Your World and You: Tips to Improve Your Family’s Health – Issue 54 (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.
Articles in this issue
- Prescription drug improves some symptoms of autism
- See a comparison of 8 options for eggless baking
- Who killed Tony the Tiger in Chili?
- Best types of material for homemade masks
- Cooling the brain helps recovery from concussions
- Don’t see improvement from the Feingold Diet? Here are some possible reasons
- Treating diabetes can stall dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
- Center for Science in the Public Interest outlines foods to avoid
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Prescription drug improves some symptoms of autism
Bumetanide, a prescription drug for edema (the build-up of fluid in the body), improves some of the symptoms in young children with autism spectrum disorders and has no significant side effects, according to a new study from researchers in China and the UK.
The study demonstrates for the first time that the drug improves the symptoms by decreasing the ratio of the GABA to glutamate in the brain.
“The mother of a four year old boy living in a rural area outside Shanghai who received the treatment told me that he was now better at making eye contact with family members and relatives and was able to participate more in activities. In future, we hope to be able to ensure all families, regardless of where they are living, can receive treatment for their child.”
GABA and glutamate are both neurotransmitters – chemical messengers that help nerve cells in the brain communicate.
The study implies that intervening at an early age may help reduce some of the symptoms that can make life challenging for people with ASD
See a comparison of eight options for eggless baking
Eggs are often an integral part of baking recipes. You may want to bake without them for a vegan product, to avoid egg sensitivity, or you simply ran out of eggs. In any event this offers a review of replacements for a muffing recipe. Tofu, a common substitute, was not included in the review, nor the commercial product Ener-g Egg Replacer.
Egg substitutes used in baking muffins are reviewed in this article. See basic muffin recipe used.
The author’s favorite was quick, easy and surprising!
Different substitutions may work better at different times. It is worth experimenting for the many people who need to avoid eggs, which are often used to help with binding ingredients or rising .
Who killed Tony the Tiger in Chili?
I was recently introduced to a wonderful website: reasonstobecheerful.world It carries empowering articles and stories that you might enjoy and learn from.
I found one on how the food culture has changed in Chili to be inspiring. The attitude toward food has been changing for the better. The secret weapon is that warning labels are added to foods high in sugar, saturated fat, salt and calories . This has had a huge effect in Chili.
From the article:
“Chile has had a sugar tax like Mexico’s for a few years — they actually raised it in 2014. But the effect of the tax was nothing compared to what they tried next. In 2015, black warning signs began to appear on the front of packages containing unhealthy food and drinks. But that wasn’t all — Chile coupled the warnings with other restrictions. Packaging that targets kids was forbidden (goodbye Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch and that leprechaun), as were ads for high-sugar foods in movie theaters and on TV between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Unhealthy foods and drinks were banned from schools altogether.
Chile has had a sugar tax like Mexico’s for a few years — they actually raised it in 2014. But the effect of the tax was nothing compared to what they tried next. In 2015, black warning signs began to appear on the front of packages containing unhealthy food and drinks. But that wasn’t all — Chile coupled the warnings with other restrictions. Packaging that targets kids was forbidden (goodbye Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch and that leprechaun), as were ads for high-sugar foods in movie theaters and on TV between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Unhealthy foods and drinks were banned from schools altogether.
Best types of material for homemade masks
Lack of definitive direction on homemade masks adds to the frustration many in the public feel during the current viral pandemic. Here are three sources for you to consider.
Editor: CDC site recommends cotton material, t-shirts, bandanas and reinforcing with coffee filters.Loose cotton weave is not a good idea. See site for directions on making the masks. “Cloth face coverings should not be placed on young children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance.”
“What the test team found was that the masks’ effectiveness varied widely. The best homemade masks achieved 79% filtration as compared to surgical masks (62% to 65%) and N95 masks (97%). But other homemade masks tested performed significantly worse, sometimes demonstrating as little as 1% filtration, Segal said.
The best-performing design was constructed of two layers of high-quality, heavyweight “quilter’s cotton” with a thread count of 180 or more, and those with especially tight weave and thicker thread such as batiks. A double-layer mask with a simple cotton outer layer and an inner layer of flannel also performed well, he said.
The inferior performers consisted of single-layer masks or double-layer designs of lower quality, lightweight cotton.”
See the link above for a full report. These are their testing results:
“Regular surgical masks filtered out 62 percent to 65 percent of particles. For comparison, N95 masks filter 95 percent of those particles.
But the fabrics led to a variety of results. One piece of cloth filtered just 1 percent of particles, rendering it virtually useless, while others were found to perform even better than the surgical masks.
“We had some that performed at 79 percent,” Segal told NBC News.
The best masks were constructed of two layers of heavyweight “quilters cotton” with a thread count of at least 180, and had thicker and tighter weave.
“You do want to use a woven fabric, like batik,” Segal said, “but you don’t want to use a knit fabric, because the holes between the knit stitches are bigger.”
In other words, if the fabric allows for a substantial amount of light to shine through, it’s probably going to allow tiny viral particles through, as well.
Other hospitals, such as Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, have also suggested using tightly woven fabrics for do-it-yourself facial coverings. Kaiser Permanente has also published instructions on DIY masks, also calling for two layers of cotton fabrics.
Cotton T-shirts, however, may not be as useful. A 2013 study published in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness compared medical grade surgical masks with homemade facial coverings using plain cotton T-shirts. The surgical masks were found to be three times more effective in blocking small particles than the T-shirts.
Cooling the brain helps recovery from concussions
In the future, treating a concussion could be as simple as cooling the brain. New findings support the treatment approach at the cellular level. That’s according to research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers.
“There are currently no effective medical treatments for concussions and other types of traumatic brain injuries,” says Christian Franck, the UW-Madison associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the study. “We’re very excited about our findings because they could potentially pave the way for treatments we can offer patients.”
The process is a bit more complicated than just applying an ice pack to the head. Conducting experiments on brain cells in a dish, Franck and his team discovered several key parameters that determined the effectiveness of therapeutic cooling for mitigating damage to the injured cells.
“We found that, for this treatment to be successful, there’s a sweet spot,” he says. “You can’t cool too little; you can’t cool too much; and you can’t wait too long following an injury to start treatment.”
And when the researchers identified that sweet spot, the results were striking.
Don’t see improvement from the Feingold Diet? Here are some possible reasons
These recommendations were shared by the Feingold organization.
If you follow the Feingold Program for a number of weeks and do not see a significant improvement, DON’T GIVE UP. You may have overlooked something when you first started the Program.
Re-read your Feingold materials and review your diet diary and double-check your pantry shelves for unacceptable items.
Be patient. Some children go through four to six weeks of withdrawal with worsening symptoms before improving.
In a minority of cases the diet alone is not enough, but when other treatments are added, the change can be dramatic. In autism, for example, the diet is seldom a “cure,” but parents report that other interventions work better once the child is also on the Feingold Diet.
Common reasons for lack of success are:
- Using products similar to, but not actually those in the Foodlist
- Using an unacceptable brand of toothpaste, shampoo, soap, vitamins, medication, etc.
- Not eliminating all salicylates
- Infractions (eating foods that are not accepted)
- Adding back salicylates too quickly
- Testing out restaurant food too soon
- Excessive sugar
Treating diabetes can to stall dementia and Alzheimer’s
Progression of dementia and Alzheimer’s signature appears develop much faster in people with untreated diabetes. A study comparing people with diabetes, prediabetes and normal blood sugar finds that diabetes, left untreated, could mean a higher likelihood of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Patients on medication for type 2 diabetes may be keeping Alzheimer’s disease away. Psychologists have found that those patients with untreated diabetes developed signs of Alzheimer’s disease 1.6 times faster than people who did not have diabetes.
“Our findings emphasize the importance of catching diabetes or other metabolic diseases in adults as early as you can,” says Daniel A. Nation, a psychologist at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “Among people with diabetes, the difference in their rate of developing the signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s is clearly tied somehow to whether or not they are on medication for it.”
Increasingly, scientists regard Alzheimer’s disease as the result of a cascade of multiple problems, instead of triggered by one or two. The compounding factors range from pollution exposure and genetics (the ApoE4 gene, for instance) to heart disease and metabolic disease.
Center for Science in the Public Interest outlines foods to avoid
A little bit of salt or sugar is safe, but not at the amounts most people currently consume. The cancer risks posed by artificial sweeteners are small, but concerning enough that CSPI urges consumers to avoid them (and urges the FDA to ban several of them.)
And because of the impact artificial food dyes have on children’s behavior, CSPI urges parents to avoid dyed foods. CSPI has useful resources for consumers on all of these topics, and more. This web page is ideal for sharing with relatives or teachers to help inform them on the importance of dietary .
Read details on the highlighted items
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