In a new study, children who ate the most vegetables and fruits had significantly healthier arteries as adults than children who ate the fewest. Here are 10 tips to encourage your children to eat more vegetables and fruits.
- Make fruit and vegetable shopping fun: Visit your local green market and/or grocery store with your kids, and show them how to select ripe fruits and fresh vegetables. This is also a good opportunity to explain which fruits and vegetables are available by season and how some come from countries with different climates.
- Involve kids in meal prep: Find a healthy dish your kids enjoy and invite them to help you prepare it. Younger kids can help with measuring, crumbling, holding and handing some of the ingredients to you. Older kids can help by setting the table. Make sure you praise them for their help, so they feel proud of what they’ve done.
- Be a role model: If you’re eating a wide range of fruits and vegetables — and enjoying them — your child may want to taste. If you aren’t eating junk food or keeping it in your home, your kids won’t be eating junk food at home either.
- Create fun snacks: Schedule snack times — most kids like routines. Healthy between-meal snacks are a great opportunity to offer fruits and vegetables. Kids like to pick up foods, so give them finger foods they can handle. Cut up a fruit and arrange it on an attractive plate. Make a smoothie or freeze a smoothie in ice cube trays. Create a smiley face from cut-up vegetables and serve with a small portion of low-fat salad dressing, hummus or plain low-fat yogurt. A positive experience with food is important. Never force your child to eat something, or use food as a punishment or reward.
- Give kids choices — within limits: Too many choices can overwhelm a small child. It’s too open ended to ask, “What would you like for lunch?” It may start a mealtime meltdown. Instead, offer them limited healthy choices, such as choosing between a banana or strawberries with their cereal, or carrots or broccoli with dinner.
- Eat together as a family: If your schedules permit, family dining is a great time to help your kids develop healthy attitudes about food and the social aspects of eating with others. Make sure you are eating vegetables in front of your children. Even if they aren’t eating certain vegetables yet, they will model your behavior.
- Expect pushback: As your kids are exposed to other families’ eating habits, they may start to reject some of your healthy offerings. Without making a disparaging remark about their friends’ diet, let your children know that fruits and vegetables come first in your family.
- Grow it: Start from the ground up — create a kitchen garden with your child and let them plant tomatoes and herbs, such as basil and oregano in window boxes. If you have space for a garden, help them cultivate their own plot and choose plants that grow quickly, such as beans, cherry tomatoes, snow peas and radishes. Provide child-size gardening tools appropriate to their age.
- Covert operations: You may have tried everything in this list and more, yet your child’s lips remain zipped when offered a fruit or vegetable. Try sneaking grated or pureed carrots or zucchini into pasta or pizza sauces. Casseroles are also a good place to hide pureed vegetables. You can also add fruits and vegetables to foods they already enjoy, such as pancakes with blueberries, carrot muffins or fruit slices added to cereal. On occasions when you serve dessert, include diced fruit as an option.
- Be patient: Changes in your child’s food preferences will happen slowly. They may prefer sweet fruits, such as strawberries, apples and bananas, before they attempt vegetables. Eventually, your child may start trying the new vegetable. Many kids need to see and taste a new food a dozen times before they know whether they truly like it. Try putting a small amount of the new food — one or two broccoli florets — on their plate every day for two weeks; but don’t draw attention to it.
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Reducing radiation dose is a high priority for medical imaging manufacturers and healthcare facilities. Expanding its dedication to reducing CT radiation dose while maintaining diagnostic confidence, Toshiba America Medical Systems, Inc. is expanding its suite of low dose CT technologies.
Toshiba will showcase dose reduction technologies, such as Target CTA and Adaptive Iterative Dose Reduction (AIDR), at this year’s Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting, held in Chicago, Nov. 28 – Dec. 3, 2010 (Booth #3435, South Hall).
Target CTA is a cardiac protocol for the Aquilion® ONE that is designed for patients including pediatrics. Since the Aquilion ONE can image the entire heart in one rotation, using the Target CTA protocol allows for more accurate targeting of the heart and minimizes padding of the scan range. Target CTA can be most helpful to limit radiation dose during gated cardiac studies.
Adaptive Iterative Dose Reduction is software that iterates noise out of the image to increase image quality and lower radiation dose. The software intuitively improves the image by removing noise until the optimal image is produced. AIDR will come standard on the Aquilion Premium edition and Aquilion ONE.
“Target CTA and AIDR represent Toshiba’s continued commitment to providing patients with safer CT exams without sacrificing the diagnostic confidence physicians require,” said Joseph Cooper, director, CT Business Unit, Toshiba. “These technologies expand the full suite of dose reduction technologies as Toshiba continues to innovate new ways to provide safer CT exams to patients.” Read the rest of this entry »
Philips Ingenia provides high image quality to aid diagnostic confidence, increases clinical versatility, and improves productivity by shortening MRI exam times
At the 96th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, Royal Philips Electronics showcased Philips Ingenia, the first-ever digital broadband magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) solution. Driven by Philips’ commitment to developing innovative patient care solutions, Ingenia MR delivers exceptional image clarity, scanning efficiency and scalability. The Philips Ingenia MR system is pending U.S. FDA 510(k) and is not available for sale in the U.S.
In order to visualize detailed structures within the human body, MRI orchestrates the application of radio frequency (RF), audio frequency and static magnetic fields, the strength of which is measured in Tesla (T) units. Clinicians have long relied on MRI for its exceptional ability to differentiate various soft tissues. Until now, all MRI systems have utilized analog components for the signal acquisition and processing needed to generate patient images. However, the use of analog components during these processes has limited the upper reaches of image clarity and quality. Read the rest of this entry »
- Author: Health Informer
- Filed under: Health News
- Date: Nov 26,2010
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators have identified key components of a signaling pathway that controls the departure of neurons from the brain niche where they form and allows these cells to start migrating to their final destination. Defects in this system affect the architecture of the brain and are associated with epilepsy, mental retardation and perhaps malignant brain tumors.
The findings provide insight into brain development as well as clues about the mechanism at work in the other developing tissues and organ systems, particularly the epithelial tissue that covers body surfaces. The report appears November 25 in the journal Science online at the Science Express website.
“Neurons are born in germinal zones in the brain, and the places they occupy in the mature brain are sometimes quite a distance away. The cells have to physically move to get to that final destination,” said David Solecki, Ph.D., an assistant member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology and the paper’s senior author. “If the process is compromised, the result is devastating disruption of brain circuitry that specifically targets children.”
In this study, investigators identified not only the molecular complexes that work antagonistically to control departure of brain cells from germinal zones, but also the adhesion molecule that functions as the cells’ exit ticket. Solecki and his colleagues showed that high levels of Siah E3 ubiquitin ligase block neuronal departure by tagging a critical part of the cell’s migration machinery for degradation through a process known as ubiquitination. Siah’s target is Pard3A, which is part of the PAR complex. Read the rest of this entry »