds and pinks. Pink is a healthy skin color; red signifies ripeness in various fruits and vegetables. These colors would have been preferred as women gathered fruit and other food for their tribes in days past.

Men had no need to develop a preference for pink/red above their natural affinity for blue, since they were primarily hunters and merely needed to identify a moving target as a food source.

The next time my daughter insists on wearing her pink dress instead of her almost identical blue one, I’m not going to argue with her. I’ll just smile to myself and pull it over her head, knowing that her color preferences may well be much older than either of us.

Posted by Sunshine.

Bumper Recall: The CPSC and Pottery Barn Kids have announced a recall of Matelassé crib bumpers because they may pose a strangulation hazard. The decorative stitching along the bumper’s edge can come lose. Consumers should stop using the bumpers and remove the exposed stitching or contact Pottery Barn at (877) 800-9720 for information on how to get a refund.

Botulism Recall Expanded: 90 canned food products are now on a recall list because of possible botulism contamination. You can find the full list of recalled items here. Of note: FDA advised consumers to search their cupboards and shelves for any of the products, which are identified with a USDA seal that has “Est. 195″ printed on it. Those cans should not be opened under any circumstances, says Robert Brackett, director of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “Discard them immediately. Double-bag the cans in plastic bags that are tightly closed, then place them in a trash receptacle outside the home,” Brackett says. Botulinum is so toxic that it can cause paralysis merely by breathing it in or exposing it to broken skin, he says. (Note, too, that botulism in commercially canned foods is extremely rare, with the last case recorded by the FDA occurring in 1971.)

Computerized Conception: Tokyo researchers are one step closer to developing a fully automated artificial womb to improve odds of success with IVF. The the University of Tokyo team are creating a chip that will serve as an initial meeting space for sperm and egg, and that can house up to 20 eggs. Endometrial cells, which line the human uterus, are also grown on the chip, which creates a more natural and hospitable environment for the developing embryos.

Good news about morning sickness: Women who suffer from nausea and vomiting during pregnancy appear to have a 30% lower risk for breast cancer than their sisters who make it through nine months with nary a twinge. It may be that the nausea is in part caused by higher levels of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin; this hormone has also been shown to have protective qualities when it comes to cancer cells.

Oldest = Smartest? New research finds that the eldest child in a family has an IQ of an average of 2.3 points higher than younger siblings. This holds true even if the first born dies and the younger sibling assumes the role of oldest child, scuttling the theory that biology specifically is at play. One theory is that oldest children receive more of their parents’ attention; another is that older children tend to teach the younger ones, and the act of instruction raises their IQs.

If you and your husband don’t use condoms, just maybe, says a researcher out of the State University of New York in Albany. Dr. Gordon G. Gallup has been looking at data that suggest that women who have intercourse without condoms are less likely to become depressed or kill themselves than those who do not have sex or who use condoms. In addition, women who do not use condoms become increasingly depressed as the time since their last sexual encounter lengthens, while no such correlation exists for women whose partners generally use condoms. The no-condom women also tend to be quicker to seek out new relationships when old ones end.

This suggests, notes Dr. Gallup, that the hormones contained in semen that may be absorbed through the vaginal wall, some of which are known to elevate mood, may be creating an addiction and subsequent withdrawal symptoms.

Gallup controlled for variables including method of contraception, frequency of sexual intercourse, as well as the women’s perception of their relationship. He concedes that women who regularly have sex without condoms might share personality traits that make them less susceptible to depression. But the behavior most often associated with non-condom users is sexual risk-taking, and studies have found no correlation between high-risk sexual behavior and lower rates of depression.

It’s an interesting idea, from an evolutionary biology point of view. If women get hooked on semen, the species is more likely to survive. But my husband just laughed and called it a “guy study”. Well, maybe it’s both.

Posted by MommaSteph.