Your World and You: Tips to Improve Your Family’s Health – Issue 24 (Premium)
Environmental and Nutritional Tips to Improve Your Family’s Health
This feature highlights reports, studies, and feedback on efforts that can make a positive impact in our quest for health. Topics we cover in this issue are included below. We invite you to share material with us that you think would be of interest to our readers.
Topics featured in this article:
- Stimulant medication for ADHD: Is it helping or hurting?
- Do you think you suffer from chemical or electrical sensitivities? See this list of characteristics.
- Ever wonder why meat-eating causes inflammation that can lead to cancers?
- Which produce has been treated with the most “vomiting gas pesticide?”
- Sources for green cleaning products.
- Recipes: Dairy-free coconut ice milk cream; Green smoothie concoctions galore; salads, soups and much more!
Stimulant medication: Is it helping or hurting?
Since the use of drugs like Straterra and Ritalin continue to rise, it would be nice to know if they are helping kids! Researchers recently posed the question: Do stimulant medications improve educational and behavioral outcomes for children with ADHD? And beyond that, are they harmful?
The answer may surprise you.
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In an important study researchers examined the effects of a policy change in the province of Quebec, Canada which greatly expanded insurance coverage for prescription medications. They report: “We show that the change was associated with a sharp increase in the use of stimulant medications commonly prescribed for ADHD in Quebec relative to the rest of Canada. We ask whether this increase in medication use was associated with improvements in emotional functioning or academic outcomes among children with ADHD. We find little evidence of improvement in either the medium or the long run. Our results are silent on the effects on optimal use of medication for ADHD, but suggest that expanding medication in a community setting had little positive benefit and may have had harmful effects given the average way these drugs are used in the community.
Read here for more information
Do you think you suffer from chemical or electrical sensitivities?
Hypersensitivities are often complicated and frequently misunderstood. Here are 8 common characteristics of chemical or electrical sensitivities:
- Symptoms come and go depending on exposure.
- Reactions may be immediate or delayed.
- The same exposure may trigger different symptoms for different individuals.
- Predictable symptom patterns evolve over time. These patterns may vary from person to person but are generally predictable for the individual.
- The exposure-response relationship may be more difficult to tease out if the individual has multiple exposures or significant levels of exposure.
- The longer an individual stays exposed, the greater the number of symptoms an individual is likely to experience and the more disabled an individual is likely to become.
- The individual must minimize or preferably eliminate exposures to reduce the level of illness and disability.
- Removal from triggering exposures will likely ease the intensity of the illness over time, though it may not halt the progressive nature of the disability.
Source: The National Center for Environmental Health Strategies
Ever wonder why eating meat causes inflammation that can lead to cancers?
While people who eat a lot of red meat are known to be at a higher risk for certain cancers, other carnivores are not. To understand why this is, researchers investigated the role of a sugar called Neu5Gc. This sugar is in most mammals but not in humans. Not until they eat meat, that is.
Beef, pork and lamb are rich in Neu5Gc. The molecule can be distributed to tissues throughout the body through the bloodstream and absorbed in human tissues. From there, it can lead to inflammation if the body is “generating antibodies against consumed animal Neu5Gc, which is foreign to the human body. Chronic inflammation can promote the formation of tumors
See a report on this study by the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine here.
Which produce has been treated with the most “vomiting gas pesticide?”
Chloropicrin is called the “vomiting gas” and millions of pounds of it are used on California strawberry, raspberry, pepper, tomato and lettuce crops. Read an excellent article here. And remember to go organic.
Sources for green cleaning products
- Green Seal: Third-party certified green products for schools
- UL Ecologo: Third-party certified green cleaners
- New York State: Green Cleaning Program
- Responsible Purchasing Network: Resource for all things related to green purchasing
- Disinfecting & Sanitizing in Child Care Centers
- Click here to read model recommendations from San Francisco Asthma Task Force on disinfecting and sanitizing in child care centers.
- For healthy schools
Recipes
Dairy-free coconut ice milk cream;
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