Skip to main content

Born a Mother's Child

There is a special bond between a mother and the child that the world of today tends to minimize in a mistaken notion that independence is threatened by the a child's devotion to his mother. Far from the truth. In fact, devotion to our mother enriches our appreciation of true independence--an independence ground by the stability of a mother's love. This week's Breakthroughs article will reveal how much of the mother reaches the being of her child.
 
CHRISTMAS is not merely about the birth of God’s only Son, but also the emergence of a Mother. We can say that the new year is also all about birth and everything starting anew. This is a relevant thought because even in this age of test tube babies and surrogate parenthood, a child will not see the light without a mother. So wherever the son is, the mother must be there also. In the same manner, whatever the mother has the son will get also.
 
That’s the essence of the scientific breakthrough we will be on this week. While no one challenges the health value of breast milk as the optimal nutrition for newborn infants, it has not been explored in the past how far the milk and dairy intake of the mother affects the newly born child.
 
That’s the scientific puzzle that the team of five researchers, led by Anne Lise Brantsaeter of the Department of Exposure and Risk Assessment of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Oslo, Norway), embarked to find out.
 
In a report published in the Food & Nutrition Research on Nov. 23, the team found out that there had only been mixed results on the relationship between maternal milk and dairy diet, and an infant’s birth length and birth weight. That means that while some studies found a relationship, other studies did not.
 
What the team found to be strongly associated with a mother’s milk and dairy products consumption during pregnancy was the child’s... [READ MORE]
 
 
This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 09 January 2013. 

Comments

Popular Posts

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .)  This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.