All About Your Child

SOURCE: Epidemiology, May 2008.

There was a study done in New York, Reuters Health, which reports that indulging in chocolate during pregnancycould help ward off a serious complication known as preeclampsia.

Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, is rich in a chemical called theobromine, which stimulates the heart, relaxes smooth muscle and dilates blood vessels, and has been used to treat chest pain, high blood pressure, and hardening of the arteries, Dr. Elizabeth W. Triche of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and colleagues write.

Preeclampsia, in which blood pressure spikes during pregnancy while excess protein is released into the urine, has many features in common with heart disease, the researchers add…..

…..Women who ate five or more servings of chocolate each week in their third trimester of pregnancywere 40 percent less likely to develop preeclampsia than those who ate chocolate less than once a week….

…..Theobromine could improve circulation within the placenta while blocking oxidative stress, or it could also be a stand-in for other beneficial chemicals found in chocolate, Triche and her team note in the May issue of Epidemiology.

“Our results raise the possibility that chocolate consumption by pregnant women may reduce the occurrence of preeclampsia,” they write. “Because of the importance of preeclampsia as a major complication of pregnancy, replication of these results in other large prospective studies with a detailed assessment of chocolate consumption is warranted.” – See Complete Report Here

If you have read My Profile, you would know that I am a chocolate lover to the core. To be honest, I need (notice I didn’t say I want) to pop in at least one or two chocolates everyday to complete my day, even if its M&Ms, so use your wildest imagination of my fridge…*laugh*. Its a craving. Its an addiction. Its like coffee to my husband and to Slouching Mom. Without one cup a day, they feel empty in the fulfillment section of their souls.

So this news came as an encouragement for my desire. Many say its too heaty, causes pimples, makes you fat, too much carbohydrates, nah….for me, I just love it! Ooops! Let me clear the air, I’m not pregnant in anyway or any sooner or may never be pregnant again, so I know this news doesn’t really concern me, just felt like sharing, maybe, just maybe, you might be a chocolate lover too and IS pregnant right now as you read, so go, eat more now.

This was what we had yesterday….chocolatie Mother’s Day Cake….

To all my pregnant mommies, especially Lynn, go on, grab a hearty piece…*wink* Oh, I’m not that unkind, the currently non-pregnant mommies come and eat too….

I had a great Mother’s Day, simply because my boys were angels yesterday, that’s what makes Mother’s Day special, isn’t it? Your kids listen to what you say without you repeating a thousand times and the best part was, I didn’t need to break up any fights yesterday!

I love news like these!

A new study in Washington provides some of the best evidence to date that breast-feeding can make children smarter, an international team of researchers said on Monday.

Children whose mothers breast-fed them longer and did not mix in baby formula scored higher on intelligence tests, the researchers in Canada and Belarus reported.

……At 3 months, 73 percent of the babies in the breast-feeding encouragement group were breast-fed, compared to 60 percent of the other group. At 6 months, it was 50 percent versus 36 percent.In addition, the group given encouragement was far more likely to give their children only breast milk. The rate was seven times higher, for example, at 3 months.

The children were monitored for about 6 1/2 years.

The children in the group where breast-feeding was encouraged scored about 5 percent higher in IQ tests and did better academically, the researchers found.

Previous studies had indicated brain development and intelligence benefits for breast-fed children.

But researchers have sought to determine whether it was the breast-feeding that did it, or that mothers who prefer to breast-feed their babies may differ from those who do not.

The design of the study — randomly assigning babies to two groups regardless of the mothers’ characteristics — was intended to eliminate the confusion.

‘MOTHERS WHO BREAST-FEED … ARE DIFFERENT’

“Mothers who breast-feed or those who breast-feed longer or most exclusively are different from the mothers who don’t,” Dr. Michael Kramer of McGill University in Montreal and the Montreal Children’s Hospital said in a telephone interview.

“They tend to be smarter. They tend to be more invested in their babies. They tend to interact with them more closely. They may be the kind of mothers who read to their kids more, who spend more time with their kids, who play with them more,” added Kramer, who led the study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

(That’s me, that’s me….)

…..The researchers measured the differences between the two groups using IQ tests administered by the children’s pediatricians and by ratings by their teachers of their school performance in reading, writing, math and other subjects.

Both sets of scores were significantly higher in the children from the breast-feeding promotion group.

Kramer said how breast-feeding may make children more intelligent is unclear.

“It could even be that because breast-feeding takes longer, the mother is interacting more with the baby, talking with the baby, soothing the baby,” he said. “It could be an emotional thing. It could be a physical thing. Or it could be a hormone or something else in the milk that’s absorbed by the baby.”

……Previous studies have shown babies whose mothers breast-fed them enjoy many health advantages over formula-fed babies.

These include fewer ear, stomach or intestinal infections, digestive problems, skin diseases and allergies, and less risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Read full report here…. (the report was removed from the Internet.)

Hey, non-1st time Mommies out there who have been giving excuses to breast-feed your baby, its time to change your mindset now!

Its true, at least for my boys. Keatkeat didn’t get much because of my MIL’s 8 unreasonable Objections to breastfeeding, but when I insisted on breastfeeding when I had Binbin, I see that Binbin’s mental and physical development IS truly more amazing!