Is there a downside to breastfeeding? A new report from the New York Times might have you thinking so. In a recent article, several studies monitoring a lack of vitamin D in infants might support that breastmilk is not enough to prevent things like rickets in children. The biggest fear is that the deficiency is more common than previously thought and is going undetected. Breastmilk apparently does not necessarily provide enough of the vitamin to children.

Doctors, of course, are rare to say anything at all negative about breastfeeding. Unlike perhaps even fifty years ago, women are being told that they simply must breastfeed, that they are wrong for not doing so, and that breastmilk is the ultimate wonder food for their infants. This may well be true, but the medical profession that's been pushing breastfeeding down our throats has also admitted to knowing there is a probable link between vitamin D deficiency and diseases like diabetes and cancer.

The answer, of course, is not to stop breastfeeding, but rather to augment a child's nutrition by adding vitamin drops, or, my favorite, cod liver oil (yummy!). The other pretty obvious answer is that if a woman is deficient in something, so, too, will be her breastmilk. Mothers should be getting plenty of vitamin D themselves in order to pass on the right amount to their infants. That should be good news to those of us who are committed to breastfeeding exclusively for as long as possible. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and my own pediatrician recommend supplementing with the vitamin D drops.

Thoughts? I for one drink enough milk while pregnant and nursing to keep a small dairy in business. Is it enough? Who knows. Did you supplement breastfeeding with vitamins for your infants or enjoy a little cod liver oil?

Pic by timtom.ch [surfin' USA].

So this is a weird one. When we travel we always bring along Parmalat for our toddler. It's much easier, obviously to transport and deal with on the road as it's vacuum-sealed and doesn't need to be refrigerated (until it's opened of course). Upon a recent trip to Central Park Zoo, a friend said someone had once told her that Parmalat isn't really milk.

The friend's acquaintance who made this claim was vegetarian (as is our family) and my friend was actually commenting on how people make such strange distinctions. The acquaintance refused to drink Parmalat because it wasn't "real milk." My understanding is that Parmalat is, indeed, real milk, it's just packaged differently, and perhaps treated a little differently to ensure it's safe to be packaged in a way that allows it to not need to be refrigerated (until opened).

So what is the deal? A recent trip to the Parmalat website upped my curiosity factor. They refer to the milk they distribute as "milk products." They also call it "ESL milk" which means Extended Shelf Life--not English as a Second Language. With regard to the whole vegetarian thing, while we don't necessarily eat meat, a good deal of us do drink milk--Parmalat included. Vegans don't do any animal products whatsoever, but quite a few vegetarians do.

So what's the deal? Is Parmalat really milk, or not? To me, if it looks like milk, smells like milk, and tastes like milk, and they call it milk, it's probably milk.

Pic by allanpatrick.

Many of today's parents grew up with the daily query, "Did you remember to take your vitamin?" and would dutifully trudge back to the kitchen and pop that Flintstone chewable.

Today there is a vast ocean of choice when it comes to children's vitamins. You can choose between omega3, immunity support, zinc & echinachea, extra iron, or extra C in liquid, swallow-able, or chewable in the traditional chalky version, gummy-bear, or bubblegum variety forms.

But are vitamins still an necessary part of a children's daily diet? A British website did a study on children's multivitamins and found only five out of 14 brands of supplements contained all 12 essential vitamins and stated that some have little more nutritional value than candy.

Even experts seem to disagree whether multivitamins are necessary for all children. The American Academy of Pediatrics only giving supplements if your pediatrician advises you to, but the same organization also says a daily vitamin isn't likely do any harm, unless it exceeds the recommended daily allowance amounts of a vitamin or mineral.

With so many of today's common food and beverages being fortified (Who could have imagined that calcium could be added to orange juice?!) even finicky children are probably getting a lot more vitamins and minerals than parents realize. We're pretty lackadaisical on the multivitamin front in our house. What about you?

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Suri Cruise is nearly two and a half years old. Heaven knows you couldn't forget that if you tried. And while she has more fashion sense than pretty much any other tot on the planet, there is one thing that seems to still give us all pause. No, it's not how her celebrity parents could have actually spawned her, nor is it how much is spent keeping her best-dressed and -tressed. Nah--it's that thing where she's still carrying around a baby bottle.

Yes, still. It seems like this first made the news when Suri was more than a year old and still using a bottle. Like sippy cups are so great. Now she's making headlines again for still sporting the baby bottle--when she's not even really a baby. My question is this: what is the big deal? My kid is nearly seventeen months old and he still occasionally uses a bottle. We've tried really hard to break him of the habit, but, for a while, he simply eschewed the sippy cup. He could use one, sure, but he couldn't get the same amount of milk from the sippy as from the bottle. So, we let him roll with it. Eventually, he switched over to predominantly using the sippy.

I know there are standards and practices for how we're supposed to raise our children. I know that guidelines have been set to help us make our way through this crazy maze called parenthood. But with issues as large as world hunger, violence, abuse and immunizations out there for us to tackle, why does anyone give a rat's butt about whether or not Suri Cruise still uses her baby bottle? I feel sorry for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes--they're busy people who are trying to raise a kid and have full-time jobs too. it ain't easy. And not every kid fits the model she's supposed to. Is it really the end of the world if Suri still uses a bottle?

Being overweight is tough for a kid. There are many options toward weight loss, but some are more (or less) appealing than others. For many, over the years, the weight-loss camp has been a dream. But, while "fat camp" is almost as American as apple pie, it's now going the way of many other American dreams--it's too darned expensive to attend. Like any other camp, weight-loss camp costs money to run and maintain. With more than nine million children who are considered obese in this country, such camp can seem like a knight in shining armor for families struggling to get their kids' weight under control. The weight-loss camps, while they can be affective, are far from free. Few to none accept insurance.

The government generally offers no more assistance than insurance companies. Instead the children rely on their essay writing skills and other means to win scholarships to attend. Yes, even weight loss camp is something only possible for the rich. Corporate sponsorship is one way to help get kids who can't afford the often more than $1,000-a-week pricetag what they need. Advocacy groups are being formed, such as the Childhood Obesity Treatment in Action. Some tax deductions are coming into play, and some insurance is starting to cover a portion of the cost--mostly in the cognitive behavior area.

But is it enough? Rarely. And financial cost is to say nothing of the emotional cost to the children, who are often left with either feeling exploited by their situation--their essays and their experiences become the property of the camp, who share that information freely with the media in hopes of growing the industry--and/or have to deal with life after camp, which can be even harder than before they found their salvation. While most children lose some portion of their body weight at the camps, few manage to keep it off after returning to the real world.

Pic by skampy.

In a draft report recently issued, the Federal Drug Administration has concluded that Bisphenol A is safe --at least when used in food containers. Commonly known as BPA to consumers, the chemical can be found in all sorts of children's products as well as cars, plastic food containers and lining aluminum cans.

This most recent study was one of two funded by the industry itself. Gee, of course any study funded by the industry that stands to make money off it is going to come out with data supporting a chemical's safety. There rationale is that people are exposed to so little of it that it won't do them harm. In other studies BPA has been found in 93% of testees' urine and has been known to cause cancer and behavioral disorders in lab animals. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) supports the findings as well.

Opponents of the decision say the study agencies don't have enough data to support their findings that BPA is safe. The country of Canada has banned the use of BPA and products containing the chemical, and national retail chain giants Wal-Mart and Toys R Us are set to remove all children's merchandise containing the chemical from their shelves as of January 2009.

I was pretty much a klutz growing up. In fact, I still am. But I'm not obese (although in the last two months of my pregnancy I do feel rather large!). Is there any real connection between the two? Perhaps so, if we're to believe the findings of another recent study.

According to a new report on Reuters, there is a growing pool of evidence suggesting such a link between children with poor cognitive function and adults with type 2 diabetes or who are obese. A study of British children between the ages of seven and eleven (that started in 1958) yielded the results: those with the worst congitive skills were also the most likely to be obese later in life. Researchers were quick to point out these children were no larger than the rest of the kids at the time, meaning weight was not to blame for their being clumsy.

In fact, factors such as body mass at childhood and social class were both taken into account and adjusted. The findings were still solid. So what causes the link (if indeed there realy is one)? Well, that is the question, isn;t it? Researchers considered smoking during pregnancy a possibility as well as children not getting enough exercise during childhood--which is critical to developing fine motor skills.

pic by vlauria.

Several studies in a recent New York Times article entitled "Honey, I Plumped the Kids" seem to be pointing in that direction. As we all know by now, human beings are getting bigger--and by bigger, I really mean fatter. In 2005 it was estimated there were 400 million obese people on the planet. Yes, 400 MILLION. And, in what is a recent phenomenon, some of those obese people happened to be women who then became pregnant and gave birth. The result? Well, if the studies are to be believed, a pregnancy for an obese woman can lead to her children being obese as well.

Similar news to this has been circulating for some time now. It's also no news that being obese, whether or not you're pregnant, can have dramatically harmful results. Cancer, diabetes and heart disease are just a few of the pleasantries headed your way if you happen to be obese. But, what does being obese mean for your unborn child? In one of the studies cited in the Times article, women who gave birth to children before they had surgery to correct their obesity were more likely have an obese child; once the women had the surgery, the children they later bore tended to not be obese. Hence, the obesity doesn't on the surface seem to be due to genetic predisposition, but rather to the mother being , well, fat.

One theory as to why this is concerns the fact that people have access to an overabundance of sugar and fat. As a direct result, so do their fetuses. In another study pregnant female rats were allowed to have as much as they wanted of either human junk food or regular old rat food. Those who had access to the junk food ate 40% more food than their rat-chow eating buddies. The baby rats born to the junk food rats were more inclined to eat such food and were more likely to be overweight as a result of consuming too many calories.

So what does this mean for all us preggies out there? Perhaps that we should listen to our doctors and cut back on the sugar and fats. Pregnancy cravings aside, the article and the studies make a good case for being even more healthy when you're pregnant--for you and your baby.

Pic by armchairgeek.

(Click the photo to see which celebs might be "pregorexic")

It seems like it should be common sense. Don't diet while pregnant. Yet for many moms these days that seems to be the trend. Many of them are successful at it--but at what cost to their unborn children? In the United States as well as in the UK, pregnant women are succumbing to what is being termed "pregorexia," wherein the consume as little as possible during pregnancy to avoid weight gain. Experts agree this is harmful to both mother and unborn child. Fetuses get their nutrients straight from mommy; when she doesn't supply enough, like with calcium, they get it from her bones. If they can't get the nutrient from the mother, they suffer--kids are born prematurely, with a low birth weight and an increased risk of spina bifida all from mothers being underweight during pregnancy.

In Hollywood, the recent barrage of women giving birth would have have us think they were barely pregnant at all. Most of them gain hardly and weight and sport only the tell-tale bump. Almost as soon as they've given birth, they return to their pre-pregnancy weight, which was scandalously low in the first place. Some, like Nicole Kidman, have even drawn harsh rumors that she was never even pregnant at all--after seeing her less than a month post-baby her body was scarily small, prompting the media to generate the notion that her sister, who'd basically remained under cover during the pregnancy, was the one actually carrying the baby.

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With all these Hollywood celebrities maintaining tiny frames while they attempt to bring another human being into the world, it's hard to not feel the pressure to be thin in our own lives. Forget the fact that it's pure misogyny at work, isn't it also the worst thing in the world to deprive not only yourself but your unborn child of vital nutrients and sustenance? Experts suggest that women of normal weight (meaning not underweight nor overweight) gain between 20-25 pounds during a pregnancy. That number was recently lowered from the old notion of anywhere from 25-35 pounds (and in some cases 40). instead of worrying about gaining too much weight, shouldn't we be more focused on getting our children--and ourselves--the nutrition needed to be happy and healthy?

Budget tightening has forced many sleep-deprived parents to forgo that delicious morning Starbucks and brew their own non-frothed coffee at home. But good news for sleep-deprived parents: the Seattle-based company has just unveiled a nationwide promotion to help get coffee back into the weary hands of the people help and boost their own sales at the same time!

Any morning Starbucks purchase allows customers who return that afternoon bearing the earlier receipt, to purchase a grande-sized iced drink for the discounted price of $2. The promotion was offered earlier in Seattle, Chicago, and Miami with great success.

As with all good things, this will come to an end September 2nd, which is just enough time to get you good and addicted to that afternoon hit of caffeine.

I'm willing to take that risk, though. Ice vanilla lattes, yum!

Is hiding vegetables in your kids' food wrong? What if that's the only way to get your child to eat something green (that isn't a booger)? One cookbook author strongly disagrees with the notion that it's ok to sneak healthy foods into unhealthy ones, and she's aiming to do something about it. On her blog and in her new cookbook, anyway. Tanya Steel is the author of the newly published "real food for healthy kids." She's also a "food professional." She and co-author Tracey Seaman instead focus on glorifying vegetables and trying to make them more appealing rather than sticking them in a brownie. According to Steel, who has a good point, why would we want to send the message to our children that brownies are GOOD for you, when in fact we have an obesity crisis on our hands in the United States?

Steel acknowledges that not all children are that easy to coax into eating anything green. She also demures that it can be difficult to work your way back up the beaten path of feeding your kids things that aren't as healthy because you've run out of options of what they'll actually eat. I can empathize with this problem. We recently ended a bout of our son refusing to eat ANYTHING other than Cheerios. Sure, they're healthier than pork rinds, but I didn't spend my entire pregnancy eating broccoli only to have my kid refuse to even look at a vegetable.

Steel offers suggestions to help steer kids in the right direction. She suggests offering kids "no thank you bites" to get them used to a new food and making sure to set a good example by eating healthy foods yourself. She also, of course, promotes her healthy eating cookbook. "real food for healthy kids" may not be The Joy of Cooking that Steel claims (whimsically) it is, but I'm sure there's something in that cookbook, as with any book designed with kids in mind, to offer nutritious alternatives for our children.

What do you think? Is deception the only way to get a vegetable-refuser to consume some legumes? Or is it best to just keep trying to offer different kinds of vegetables in the hopes that eventually you'll see change?

Pic by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.