NY Times follows up on my Vitamin D story

The New York Times did a follow-up story to my earlier post about the dangers of too little vitamin D.

According to the Times, medical types have noticed an increase in the number of babies with problems they suspect are the result of too little vitamin D, including rickets, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

Doctors suspect multiple causes, including exclusive breastfeeding (since the mothers are vitamin D deprived themselves), children drinking soda and juice instead of milk, and not enough time spent outdoors in the sun. Because we know that exposure to the sun will cause instant death, the recommended solution is to feed your baby vitamin supplements and cod liver oil.



But wait! According to Sydney Spiesel, a pediatrician and professor at Yale University School of Medicine, too much cod liver oil will actually do damage to your bones. Overdo the cod liver oil and you're likely to get too much vitamin A, which can lead to "liver damage to nervous-system symptoms that resemble the effects of a brain tumor," as well as bone mineral loss leading to osteoporosis.

Well, that certainly clears things up.

FDA Is Worried About Cough Syrup

The Food and Drug Administration is about to revise regulations on over-the-counter children's cough syrup. The FDA's review may even lead to the disappearance of the drugs from store shelves, making them available only via prescription.

The trouble, it seems, is twofold. First, the stuff doesn't work. Second, it may cause some unwanted side effects (which makes me wonder if you can call something a "side effect" if it doesn't actually have a primary effect...). Side effects include hallucinations (cool!), seizures (not cool), trouble breathing (very bad), heart problems (uh oh), and death (very not cool and very bad).

In response to an FDA-panel report back in October 2007, drug companies yanked all cough medicines for kids 2 and under off the shelves. The FDA let the companies keep selling the drugs for children older than that, however, despite the fact that the panel had determined that there was no evidence that the medicines actually worked.

The FDA had declined to stop the sale of the drugs, even though averse reactions to cough medicines led to over 7,000 ER visits, two-thirds of which involved children aged 2-5. The panel agreed that the drugs don't do any good for children age 6-11 either, but a majority of the panel members thought that parents "wouldn't have any good alternatives" (translation: It would be bad if drug companies would stop making money from this worthless and sometimes harmful product).

How were the companies able to push these harmful products for so long? It turns out that the drugs were first put on the market before proper drug testing was the norm, and then got grandfathered in. And then, hey, people were buying hundreds of millions of dollars of them a year, so what was the problem?

What's a worried dad (or mom) to do? Try a teaspoon of buckwheat honey (but not in children under 12 months as it may cause botulism in infants).

Toy Helicopters = Death

More toy helicopter tragedy.

First, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has put the kibosh on another toy helicopter because of exploding battery problems. The Chinese-made batteries in Hobbico Inc's Electrifly helicopter kits due to problems with the batteries melting, bursting into flames, and causing property damage.

On a sadder note, a six-year old boy was killed by a toy helicopter in the rural Brazilian city of Altinho in the state of Pernambuco. No word on what model it was, but let's face it, these things are just bad.

MSG Will Make You Fat

A new report by people in white coats suggests that MSG will make you fat. In a new report in the journal Obesity (you gotta wonder what they serve in their cafeteria), researches noted that Chinese peasants who ate a lot of MSG with their food were nearly three times as likely to be obese than those who didn't pour the stuff on (after controlling for calories, exercise, etc.).

So how am I supposed to get my umami fix now?

Here comes the sun. Hide your child now!

We recently discussed how people are dying nasty deaths because they can't manage to get 15 minutes of exposure to sunlight a day. Today we look at why you should be afraid to ever expose your child to the sun's harmful rays at all.

A helpful worry-inducing article from one of my favorite panic inducers, Parent's Magazine, provides many reasons to be afraid of the sun.

According to the article, "new research has found that overall sun exposure in childhood -- not just burns -- significantly increases the risk of skin cancer."

The author warns that normal approaches aren't going to protect your child. SPF 50 sunblock only works if you slather on a gallon of it, and reapply every time they even think about taking a swim.

Tans are bad: "We know now that the more sun your child gets, the more likely he or she is to develop basal-cell and squamous-cell skin cancers," says Dr. Eichenfield. "Any sign of color means that the skin has been damaged."

You can run, but you can't hide. Those harmful UVA rays will sneak in through closed windows and give us all cancer.

What to do?

Slather on the broad-spectrum sunscreen (remember when we used to call this "sun tan" lotion?).

Limit the time your kid spends in the sun during 10:00am and 4:00pm.

Make sure they wear a broad-brimmed hat, sun protective clothing, and sunglasses.

Hey kids, let's have a Burqa party!

Too little vitamin D will kill you

Something else to worry about.

According to a report by people in white coats, people with too little vitamin D in their bodies will die horrible, horrible deaths. In a study following 13,000 initially healthy men between 1994 and 2000, those with low levels of vitamin D were 26% more likely to die. Insufficient vitamin D was also linked to higher rates of breast cancer, depression in the elderly, and possibly to cardiovascular disease.

The somewhat shocking thing is that, according to the reports, all you need to get the required amount of vitamin D is to get 10-15 minutes of sunshine a day, however 50% of adults age 50 and over, and a large share of younger people, are under-D'd.

Too MUCH sleep can make you fat too!

For the moment, my big problem is that I can't get Cinderella to sleep early enough. And this could make her fat.

Now my sister, Worried Aunt, has informed me of research reported on WebMD that too much sleep is associated with a whole host of problems, including diabetes, headaches, back pain, depression, heart disease, and, of course, obesity.

One recent study showed that people who slept for nine or 10 hours every night were 21% more likely to become obese over a six-year period than were people who slept between seven and eight hours. This association between sleep and obesity remained the same even when food intake and exercise were taken into account.

So, the previous studies suggested that you were at risk for obesity if you slept less than 9 hours a night. This one says nine or more and you're in trouble too.

Gee, thanks Sis!

The Epidemic of Exploding Helicopters Continues Unabated

Another month, another recall of exploding toy helicopters. According to the CPSC, the "Sky Scrambler" and "Sharper Image" helicopters (made in Hong Kong by Innovage) join the ranks of the Sky Champion and the Thunder Wolf as toys recalled because they burst into flames.

Kind of makes me wonder what other toys might be really cool if they started exploding: Elmo's Inferno, Dora Explores the Inside of a Volcano, Burn Barney Burn!

Restaurant Food Isn't Good For Your Kid

Put this in the "hardly shocking, but still good to keep in mind" folder:

A new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report that showed that of the 13 largest restaurant chains, 93% of the possible kids' food combos contained a third of the total calories that kids 4-8 should consume in a day. Not too terrible in itself. However, for many of the places, though, almost all of the value-priced kids combos packed an entire days calories into a single meal.

The fast-food joints did about as poorly as you might expect (with the exception of Subway, mostly because they push milk instead of soda--ahhh!! milk!!!), but the big chains like Chili's and Denny's were some of the worst offenders. Many other chains don't make their nutrition info public.

We're bummed because one of our favorite neighborhood burrito joints, Boloco (with lots of cheap, fresh food on the menu), just closed the shop closest to our house. And, of course, it was the one location with a kids play area.

How are you supposed to feed your kid on the run without packing up half the fridge in your pack?

My inability to get my kid to sleep early will make her fat

My daughter, Cinderella, has so far been the victor in the ongoing bedtime battle. It doesn't help much that The Wife and I are night owls (actually, I'm a night owl, she's descended from vampires).

I'm not so good with the whole setting strict limits thing, for the most part. The family motto is "Put the [insert dangerous object] down and nobody gets hurt." Apparently, this isn't good enough to get me a fatherhood medal. It seems that my inability to turn Cinderella into Sleeping Beauty is dramatically increasing her chances of joining the national childhood obesity craze that's sweeping the nation.

Several studies by people in white coats from New Zealand and England point to what appears to be a clear link between the lack of sleep and the rise of childhood obesity. In one study, researchers following 13,000 children made the shocking discovery that children who sleep less tend to spend less time playing outdoors and have less energy for active play. More worryingly, they say that it appears that lack of sleep may alter children's hormones, leading them to overeat, and seek out the worst kinds of food.

Another smaller study of 591 children found that "children who slept an average of less than nine hours a night had a 3.34% increase in body fat compared with those who slept more than nine hours." The researchers noted that shortchanging your kid's sleep led to a three-fold increase in their risk of becoming obese, independent of the amount of exercise they got or the amount of television they watched.

Harshing my own mellow

[Author note: the following entry should be prefaced with the word "alledgedly."]

It has often been noted (by me, anyway) that the older we get, the more legal our vices become. With parenthood, a mortgage, and (oh the shame) a minivan, the last remnants of your youthful fantasies of carrying on your cool anti-establishment abandon go up in smoke. And it ain't the kind you spray over with your mom's air freshener either.

Now the drugs we take to make us happy are not only legal, they're pushed by the evil corporations that you once swore you'd never abide. While we once sought out the newest freak to free our mind from the drudgery we knew, deep down, was our unavoidable fate, we now cadge uppers and downers from our doctors in order to stay productive at work and keep pace in the soul-crushing rat race that sends digital money to our bank accounts so that we can transfer it to our credit card companies and bill collectors.

Yet, is there any better anti-drug ad than seeing a bunch of aging California hippies?

For some reason I'm often reminded of an old New Yorker cartoon. One guy says to another "The problem with living longer is that all the extra years come at the end, when you're old."