Parents & Kids

We want to hear what kids around the nation (and globe!) want to know about science and health. Kicking off our new segment, #KuriousKiddos, are Isaiah and Gabriel who ask us this: Our mom dilutes our juice with water because she says too much sugar is bad for us. Is it healthier to drink diluted juice or the real deal? Watch the video to hear our answer! If you'd like to submit a question to #KuriousKiddos, please e-mail us at: simovskaa@acsh.org    
Another agenda-driven group is at it again, this time using our kids' school lunches for its own purposes. The vegetarian-centric Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is suing California schools. The group wants to have processed meats removed from students' lunches – a move that's less about health and more about pushing its agenda. 
April is autism awareness month and the FDA isn't missing a beat, warning about fraudulent autism treatments – like chelation therapies and detoxifying clay baths. Not only are they expensive, they're completely ineffective. It's time to smoke out these snake oil salesmen who are preying on parents who just want to help their kids. 
Babies are a little safer today as Hyland's homeopathic teething tablets have been recalled by their manufacturer, Standard Homeopathic Company. It's been a long road to get to this point, with pressure for the recall coming primarily from the FDA.
Here's a health question related to Sunday's Easter Egg Hunt: Once the kids have found the eggs that you've so carefully un-hidden, can they eat them? That's really an easy one — sure. But what you want to be careful about is cracked eggs. And here's why.
Over-the-top responses to peanuts are not uncommon. People are under the impression that the mere whiff of a peanut is enough to send some kids to the emergency room. But that's simply not true.
In infants, whooping cough is horrific. They are especially vulnerable during their first few months, before they can receive their first vaccinations. A new study strengthens the CDC's recommendation: expectant mothers should get the whooping cough vaccine in their third trimester, to transfer protective antibodies to their newborns.
A growing number of parents choose to opt out of giving children their daily dose of milk, and switching to alternatives like almond milk or cashew milk. Perhaps they may think the alternatives offer a bit more calcium than real milk — but this is misleading: Real milk contains both calcium and vitamin D (added in the 1930s due to Rickets — a vitamin D deficiency among children), and the presence of vitamin D helps absorb the calcium. 
It glistens, oozes, sometimes sparkles and seems to be everywhere: in homes, schools and offices, and on travel gear and key chains. So it's no wonder that kids are accidentally – and even intentionally – ingesting hand sanitizer. The result can be signs of alcohol toxicity.
Nurses in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit have their work cut out for them. Not only since they care for an extremely vulnerable population, but because they have to literally cut diapers to make them fit the smallest babies. But now two companies have designed specialized diapers with those babies in mind.
Older mothers may be better – or maybe not. But when a study is based on moms' answers to a questionnaire about their own children, it's also possible that older mothers just think their children are more perfect than how younger moms view their kids.  
Public health experts have noted the unexplained increases in childhood asthma and autism spectrum disorders over the past few decades. A recent review has linked such ills to the coincident increases in obesity in women of childbearing age.