Despite the formula industry's best efforts, nothing is quite as good for babies as breast milk. Babies that nurse have been shown to get more education, have greater resistance to disease, and experience physical benefits of skin-to-skin contact. New moms who are unable to breastfeed still want their babies to reap the same benefits, so some look to purchase breast milk from places like milk banks or even classified ads. But according to an editorial published today in the British Medical Journal, parents should not buy breast milk online, as the industry still lacks important regulation and could put the health babies at risk.
From 1997 to 2010, the number of Americans with peanut allergies quadrupled. To combat the surge, the American Academy of Pediatrics created guidelines in 2000, suggesting children under the age of 3 should refrain from eating peanuts. In 2008, when this didn't seem to have any impact on the rising number of peanut allergies, the AAP retracted the recommendation. Now, a team of allergists has published a study that flies in the face of those recommendations, arguing that it is actually beneficial to feed peanuts to infants with a high risk of developing the allergy.
Last week members of the British House of Commons passed a bill legalizing mitochondrial DNA transfers--a process that combines three different sets of DNA to create an embryo. That means one day, it could be possible for children in the United Kingdom to have DNA from three parents.
After getting a uterus transplant, a woman in Sweden has carried and given birth to a baby boy. She's named the baby Vincent, which means "to conquer," signifying his parents' tough path to this moment, the Associated Press reports.
The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics released today its latest report on American teenagers having babies. The results are both happy and strange. American teens are having babies at their lowest rate ever -- and that rate is falling fast. Yet, as Vox discovered, nobody knows why this is happening. One of the steadiest trends in American life is inexplicable.
Maybe you've heard of King Henry VIII's tendency to blame his wives for giving birth to baby girls instead of male heirs. That the sex of a baby is somehow a mum's fault is a belief that's cropped up in a number of pre-scientific societies. It's total bull, of course. The sex of babies is random. For those conceiving in the old fashioned manner, there's no way to control the outcome.
