Eating raw Toll House refrigerated cookie dough may have sickened up to 66 people nationwide with E. coli bacteria infections. Federal officials say consumers should throw out any cookie dough, and Nestle USA says that the products can be returned to grocery stores for a full refund.
However tempting, people should never eat raw cookie dough. And even though baking the dough could kill any bacteria, the feds are being cautious because handling the pre-cooked dough could spread the bacteria to hands and kitchen surfaces.
It’s unclear how the dough may have been contaminated, the New York Times reported. E. coli is usually linked to bad meat and can cause cramps, vomiting and bloody diarrhea.
Restaurants aren’t doing you a favor by offering a kiddie menu; they’re helping to supersize your child. The standard offerings of mac and cheese, burgers and chicken fingers are loaded with fat and sodium.
So what’s a parent to do?
Diabetes educator and mom Hope Warshaw told the Houston Chronicle that families should order off the regular adult menu. Instead of chicken nuggets, try an order of grilled chicken and veggies and share it with your child. “We need to take food decisions a lot more seriously than we do,” she says. “It’s about realizing sometimes that food can be a battle zone, but the battle is worth fighting.”
The Institute of Medicine has some numbers that should scare parents into action. Kids ages 4 to 8 shouldn’t have more than 1,200 milligrams of salt a day. But a kiddie meal at a typical restaurant blows that cap. The kiddie nuggets at Chili’s restaurant has 1,600 milligrams of sodium. The kid’s cheese pizza at the Olive Garden has 1,170 milligrams. A couple of meals out, and your kids are walking salt-shakers.
Warshaw, a dietician, had the following tips to help make your child’s dining-out experience healthier:
– Eat at ethnic restaurants, which encourage “family-style” sharing of entrees.
– Order low-fat milk or water. Avoid soda and fruit juices.
– Divide desserts.
– Be a role model. Don’t lecture your kids and then pig out on fatty foods.
Jerri Althea Gray, whose 14-year-old son Alexander Deundray Draper weighs 555 pounds, has been arrested in Baltimore. Gray and her son, who lived in South Carolina, went on the lam after authorities threatened to take custody of the child.
“The individual was of the weight where it was decided by medical authorities that he needed treatment that was not being provided for by his mother,” Matt Armstrong, a spokesperson for the Greenville, S.C. sheriff’s office said. Gray will be extradited to South Carolina, and her son will be sent there for treatment, too, according to CNN.
Gray and her son were supposed to appear in family court last Tuesday, but instead, fled. During that hearing, the obese 14-year-old was ordered into state custody.
A Georgia father was sentenced to 100 years in prison for poisoning his children’s soup in an attempt to wring money out of Campbell’s.
A jury found that William Cunningham forced his kids to eat soup laced with prescription drugs and lighter fluid in 2006, according to the Associated Press.
He was convicted of seven counts of aggravated assault. Cunningham’s three-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter were hospitalized twice and suffered long-term lung damage from the poisoning. His wife has since divorced him.
Paging the broccoli monster!
One in five American four-year-olds is obese, and the rate of obesity is even worse among black, Hispanic and American Indian preschoolers, according to a new study, reported on by the Associated Press.
The researchers found significant differences by race. 13 percent of Asian children were obese; 16 percent of whites; almost 21 percent of blacks; 22 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of American Indians.
“The magnitude of these differences was larger than we expected, and it is surprising to see differences by racial groups present so early in childhood,” said Sarah Anderson, the study’s co-author and an Ohio State University public health researcher.
For tips on preventing obesity in your child, click here.
Don’t supersize that bottle.
If your baby gains a lot of weight during the first six months of her life, she could be obese by the time she’s in preschool, according to a study in the medical journal Pediatrics.
How much weight a kid gains and how suddenly that happens is a bigger factor in determining childhood obesity than how much the baby weighed at birth, the mom’s weight during pregnancy or the weight of the kid’s parents, according to the researchers. The Harvard Medical School study followed 559 mother-child pairs in the Boston area. Researchers found that a baby weighing 18.4 pounds after six months had a 40 percent greater risk of obesity by age 3 than a kid who weighed 16.9 pounds.
Pediatricians interviewed by the Chicago Tribune weren’t so sure that parents should put their fat babies on a diet, though. Dr. Mary Hall said that some kids stabilize in weight between the sixth and ninth months. Still, she said that it’s best that parents not always respond to their babies by offering food. “They may need to hold the baby, change the baby’s diaper, or the baby may be tired,” she said.
Breathe! Push! And have some yogurt, will ya?
Doctors have long told women not to eat while in labor, but a new study now says that some light snacking doesn’t harm mom or baby. Previouly there was fear eating could lead to breathing food in the lungs in case of an emergency C-section.
Researchers compared two groups of moms — one was only allowed to drink water and the other could have bread, fruits, yogurt and fruit juice during delivery, AFP News reported. The study of 2,426 moms found that there was no difference between the two groups in terms of duration of labor, percentage of C-sections or even rate of vomiting. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggested that fasting while in labor could even be more harmful since who wants to work on an empty stomach?
Danielle Glanville was breast-feeding her daughter in the children’s book area when a security guard came over and told her to stop. She didn’t — a kid’s gotta eat – and the guard scolded her again.
Now the public library in Brooklyn, N.Y., has come to its senses and apologized to Glanville, the Associated Press reported. The 34-year-old school teacher had contacted the New York Civil Liberties Union and threatened to sue. Under Nw York law, a mom has the right to breast-feed in public.
The guard apparently has been transferred, and a memo has been issued to library staff about breast-feeding rights.
Waste not, want not?
Kindergarten teacher Anne O’Donnell is accused of forcing a student to eat his lunch after he tossed it in the garbage. The 5-year-old boy, who was not publicly named, had thrown out his cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets and a banana. O’Donnell allegedly took the items out of the trash and then gave them to the boy to eat, the Associated Press reported.
O’Donnell, 67, of Fairfield, Conn., was charged on Tuesday with risk of injury to a minor. The alleged garbage-eating happened last week at Park City Magnet School.
Two new studies suggest that such a treatment could help children increase their tolerance for nuts.
Researchers gave allergic kids doses that began as small as one-thousandth of a peanut and gradually upped their intake to about 15 peanuts a day. Many of the kids in the studies were able to tolerate the treatment, but four kids dropped out because they had allergic reactions. The research at Duke University and Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock involved a small sampling, just 33 kids in one study and 18 in another.
Researchers, who presented the results at a conference on Sunday, said the the results were promising and could eventually lead to some sort of treatment for peanut allergies, the New York Times reported. For now, parents are advised not to try such treatments as home. About 2.2 million American children suffer from food allergies, and exposure can lead to severe reactions and even death.