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Folic acid, a B vitamin, lowers stroke risk in people with high blood pressure
If you’re among the one in three American adults with high blood pressure, be sure you’re getting plenty of the B vitamin known as folate. Doing so may lower your odds of having a stroke, an often disabling or deadly event linked to high blood pressure, a new study suggests. Folate occurs naturally in many foods, but especially green leafy vegetables, beans, and citrus fruits. Here in the United States, add to the list most grain products, including wheat flour, cornmeal, pasta, and rice. They are fortified with the synthetic version of folate, known as folic acid. That’s not the case in many countries ar...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - March 18, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Julie Corliss Tags: Drugs and Supplements Hypertension and Stroke high blood pressure Source Type: news

FDA warns parents about arsenic in rice cereal
Follow me at @drClaire For years, rice cereal has been a go-to for parents when they start their babies on solid foods. It’s time to change that. In 2012, the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a report warning about high levels of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products. Rice plants are particularly good at absorbing arsenic from the soil, in particular because they grow in a lot of water. Inorganic arsenic is a common ingredient in pesticides and other products used in farming, and can linger in the soil for a long time after it is used. It can be poisonous. In high doses it is lethal, but even small...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - April 5, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Claire McCarthy, MD Tags: Children's Health Parenting Safety Source Type: news

3 reasons your child shouldn’t go “gluten-free” (unless your doctor says so)
Follow me at @drClaire There is a puzzling and worrisome new phenomenon that I am seeing as a pediatrician: parents who are putting their children on gluten-free diets. It’s puzzling because in the vast majority of cases it isn’t necessary — and it’s worrisome because, although parents are doing it because they think it’s healthy, a gluten-free diet can be very unhealthy for children. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and some other grains. It’s in bread and other baked goods, cereals, pastas — and in many other foods in small amounts. For people with celiac disease, even those small amounts ca...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - June 7, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Claire McCarthy, MD Tags: Children's Health Healthy Eating Parenting Source Type: news

A Novel Homozygous Non-sense Mutation in the Catalytic Domain of MTHFR Causes Severe 5,10-Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase Deficiency
Conclusion: We identified a novel non-sense mutation in MTHFR gene in a single Egyptian family with severe MTHFR deficiency. The present investigation is clinically important, as it adds to the growing list of MTHFR mutations, which might help in genetic counseling of families of affected children and proper genotype-phenotype correlation. Background Severe 5,10-Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR; OMIM 236250) deficiency is a rare inborn error of metabolism and inherited in an autosomal recessive fashion. It is a very common disorder of folate metabolism and is clinically characterized with low plasma methion...
Source: Frontiers in Neurology - April 23, 2019 Category: Neurology Source Type: research

What the Science Says About the Health Benefits of Vitamins and Supplements
From multivitamins and melatonin to fiber and fish oil, Americans who are trying to boost their health and immunity have a plethora of supplements to choose from. An estimated 58% of U.S. adults ages 20 and over take dietary supplements, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the supplement industry is valued at more than $30 billion a year. Supplement use has been growing rapidly over the past few decades along with the wellness industry. “The popular belief is that a supplement is going to be helpful for promoting health,” says Fang Fang Zhang, a professor at Tufts University&rs...
Source: TIME: Health - April 28, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Sandeep Ravindran Tags: Uncategorized Diet & Nutrition healthscienceclimate Source Type: news