Things to Know About Food Poisoning

September 18, 2008

What Is Food Poisoning?

Food poisoning comes from eating foods that contain germs like bad bacteria or toxins, which are poisonous substances. Bacteria are all around us, so mild cases of food poisoning are common. You may have had mild food poisoning — with diarrhea and an upset stomach — but your mom or dad just called it a stomach bug or stomach virus.

You might think the solution is to get rid of all the bacteria. But it isn’t possible and you wouldn’t want to do it, even if you could. Bacteria are all around us, including in food, and sometimes they can be good for you. It’s confusing, but one thing is for sure — the bacteria in the rotten leftovers weren’t good for you. But you can learn how to avoid those bad germs in food.

Which Germs Are to Blame?

Foods from animals, raw foods, and unwashed vegetables all can contain germs that cause food poisoning. The most likely source is food from animals, like meat, poultry (such as chicken), eggs, milk, and shellfish (such as shrimp).

Some of the most common bacteria are:

• Salmonella (say: sal-meh-nel-uh)
• Listeria (say: lis-teer-ee-uh)
• Campylobacter (say: kam-pe-low-bak-ter)
• E. coli (say: ee kole-eye)

To avoid food poisoning, people need to prepare, cook, and store foods properly.

Do I Have Food Poisoning?

Someone who has food poisoning might:

• have an upset stomach (called nausea, say: naw-zee-uh)
• have stomach cramps
• have diarrhea (say: dy-uh-ree-uh), which may contain blood
• have a fever

Sometimes feeling sick from food poisoning shows up within hours of eating the bad food. At other times, someone may not feel sick until several days later. With mild cases of food poisoning, you will not feel sick for very long and will soon be feeling fine again.

It can be hard to tell if you have food poisoning or something else. You might do a little detective work and see who else gets the same sickness. Did they eat the same thing you did? If only people who ate that food got sick, food poisoning could be the problem.

It’s one thing to get food poisoning from something in your fridge, but imagine how many people could get sick if a restaurant served food that had these bad germs in it. When that happens, people from the health department might get involved and try to figure out what happened and make sure everyone gets the medical care they need.

What Will the Doctor Do?

If you go to the doctor, he or she will ask you a lot of questions about how you’re feeling, when you first felt sick, what you ate in the past few days, and if anyone else you know is also sick. The doctor might also take a sample of your stool (poop) and urine (pee) to test for possible germs that might have caused food poisoning.

The type of treatment you’ll get for food poisoning will depend on the specific germ that is making you sick. The doctor might give you medicine, but most of the time someone who has food poisoning doesn’t need to take medicine.

It’s also rare that a kid with food poisoning would need to go to the hospital. Usually, only people who get really dehydrated have to go to the hospital. Being dehydrated means your body has lost too much fluid due to diarrhea and vomiting. A dehydrated person can get fluids and medicine through an IV at the hospital. To keep from getting dehydrated, try to keep drinking fluids when you are sick.

You may also need to go to the hospital if you have blood in your poop. If you do see blood in your poop, you should definitely tell your parents about it.

How to Fight the Germs

Many things can be done to prevent food poisoning. These precautions should be taken at every stage a food takes — from preparation to cooking to storing leftovers. A lot of this responsibility falls on grown-ups, but kids can help fight germs, too. One of the best ways is to wash your hands if you’re helping to prepare foods.

When should you wash? Before you start helping — so germs from your hands don’t get on the food — and after so you don’t pass along germs from the food to yourself or anyone else. If you don’t, here’s how germs can travel:

1. You help make hamburger patties.
2. You get bad bacteria from the raw ground beef on your hands.
3. You hold your little sister’s hand.
4. She uses that hand to eat a snack.
5. Now the bacteria have made it inside and can make her sick.

Other steps you can take to keep your food safe include:

• Wash fruits and vegetables well before eating them.
• Only eat foods that are properly cooked. If you cut into chicken and it looks pink and raw inside, tell a grown-up.
• Look at what you’re eating and smell it, too. If something looks or smells different from normal, check with an adult before eating or drinking it. Milk is a good example. If you’ve ever had a sip of sour milk, you know you never want to taste that again! Mold (which can be green, pink, white, or brown) is also often a sign that food has spoiled.
• If you’re going to eat leftovers, ask a grown-up for help heating them up. By heating them, you can kill bacteria that grew while it was in the fridge.
• Check the date. Lots of packaged foods have expiration dates or “sell by” dates. Don’t eat a food if today’s date is after the expiration date. Use it before it expires. Some of these dates are “sell by,” which means that the food should leave store shelves by that time. Ask an adult for help deciding if it’s past the sell by date.
• Cover and refrigerate food right away. Bacteria get a good chance to grow in foods that sit at room temperature. By putting food in the fridge, you’re putting the chill on those bad germs!

Quick Steps to a Great Lunch

Whether you pack or buy your lunch, follow these guidelines:

1. Choose fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are like hitting the jackpot when it comes to nutrition. They make your plate more colorful and they’re packed with vitamins and fiber. It’s a good idea to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day, so try to fit in one or two at lunch. A serving isn’t a lot. A serving of carrots is ½ cup or about 6 baby carrots. A fruit serving could be one medium orange.
2. Know the facts about fat. Kids need some fat in their diets to stay healthy — it also helps keep you feeling full — but you don’t want to eat too much of it. Fat is found in butter, oils, cheese, nuts, and meats. Some higher-fat lunch foods include french fries, hot dogs, cheeseburgers, macaroni and cheese, and chicken nuggets. Don’t worry if you like these foods! No food is bad, but you may want to eat them less often and in smaller portions. Foods that are lower in fat are usually baked or grilled. Some of the best low-fat foods are fruits, vegetables, and skim and low-fat milk.
3. Let whole grains reign. “Grains” include breads, cereals, rice, and pasta. But as we learn more about good nutrition, it’s clear that whole grains are better than refined grains. What’s the difference? Brown rice is a whole grain, but white rice is not. Likewise, wheat bread contains whole grains, whereas 100% white bread does not.
4. Slurp sensibly. It’s not just about what you eat — drinks count, too! Milk has been a favorite lunchtime drink for a long time. If you don’t like milk, choose water. Avoid juice drinks and sodas.
5. Balance your lunch. When people talk about balanced meals, they mean meals that include a mix of food groups: some grains, some fruits, some vegetables, some meat or protein foods, and some dairy foods such as milk and cheese. Try to do this with your lunch. If you don’t have a variety of foods on your plate, it’s probably not balanced. A double order of french fries, for example, would not make for a balanced lunch.
6. Steer clear of packaged snacks. Many schools make salty snacks, candy, and soda available in the cafeteria or in vending machines. It’s OK to have these foods once in a while, but they shouldn’t be on your lunch menu.
7. Mix it up. Do you eat the same lunch every day? If that lunch is a hot dog, it’s time to change your routine. Keep your taste buds from getting bored and try something new. Eating lots of different kinds of food gives your body a variety of nutrients.
8. Quit the clean plate club. Because lunch can be a busy time, you might not stop to think whether you’re getting full. Try to listen to what your body is telling you. If you feel full, it’s OK to stop eating.
9. Use your manners. Cafeterias sometimes look like feeding time at the zoo. Don’t be an animal! Follow those simple rules your parents are always reminding you about: Chew with your mouth closed. Don’t talk and eat at the same time. Use your utensils. Put your napkin on your lap. Be polite. And don’t make fun of what someone else is eating.
10. Don’t drink milk and laugh at the same time! Whatever you do at lunch, don’t tell your friends a funny joke when they’re drinking milk. Before you know it, they’ll be laughing and that milk will be coming out their noses! Gross!

Omega-3 fish oil: Highly Recommend by Heart experts

September 17, 2008

Patients with heart diseases always face the threat of sudden death or a potentially life-threatening irregularity of the heartbeat called arrhythmia.

There is now a growing body of evidence that supplementation with omega-3 fish oil can reduce the risk of sudden death in many high-risk heart patients.

The following are all oily fish:

• Herrings
• Mackerel
• Pilchards
• Salmon
• Sardines
• Trout

These fish contains high amounts of the beneficial omega-3 oil.

A study published in the journal Circulation by Dr. Alexander Leaf and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts showed that the regular ingestion of fish oil fatty acids for 12 months may have benefited the patients due to a longer time to first potentially fatal arrhythmic event or death from any cause among patients randomized to fish oil compared with those randomized to olive-oil placebo.

It would suggest that omega-3 can help suppress the potentially fatal arrhythmia called ventricular fibrillation or VF.

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HEALTHPRACTICAL:The bittersweet facts about diabetes

September 11, 2008

One can never too young – or too paranoid – to take preventive measures against diabetes mellitus. With our fast-paced lifestyle anchored on modern technology, the temptation to eat a less-than-healthy diet and lead a sedentary lifestyle is simply too great. Factor in stress, smoking and drinking, and the worst-case scenario becomes a real possibility. Keep in mind that the risk to develop diabetes increases significantly if the disease runs in your family.

More than 150 million people in the world suffer from diabetes mellitus; by 2025, experts predicts this number to double to 300 million, with the greatest increase expected to come from developing countries such as the Philippines. About 4 million Filipinos are estimated to have diabetes mellitus, a figure that is almost certainly an underestimate because many cases remain undetected. Untreated or uncontrolled, diabetes can lead to a heart attack, stroke, blindness, amputations, kidney problems, and even death.

Leading a sedentary lifestyle, being overweight or obese, eating an unhealthy diet, a family history of the disease – if any of these apply to you, you may be at risk. If your pee trips to the toilet are becoming more frequent, if you are constantly hungry or thirsty or feel like your hands and feet are being pricked by needles, you may already have the first confirm the diagnosis through a fasting blood sugar (FBS) determination and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT).

So far, we’ve been talking about only one of several types of diabetes mellitus. There is also type 1 diabetes mellitus which usually develops in childhood and often requires lifetime insulin therapy, and gestational diabetes which develops during pregnancy and disappears after delivery. But type 2 diabetes mellitus is by far the most common.

Although there is no cure yet for diabetes, the disease is highly preventable. Simple but positive lifestyle changes, such as eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, are scientifically proven to prevent diabetes. In fact, for individuals with mildly elevated blood sugar levels- what doctors call pre-diabetics such simple lifestyle changes can prevent pre-diabetes from progressing to full-blown diabetes.

The range of treatment options for diabetes is now much broader than what was available two or three decades ago, thanks to robust research. There are a variety of oral anti-diabetes medications that target different organ systems, all of which work lower blood sugar levels. These include vildagliptin, which belongs to a new class of blood sugar-lowering medicines called DPP-4 inhibitors. Insulin therapy has gone beyond conventional disposable insulin injections, with the development of the insulin pen that holds multiple replaceable insulin cartridges and the insulin pump, a delivery device about the size of a deck of cards that can be worn on a narrow, flexible plastic tubing that ends with a needle inserted just under the skin, it can be set to administer a steady trickle of insulin pump can be programmed to release higher doses of insulin at meals and at times when blood glucose is expected to spike.

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HeathPractical’s Tip About Migraine, Begone

Having a migraine headache can be the worst feeling in the world.The cause of migraine is unknown. The condition may result from a series of reactions in the central nervous system caused by changes in the body or in the environment. There is often a family history of the disorder, suggesting that migraine sufferers may inherit sensitivity to triggers that produce inflammation in the blood vessels and nerves around the brain, causing pain.

Migraine pain is often described as throbbing or pulsating pain that is intensified by routine physical activity, coughing, straining, or lowering the head. The headache is often so severe that it interferes with daily activity and may awaken the person. The attack is debilitating, and migraine sufferers are often left feeling tired and weak once the headache has passed. Sensitivity to light; noise, even movement can cause a migraine headache to increase in pain. If you have ever had a migraine, you know it can leave you irritated and, at times, debilitated for as long as it lasts.

Everytime we feel the pain in our head, we usually take a painkiller, wait for the hurt to go away and that’s it. That is the routine for most migraine sufferers But the pills most commonly used can lead to “rebound” headaches. A new study suggests that an antiseizure drug can reduce the frequency of – and in some cases, prevent migraines without that nasty rebound.

In a trial that took place at numerous medical centers across the United States and Canada, a total of 468 patients took the drug, called topiramate, or a placebo for six and a half months. Those getting 100 mg of topiramate a day experienced roughly half as many monthly migraines per month.

Migraines are caused by hyperactive brain signals overwhelming nerve endings, topiramate seems to calm the signals. Researchers believe topiramate can stabilize brain activity so migraines don’t return, meaning patients might not have to take the medicine indefinitely, says Jan Brandes, a neurologist at the Nashville Neuroscience Group. The US Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve the use of the drug before year’s end.