Category: Pediatric

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Pediatric

Get the White Out of Baby’s First Foods

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Almost every childcare book offers the same advice about a baby’s first solid meal — start them first on rice cereal mixed with breast milk or formula. This has been received wisdom for 60 years.

But this is because in the 1950’s, baby food companies launched an advertising blitz trumpeting the benefits of white rice cereal.

But there is no scientific basis for this recommendation. None at all. And now, concerned about increasing childhood obesity, some pediatricians want to change how babies eat.

If babies are getting used to the taste of highly processed white rice and flour, it could set them up for a lifetime of bad habits.

USA Today reports:

“White rice — after processing strips away fiber, vitamins and other nutrients — is a ‘nutritional disaster’ … White rice and flour turn to sugar in the body ‘almost instantly,’ … raising blood sugar and insulin levels.”

Every mother need to know:
According to nutrition experts, white rice is the wonder bread of grains, stripped off of most of its nutritional value, including fiber, vitamins and minerals. White rice and white flour turn to sugar almost instantly in our bodies, spiking blood sugar levels.

Brown rice should be chosen by parents, and by building a preference for it from day one, toddlers growing into childhood will come to enjoy brown whole rice in its normal form for many years to come.

Aside from rice, it’s good to get your child used to as many types of veggies and fruit as possible early on, adding a new one to the plate every few days. Good entry points are:

* bananas – choose a ripe, just-about-to-brown banana and mash it well with the back end of a fork til smooth.
* carrot, zucchini, squash – peel, boil in water until soft, the mush with the back end of a fork until smooth.
Click to see : Baby’s first foods till one year old

Resources:
USA Today December 1, 2010

What should be  Baby’s First Solid Food

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Pediatric

Breast Milk Storing

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As a general rule milk can be stored at room temperature for 4-6 hours, in a refrigerator for up to 8 days, in a refrigerator freezer for up to 3 months and in a deep chest freezer for up to 6 mon or  12 months in a deep freezer. If you are using breast milk storage bags, be sure to get all the air out of the bag before sealing it to prevent freezer burn. Thawed breast milk must be used within 24 hours and must be refrigerated until use. Never refreeze breast milk.
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It’s very important to remember to chill your breastmilk before freezing it. Do NOT stick it directly into the freezer before it’s spent a few hours in the refrigerator.

The kind of storage you use for your milk comes down to how you plan to use it. If it’s stored for occasional use, meaning your baby is almost always getting nourishment straight from the breast, then using the plastic storage bags designed for breastmilk storage is fine. If your baby is generally being nursed from a bottle of expressed milk, as in a daycare situation, you may want to use glass bottles, as the live antibodies in breastmilk tend to stick less to the sides of glass then they do to plastic.

If you pump more in a single day you can add to your supply. If you already have milk from the same day in the freezer you can chill freshly expressed milk and add it directly to the bag that you’ve already frozen – this can only be done for same day expressions.

When warming frozen milk there is one major rule – NEVER put in on the stove or in the microwave! Microwaving destroys the antibodies in human milk and that’s one of the major reasons for breastfeeding in the first place. First thing is to remember to defrost the oldest milk first. Milk in glass bottles is best thawed in a bottle warmer. For milk stored in storage bags take it out of the second storage bag with the written information on it and either run it under warm tap water or place it in a bottle warmer.

Once your milk is warmed to the proper temperature you can pour it into the feeding bottle. Human milk is not homogenized so the fat does separate. NEVER shake human milk – always gently swirl it to mix it.

Milk thawed from the freezer can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours but remember to NEVER reuse milk that has already been in a bottle your baby has sipped off of. If you thaw 6 ounces of milk and pour 4 ounces into a bottle for baby, you can save the other 2 ounces in the refrigerator. But once the bottle has touched your baby’s lips you can only keep that milk for about an hour, due to the bacteria.

Freezing breastmilk kills some of the beneficial antibodies but is still better then formula feeding. Fresh breastmilk, either milk directly from the breast, freshly expressed or refrigerated is best, but frozen breastmmilk is still a safe and better choice for baby.


Resources:
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5188825_long-breast-milk-stored-fridge_.html
http://www.helium.com/items/620559-how-long-breastmilk-can-last-in-the-freezer

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Featured Pediatric

Controversial New Breakthrough Can Boost Your Child’s Health

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There were once doubts that strength training held any benefits for children.  But a new research review confirms that children and teenagers can increase their muscle strength with regular workouts.
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The findings support recent recommendations from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) that kids strength-train two to three times a week under professional supervision.

Studies have shown that children’ICK & SEEs risk of injury from strength training is no greater than that from other types of exercise or sports, and the potential benefits of such training, such as increased bone density and decreased body fat, generally outweigh any risks.

Reuters reports:
“Overall … the training was effective at boosting kids’ strength, with gains being greater among older kids versus prepubertal children (typically about age 10 or younger) … The average strength gain varied widely among the studies, but in the majority the kids improved their strength by 20 percent to 40 percent of their starting levels.”

Resources :
Reuters October 28, 2010
Pediatrics November 2010; 126(5):e1199-210

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Nighttime Sleep Boosts Infant Skills

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At ages 1 and 1-1/2, children who get most of their sleep at night (as opposed to during the day) do better in a variety of skill areas than children who don’t sleep as much at night.

That’s the finding of a new longitudinal study conducted by researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Minnesota. The research appears in the November/December 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study, of 60 Canadian children at ages 1, 1-1/2, and 2, looked at the effects of infants‘ sleep on executive functioning. Among children, executive functioning includes the ability to control impulses, remember things, and show mental flexibility. Executive functioning develops rapidly between ages 1 and 6, but little is known about why certain children are better than others at acquiring these skills.

“We found that infants’ sleep is associated with cognitive functions that depend on brain structures that develop rapidly in the first two years of life,” explains Annie Bernier, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, who led the study. “This may imply that good nighttime sleep in infancy sets in motion a cascade of neural effects that has implications for later executive skills.”

When the infants were 1 year old and 1-1/2 years old, their mothers filled out three-day sleep diaries that included hour-by-hour patterns, daytime naps, and nighttime wakings. When the children were 1-1/2 and 2, the researchers measured how the children did on the skills involved with executive functioning.

Children who got most of their sleep during the night did better on the tasks, especially those involving impulse control. The link between sleep and the skills remained, even after the researchers took into consideration such factors as parents’ education and income and the children’s general cognitive skills. The number of times infants woke at night and the total time spent sleeping were not found to relate to the infants’ executive functioning skills.

“These findings add to previous research with school-age children, which has shown that sleep plays a role in the development of higher-order cognitive functions that involve the brain’s prefrontal cortex,” according to Bernier.

Source : Elements4Health

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One of the Worst Parenting Mistakes

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No matter how physically active a child is, time spent in front of the computer or television screen is associated with psychological problems.
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In other words, children can’t make up for TV time by spending extra hours exercising.

The findings also suggest that the way children spend their sedentary time, in addition to how much time they spend being sedentary in the first place, matters for their mental health.

According to Live Science:
“… [R]esearchers asked 1,013 British 10- and 11-year-olds how much time each day they spent in front of a computer or TV. The children also wore accelerometers around their waists for a week to track their physical activity and sedentary time …

The study found that … more than two hours a day in front of a TV or computer was associated with more emotional and behavioral difficulties.”
Sources:
Live Science October 11, 2010

Pediatrics October 11, 2010 [Epub ahead of print]

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