Better And Brighter Years - BABY

Hello Dear Friends,

I am happy to announce that I have created a facebook page to share health tips and health-related news concerning maternal and child health. Please visit the page, and I hope that you will enjoy and benefit from it as well as participate by adding  materials and posts.

Bests

Better And Brighter Years - BABY

The World Breastfeeding Week 2013

Your pregnancy is finally over! You’ve got your body back and besides you have your own baby resting in your arms! Miraculous lovely being that you love and want to protect.

Feeding the baby is an enormous task; it takes lots of the mother time and effort. But what diet to choose? Baby formula or breastfeeding? Each has its advantages and disadvantages, formula is easier, most of the babies like it more than the breastfeeding and sometimes you tried to breastfeed your baby but the milk is simply not enough, the baby is always hungry! Some of the babies are even allergic to any kind of milk.

Let’s get back, what if your child does not have any allergy or problem. A normal healthy child (and I wish all babies much health and no problems at all). The choice of feeding the child is yours and yours alone, you have to remember that, but the researchers can advice you based on their observations and scientific findings. Breastfeeding is healthy both for the newborn baby and for the mother. Let me list the advantages below:

Benefits of Breastfeeding for Baby:

• The physical closeness, skin-to-skin touching, and eye contact all help your baby bond with you and feel secure.
• Breast milk provides the ideal nutrition for infants. It has the perfect mix of vitamins, protein, and fat.
• Breast milk contains antibodies that help your baby fight off viruses and bacteria.
• Breastfeeding reduces your baby's risk of having asthma or allergies.
• Babies who are breastfed exclusively for the first six months, without any formula, have fewer ear infections, respiratory illnesses, and bouts of diarrhea.
• Breastfeeding has been linked to higher IQ scores in later childhood in some studies.
• Breastfed infants are more likely to gain the right amount of weight as they grow rather than become overweight children.
• Breastfeeding plays a role in the prevention of sudden infant death syndrome.
• Breastfeeding is thought to lower the risk of diabetes, obesity, and some cancers later in life.

Breastfeeding has some advantages to you as well:

• Breastfeeding burns extra calories, so it can help you lose pregnancy weight faster.
• Breastfeeding releases the hormone oxytocin, which helps your uterus return to its size before pregnancy and may reduce uterine bleeding after birth.
• Breastfeeding lowers the risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
• Breastfeeding may lower your risk of osteoporosis.

As I mentioned earlier, the decision rests with the mother only, but the advantages of breastfeeding are worth your time and consideration.

Wishing the mothers and their infant babies all the health.

To know more about breast feeding and its advantages please visit:

Your Guide to Breastfeeding 

Breastfeeding - Office on Women's Health 

Why breastfeeding is important 

The Role of Social Media in Health Promotion

Whenever we like or need, we can enjoy an easy access to the internet through our laptops, smart phones or even smart TVs. We connect with our friends and family through facebook or twitter beside the good old emailing system. Text-messaging is a worldwide behavior, you can rarely walk in the street or in the metro without being nearly-hit (or hit) by someone who is busy texting.

This passion about the internet and web-applications can be beneficial to our health as well. Let’s imagine a pop-up email or a message reminder on your phone telling you its exercise-time of the day; you can program it to fit your schedule. You can also link the reminder to a page showing you various exercises.  

What about a facebook or twitter page spreading information about healthy behavior or disease prevention, or a texting system reminding the mothers of the child’s immunization schedule, or how to quickly prepare a healthy food of the day for your family?

Many of what I am mentioning is actually available. The problem though is that they are not on everybody’s top list. Facebook campaigns could help promote cancer screening for example, let’s start a page for people who did colonoscopy to share their stories, or mammography, or PSA. Let us think of the positive impact of hearing from other people who did this test and benefited from it, or let them tell you how hard or easy they though the test was, people can ask others who went through a test about what’s frightening and stopping them, physical or social.

As I mentioned earlier, many of what I am suggesting is available but not as widely known as it should be. But we can change that; let us share with our friends at least a health website, a post or a message whenever possible. Let us start today and at least, at the very least, share one healthy site/ page today .. it’s the bless of the social media that we can share what we think can help us and those we love stay healthy and happy.

One important thing though that’s worth mentioning here: some of the sites or pages spread faulty or inaccurate information, maybe unintentionally. Please check and investigate what you read, it helps you either way. If the message was accurate then you know it and the science of it, otherwise you are not mislead by it and you know why as well. Be inquisitive, it helps to ask and check especially with the abundance of information we are witnessing nowadays, and if needed ask an expert, they will be happy to help.

And if you know a website or a page that you think is very important and useful, you can share it here as well.

Stay healthy, stay well .. and enjoy surfing the net.