Recently in Health Category

Yep, I spent part of my holiday weekend de-lousing my home and family, and I must say, it was so much work that we may just have to live with the little critters next time.

It all started when another mother at our school emailed me Friday that she had confirmed the presence of lice on her daughter, and that she had it too. Shortly after the message, I started to get that itchy feeling. I am convinced that it wasn't entirely due to the power of suggestion, but that there actually was a science project unfolding on my scalp.

My kids, of course, seemed oblivious. Husband is bald.

SO, I bought the stuff, I did it to my hair, I didn't wear the same clothes after the shampoo with the pesticide. I spent an hour combing out the kids' hair after first plying them with lollipops and morning cartoons and the promise of more candy if they complied.

I did all the right things, in short. But now, a few days later, I still feel a little itchy. Could it be that we actually didn't have lice at all, that I just have an itchy scalp and an overactive imagination, and that I did all that laundry for nothing?

I'll never know for certain, but I have promised myself that I will get a confirmation from an expert (like the school director) next time before going through the whole process. And when I do it, I'll take the suggestion I read on http://www.drgreene.org: "Instead of cleaning every inch of the house, just lock up tight and go on vacation. Get rid of the lice on your heads, and then get out of town. Lice die after 55 hours without a human host. If you can afford to be gone for at least three days, you will return to a lice-free environment.''

Relying on more green beans and carrots to ensure your kid doesn't go through life a shortie? Here's a cool calculator that may take some of the guesswork out of the height question: http://parentcenter.babycenter.com/child-height-predictor

Check out my story today about new fathers putting on weight and how to take it back off: http://www.dailynews.com/search/ci_9153688?IADID

Here's the nuts and bolts that don't appear in the online version:

TOP BUFF DAD TIPS:
• You don't need to work out for two hours a day.
• Work out first thing in the morning. Exercising before breakfast will stimulate your metabolism for the whole day.
• Breakfast is a must. Again, it's that metabolism jumpstart.
• Try to eat the same thing every day.
• Eat six times a day, or every three hours.
• Control portions.
• Stop eating two hours before bed.

Mike's sample menu:
Levinson said he eats this diet Monday through Friday:
Breakfast: egg white company cup - low fat cheese, pita and salsa
Snack: fruit or yogurt or a handful of nuts
Lunch: A sandwich
Snack: Fruit and peanut butter or a protein shake
Dinner: Stir-fried vegetables, sometimes with chicken, and a small dessert.

Want a boy? That may require power breakfasts of morning cereal, according to a new study. Read on:

Mom's diet may play role in whether baby is boy or girl
By LINDSEY TANNER

CHICAGO (AP) -- Snips and snails and puppydog tails ... and cereal and bananas? That could be what little boys are made of, according to surprising new research suggesting that what a woman eats before pregnancy influences the gender of her baby.

Having a hearty appetite, eating potassium-rich foods including bananas, and not skipping breakfast all seemed to raise the odds of having a boy.

The British research is billed as the first in humans to show a link between a woman's diet and whether she has a boy or girl.

It is not proof, but it fits with evidence from test tube fertilization that male embryos thrive best with longer exposure to nutrient-rich lab cultures, said Dr. Tarun Jain. He is a fertility specialist at University of Illinois at Chicago who wasn't involved in the study.

It just might be that it takes more nutrients to build boys than girls, he said.

University of Exeter researcher Fiona Mathews, the study's lead author, said the findings also fit with fertility research showing that male embryos aren't likely to survive in lab cultures with low sugar levels. Skipping meals can result in low blood sugar levels.

Jain said he was skeptical when he first heard about the research. But he said the study was well-done and merits follow-up study to see if the theory proves true.

It's not necessarily as far-fetched as it sounds. While men's sperm determine a baby's gender, it could be that certain nutrients or eating patterns make women's bodies more hospitable to sperm carrying the male chromosome, Jain said.

"It's an interesting question. I'm not aware of anyone else looking at it in this manner," he said.

The study was published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British medical journal.

The research involved about 700 first-time pregnant women in the United Kingdom who didn't know the sex of their fetuses. They were asked about their eating habits in the year before getting pregnant.

Among women with the highest calorie intake before pregnancy (but still within a normal, healthy range), 56 percent had boys, versus 45 percent of the women with the lowest calorie intake.

Women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily were 87 percent more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowlful per week. Cereal is a typical breakfast in Britain and in the study, eating very little cereal was considered a possible sign of skipping breakfast, Mathews said.

Compared with the women who had girls, those who had boys ate an additional 300 milligrams of potassium daily on average, "which links quite nicely with the old wives' tale that if you eat bananas you'll have a boy," Mathews said.

Women who had boys also ate about 400 calories more daily than those who had girls, on average, she said.

Still, no one's recommending pigging out if you really want a boy or starving yourself if you'd prefer a girl.

Neither style of eating is healthy, and besides all the health risks linked with excess weight, other research suggests obese women have a harder time getting pregnant.

The study results reflect women at opposite ends of a normal eating pattern, not those with extreme habits, Mathews said.

Professor Stuart West of the University of Edinburgh said the results echo research in some animals.

And Dr. Michael Lu, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and public health at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the results "are certainly plausible from an evolutionary biology perspective." In other words, since boys tend to be bigger, it would make sense that it would take more calories to create them, Lu said.

Still, Lu said a woman's diet before pregnancy may be a marker for other factors in their lives that could influence their baby's gender, including timing of intercourse.

"The bottom line is, we still don't know how to advise patients in how to make boys," he said.

Momnesia -- It's my favorite new buzzword. It gives me an excuse for all the really stupid things I find myself doing, like talking to a friend on my cell phone while searching the house (and even walking out to the car) in search of .... my cell phone.

I used Momnesia to excuse a lot of things for the first few years after my girls were born, but the problem is, the excuse is wearing thin. They're not babies anymore, but I don't think my brain has ever fully regained its sharpness.

For instance, that incident with the cell phone didn't occur the month after they were born. It just happened last week. In a fun USA Today article, a researcher says part of the reason for the mental fuzziness is that it takes so much brain power to keep your eyes on your kids, it hurts performance in other areas, like memory.

What’s really in a Chicken Nugget? A lot of things that aren’t technically edible, as pointed out by Al Nye on his
interesting blog, www.alnyethelawyerguy.com. According to a McDonald’s own Web site, Chicken McNuggets contain a dash of dimethylpolysiloxane, an “antifoaming agent’’ that is flammable, and
TBHQ, a form of butane. Go to the link.

In a show of Mom power, Momsrising.org is crashing the Presidential candidate debates in California this week to spread the message that millions of U.S. kids have no health insurance. Momsrising members plan to hold up baby onesies embellished with slogans like: “I ♥ Healthcare’’ and “I’m Worth the Effort’’ as candidates file into Hollywood’s Kodak Theater tomorrow afternoon. For more info, see http://www.momsrising.org.

My friend H. is a single working mother who has a daughter with a serious medical condition. The only way she can handle her child’s lengthy doctor visits is to use her federally-mandated 12 weeks of unpaid leave in spurts, instead of in a single stretch. But she's worried because her employer isn't thrilled with the arrangement. She says they'd rather have her schedule a leave in one solid block planned well in advance. As we all know, however, that's not how it goes when you've got an ill child or parent to take care of. What parents need from the Family & Medical Leave Act is flexibility, which is one thiing most companies hate.

Right after H. told me about her situation, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (soon to be free online) about the tug of war being played out between HR departments and working parents all over the country. According to the article, the Labor Department asked for comments on the FMLA last year and was flooded with responses and is considering defining the law more specifically.

In the meantime, some companies are goiing to extreme lengths to check up on employees claiming the leave. One firm, Matrix, even advertises spying services on its Web site to catch workers using family medical leave fraudulently.

For more information and eligibility requirements for FMLA, see the Labor Department site.

You would think that motherhood would be a piece of cake compared to working as a spy for the CIA. But, as outed operative Valerie Plame reveals in her new book, giving birth to twins was what brought on the real panic attacks.

Plame was a covert CIA operative until her identity was revealed in a Washington Post op-ed in 2003 and became the Plame Affair . She had boy-girl twins in 2000. She talks about her experience with post-partum depression in Fair Game; My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House in a blog she wrote for The Huffington Post during a five-day book tour last month.

In one entry, Plame addresses questions she says nobody asked about the book. Her favorite seems to be the chapter on her depression. "With the birth of my twins in 2000, I experienced serious postpartum depression and initially had absolutely no idea what was happening. I think it's fair to say that up to that point in my life, I had demonstrated a high degree of coping abilities under significant stress and had always come through just fine,'' she writes.

I just loved reading this, because that is exactly how I felt. I have moved to foreign countries without speaking a word of the language and walked dark alleys in scary places to cover stories. But I never had the feeling that I was truly in over my head -- until my twins were born.

As one Mom commenting on her own bout with PPD writes: "Before I had kids, I thought childbirth and nursing could be compared to basic training — you know, like ‘war lite’. After I went through childbirth and the first three months, I came to the conclusion that child birth *is* the female equivalent of real war.''

Not that you needed another reason to get the kids to bed early, but here you go: a new study from the University of Michigan finds that every additional hour per night a third-grader spends sleeping reduces the child's chances of being obese in sixth grade by 40 percent. Wow. 40's a big number.(see story)

The less sleep they got, the more likely the children were to be obese in sixth grade, no matter what the child's weight was in third grade, said lead researcher Dr. Julie Lumeng. The research was published in the November issue of Pediatrics.

Among children who slept 10 to 12 hours a day, about 12 percent were obese by sixth grade. Of those who slept less than nine hours a day, 22 percent were obese by sixth grade!