The Canadian Parvasi - Issue 28

The International News Weekly OFF-BEAT
January 12, 2018 | Toronto 16
Egg yolks, nuts during
pregnancy lead to smart babies
Agencies
NEW YORK: Want to
have smarter kids? Eating
foods such as egg
yolks, nuts and cruciferous
vegetables -- that are
rich in nutrient choline
-- during pregnancy can
boost your kids' memory
and brain skills, a study
has found.
The study suggested
that maternal consumption
of choline rich foods
like lean red meat, fish,
poultry and legumes daily
during the last trimester
of pregnancy improved
the kids' processing speed
and visuospatial memory
at the age of four, seven,
10 and 13 months.
"In animal models using
rodents, there's widespread
agreement that
supplementing the maternal
diet with additional
amounts of this single nutrient
has lifelong benefits
on offspring
cognitive function.
Our study
provides
some evidence
that a
similar result
is found
in humans,"
said Marie
Caudill, Professor
at the Cornell
University in New
Beware, smoking
habit starts with just
one cigarette!
Agencies
LONDON: Smoking just one cigarette for the first time
in life can make more than two-thirds of people addicts,
a survey involving over 215,000 people has revealed.
In the study, over 60 per cent of adults said they had
tried a cigarette once in their lifetime, with nearly 69
per cent admitting to having progressed to becoming
daily smokers.
"We've found that the conversion rate from 'first
time smoker' to 'daily smoker' is surprisingly high,
which helps confirm the importance of preventing
cigarette experimentation in the first place," said Peter
Hajek, Professor at the Queen Mary University in
London.
The findings, published in the journal Nicotine &
Tobacco Research, provides strong support for prioritising
efforts to reduce cigarette experimentation
among adolescents.
Given the high conversion rate found in surveys,
the researchers suggest that at least some of the reduction
in smoking prevalence observed over the past 20
years is likely due to reduced experimentation with
cigarettes among adolescents.
While, concerns were expressed that e-cigarettes
could be as addictive as conventional cigarettes, but
this has not been the case, the study stated.
"It is striking that very few non-smokers who try
e-cigarettes become daily vapers, while such a large
proportion on non-smokers who try conventional cigarettes
become daily smokers. The presence of nicotine
is clearly not the whole story," Hajek said.
Agencies
NEW YORK: Women
who consume acetaminophen
-- also known as
paracetamol and widely
used to reduce a high fever
or relieve pain -- during
early pregnancy are six
times more likely to see
delay in their daughters'
language skills, warns a
new study.
Acetaminophen is the
active ingredient in Tylenol
and hundreds of overthe-counter
and prescription
medicines.
The maternal intake
of acetaminophen saw a
reduction in the intelligence
quotient level along
with increasing language
delay, defined as the use
Agencies
NEW YORK: Women are biologically
more stronger than men and
hence tend to outlive their male
counterparts, finds a study challenging
the per-conceived notion that the
female sex is weaker.
The findings showed that women
do not just outlive men in normal
times, but they are also more likely
to survive even in the worst of circumstances
such as famines and epidemics.
Women's increased life expectancy
is because they tend to have a
survival advantage in infancy rather
than adulthood. In times of adversity,
newborn girls are more likely to
survive than newborn boys.
of lesser than 50 words, by
the kids.
The communication
delay affected boys at the
same time, but was more
prevelant among the girls,
the study showed.
"Given the prevalence
of prenatal acetaminophen
use and the importance
of language development,
our findings, if
replicated, suggest that
pregnant women should
limit their use of this analgesic
during pregnancy,"
said Shanna Swan, Professor
at the Icahn School of
However, even when mortality
was very high for both sexes, women
still lived longer than men by six
months to almost four years on average,
This advantage in women may
be largely due to biological factors
such as genetics or hormones, especially
estrogens, which enhances
the body's immune defenses against
infectious disease, the researchers
York, US.
The finding, published
in The FASEB Journal, is
important because choline
is in high demand
during pregnancy yet
most women consume
less than the recommended
450 milligrams per day.
But, eating choline
rich foods close to twice
than the recommended
amount daily during the
last trimester of pregnancy
helps in producing optimal
cognitive abilities,
the researchers said.
For the study, the
team divided pregnant
women in two groups.
While the first group consumed
930 mg per day, the
second group consumed
480 mg per day.
While children in both
groups showed cognitive
benefits, higher brain
development was significantly
faster for the first
group, the results showed.
Paracetamol in pregnancy may harm your baby
Medicine at Mount Sinai
in New York, US.
"It's important for us
to look at language development
because it has
shown to be predictive of
other neurodevelopmental
problems in children,"
Swan added.
The study, published
in the journal European
Psychiatry, examined
754 women, who were in
eight-13 weeks of pregnancy.
Researchers asked
participants to report the
number of acetaminophen
tablets they had taken between
conception and enrollment,
and tested the
acetaminophen concentration
in their urine at
enrollment.
Why women live longer than men
explained.
"Our results add another piece
to the puzzle of gender differences
in survival," said researchers led by
Virginia Zarulli, Assistant Professor
at the Duke University in Durham,
US.
In the study, published in the
journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, the team
analysed mortality data going back
roughly 250 years for people whose
lives were cut short by famine, disease
or other misfortunes.
The data spanned seven populations
in which the life expectancy
for one or both sexes was a dismal 20
years or less and found that newborn
girls are hardier than newborn boys
due biological factors.