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A family that eats together, stays together, and now, according to a recent study, consistently eating breakfast as a family can also promote positive body image for children and adolescents. The study suggests that parents hoping to raise teenagers with positive body image might just find helpful tools in the kitchen every morning. "We know that developing healthy behaviours in adolescence such as eating breakfast every day and eating family meals can have long-term effects into adulthood. Children and adolescents are under a lot of pressure from social media and pop culture when it comes to physical appearance. Having a healthy relationship with food from eating breakfast and spending meal time with family might have a significant impact on well-being," said Virginia Ramseyer, one of the lead researchers. Researchers analyzed data from more than 12,000 students in more than 300 schools in all 50 states and Washington D.C. They looked at data related to eating...

Business Standard : According to a recent study, having a fixed bedtime and getting sufficient amount of sleep from early childhood may lead to a healthy body weight in adolescence. The results of the study were published in the journal ' Sleep '. The researchers at Penn State identified groups of children by bedtime and sleep routines and tested longitudinal associations for each group with adolescent body mass index (BMI). The findings suggest that childhood bedtime and sleep routine groups predict adolescent sleep patterns and BMI. In a national study of urban households, one-third of children consistently adhered to age-appropriate bedtimes for ages five through nine. Those who had no bedtime routine at age of nine had shorter self-reported sleep duration and higher BMI at age of 15 when compared to those children with age-appropriate bedtimes (after adjusting for age 3 BMI). "Parenting practices in childhood affect physical health and BMI in the ...

Women who are in the habit of popping up over-the-counter painkillers during pregnancy could increase the risk of their daughters entering puberty earlier than normal, warns a research. The study observed that girls whose mothers consumed paracetamol during pregnancy exhibited pubertal symptoms such as breasts, pimples, menstruation, hair growth in places and unpredictable mood swings, on average, three months earlier, than the normal. These symptoms were visible even more earlier if the mother took paracetemol for more than 12 weeks during pregnancy. "While entering puberty one-and-a-half to three months earlier may seem unimportant, when taken together with the frequent use of paracetamol during pregnancy, our findings ought to make people take notice," said Andreas Ernst, a post-doctoral student from Aarhus University in Denmark. "Our results are certainly not the decisive factor that should change current practice, but the perception of paracetamol as ...

Long-term exposure to radiation from mobile phones may adversely affect memory performance of certain brain regions in adolescents, a study has found. The study, appearing in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, involved nearly 700 adolescents in Switzerland.  Scientists at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) looked at the relationship between exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) from wireless communication devices and memory performance in adolescents. The study found that cumulative RF-EMF brain exposure from mobile phone use over one year may have a negative effect on the development of figural memory performance in adolescents, confirming prior results published in 2015. Figural memory is mainly located in the right brain hemisphere and association with RF-EMF was more pronounced in adolescents using the mobile phone on the right side of the head. "This may suggest that indeed RF-EMF absorbed by the ...