Family Health Handbook

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By: Margaret O. Kirk, Photo: Peter Cade/Getty Images Information overload and scary medical studies got you down? Here's what you need to know to keep your family fit and healthy—and even help boost your kid's IQ. When Claudia Huot, a Philadelphia lawyer, reads the health headlines, she can't help but see her husband and three school-age kids. Do children really inherit picky eating habits from their parents? Her husband, Joe, acts like he's allergic to salad—and so do Charlie, 13, Peter, 11, and Olivia, 9. Does sleep really affect a child's IQ? Hmm, what time did Peter go to bed last night? From diabetes to dieting, fitness to fatigue, the deluge of landmark medical studies is often more confusing and contradictory than constructive. What to believe? Dismiss? The future of the Huot family's health may depend on these new findings—but who has time to weed through what's out there? Luckily for Claudia, and you, we do. After much research and consultations with some very smart family health experts from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), we've come up with ten of the latest family health breakthroughs and must-knows. It's important information for you, the family health manager—a role most working moms assume as the person in the household who schedules the doctors' appointments, picks up the prescriptions, plans the menus and drags the kids away from Wii long enough to attend hockey practice. With all of that—not to mention a career—your time is limited. So here's a crib sheet on new research, what you need to know and how you can use this information to boost your family's health, now and in the future. Picky Eating Is Genetic Children's aversions to trying new foods are mostly inherited, according to University College London research (August 2007). What You Need to Know It's no secret that children can be fussy eaters and that parents are constantly looking for new ways to deal with food battles. But the reason your kid turns his nose up at whole-grain noodles might be traced back through your family tree. The study found that unwillingness to try new foods (a condition called neophobia) is 78 percent genetic and 22 percent environmental. What You Can Do Our experts caution that it's not worth turning the dinner table into a battleground in order to get a child to try new foods. 1  2  3  4  5  6  7