Your Health This Week

Drinking even a weeetle bit during early pregnancy may lead to mental health problems in children, especially girls. We are talking less than one drink per week over the first trimester showing visible psychological symptoms in a group of 9,000 U.K. kids aged 4 to 9. This should be especially concerning for Australians. A new survey found that half of all women in the country ignore advice on alcohol limits during pregnancy.

In more “it’s freaky to be pregnant news,” fetal exposure to cigarette smoke can lead to behavioral problems. Oh yes. Just one more reason not to smoke while pregnant. Or not to have children. Your choice, really.

But if you DO want to have babies and you DO want them to grow up smart and healthy, why not eat lots and lots of fish. A new study of almost 12,000 U.K. mums giving birth in 1991 and 1992 found that more fish = more omega-3s = higher IQ for kids at age 8. The benefits, say the authors, outweigh risks posed by the neurotoxicological effects of mercury in fish; the best developmental scores were for kids whose mothers ate more than the EPA-recommended 340 grams of seafood per week. So eat up!

And and and, if you want your brilliant, smoke-and-alcohol-free baby to scale the social ladder, be sure and breastfeed. Boobs just seem to be the way up in this world.

We want all you body builders out there to know that soy protein is as good as whey protein for bulking up. In case you were wondering. Oh, and eating lots of soy protein won’t turn you into a girl or nothin’ neither. In case you were worried.

If you are, however, already a girl, please do clean your desk. Right now. In a Clorox bleach-funded University of Arizona study, women’s computers, keyboards and mice had three to four times more bacteria than the desk clutter of their male counterparts.

In counterintuitive news of the week, toothpaste, mouthwash and breath strips might actually lead to a foul, smelly mouth. All contain some form of drying agent, which leads to bad breath. Oh and breath strips have antifreeze in them. Which isn’t so much stinky as it is just gross. I knew those things freaked me out for a reason.

Oh, and meth is, like, bad for your heart. And I thought it was just a harmless vitamin, but there you go.

Disclaimer: Your Health This Week and Inkling Magazine would like to remind you that this is a humorous article. We do not encourage you to annihilate the microbes in your workspace any more frequently than normal. Please don’t take the joke about meth being a vitamin even remotely seriously. Likewise, we deem inadvisable the stuffing of breath strips into an overheating car. It’s a complicated world out there; please use your brain whenever possible.