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In this edition of EmpowHER's "HER Week In Health" for the week of September 16, 2011 Bailey Mosier talks about how birth control pills may actually affect women’s memory. We’ll also learn that serving your children a glass of milk a day can be instrumental to their long-term health. And lastly, we’ll take a very real and very serious look at the way parent’s alcohol intake at home affects their teenage children.
Hi, I’m Bailey Mosier and this is EmpowHER’s HER Week in Health.
In this week’s edition, we learn that birth control pills actually affect women’s memory. We’ll also learn that serving your children a glass of milk a day can be instrumental to their long-term health. And lastly, we’ll take a very real and very serious look at the way parent’s alcohol intake at home affects their teenage children.
A UC Irvine research team recently found that women who take oral contraceptives see an improvement in their ability to remember the gist of emotional events, whereas women not using contraceptives better retain specific details.
The researchers say the change makes sense because contraceptives suppress sex hormones such as estrogen to prevent pregnancy … hormones that have been linked to left brain memory – the side of the brain associated with logic.
But have no fear, this difference is simply in type of information remembered, not a deficit.
The researchers say their findings could help explain why men remember differently than women – men retain more of the gist whereas women tend to recall specifics.
A Harvard University study found that milk-drinking teens were also likely to be milk-drinking adults – a lifelong habit that lowers the risk for type 2 diabetes.
Researchers studied teenage and adult food intake patterns and health risk in more than 37,000 women. They found women who drank the most milk as adults and consumed the most milk products in their teen years had a 43 percent lower risk for type 2 diabetes compared to non-milk drinkers.
The milk-drinking teens retained their dairy habit into adulthood and gained less weight over time which is another important risk factor for diabetes.
Dietary Guidelines recommend three servings of fat free or lowfat milk each day for high-quality protein, calcium and vitamin D.
Researchers from the University of Florida found that parents who drink – even moderately – may increase the risk that their children will drink and drive as adults.
The team collected information from nearly 10,000 teens and their parents, and followed up with a second survey seven years later.
About 6 percent of teens whose parents drank said they drove under the influence when they reached 21 years of age, where only 2 percent of those whose parents did not drink drove under the influence.
Researchers conclude that efforts to prevent drinking and driving among young adults must start when kids are younger than 15 years of age, and parents must also be educated about the consequences of their behavior because parents influence their children more than they realize.
That wraps up your EmpowHER HER Week in Health. Join me here, at EmpowHER.com every Friday as we recap the latest in women’s health.
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