I have been shopping with Melaleuca The Wellness Company for a little over a year now. Some of my favorites are the haircare and facecare lines. I also love their mascara and lipstick. The products that have made the most difference to me nd my family are the cleaning products… ecosense. They smell good, do not give me a headache or make me sneeze and they don’t irriatate my skin. The renew lotion is my other favorite product. It has been proven to help with exzema and psoriasis. Here is some information about things that have been in the news.
Why we shop at Melaleuca…
Are Our Kids the Sickest Generation?
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More kids than ever before are diagnosed with bipolar, ADHD, allergies, and asthma. Why, and what does it mean for your child?
By Jean Weiss for MSN Health & Fitness
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Did you leave out the peanut butter sandwich when you packed school lunches today? Most everyone knows at least one family that has a child with a serious food allergy. Yet a generation ago, we’d scarcely heard about the problem. The same can be said for several conditions now on the rise in children. More kids are getting diagnosed with bipolar, ADHD, allergies, and asthma in this decade than in previous decades. Some attribute this increase to improved diagnosing, others to over-diagnosing. Still others view the sick-kid trend as the proverbial canary in the coalmine: More children are getting sick because they are fragile and affected by an increasingly industrialized world.
“I do think we are in the midst of an epidemic of these child disorders,” says Dr. Kenneth Bock, co-founder of the Rhinebeck Health Center and author of Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma, Allergies (Ballantine Books, 2007). “I don’t believe it is all due to better diagnosis.”
Bock suggests that children predisposed to these medical conditions are more likely to manifest them after cumulative exposure to pollutants such as heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, flame retardants, and chemicals from plastic additives to name a few. “All those kinds of things together are increasing the toxic load on children,” he says.
The simplest thing parents can do for their child is decrease their exposure to toxins, Bock says, whether it means eating pesticide-free food or avoiding heavy metals and harmful pollutants found in myriad products such as toys, computers, and clothing. “This is a recent phenomenon over the last 20 years,” says Brock. “We are living in a chemical soup, and it’s the kids that are the most susceptible.”
The link between environment and child illness is especially evident in conditions such as allergies and asthma. The tie to bipolar disorder and ADHD has been more complex to identify. Most experts in the field of pediatric mental disorders attribute the increase in diagnosis to a better understanding of mental illness, saying it could be that environment plays a small role.
ADHD: Up by a whopping 400 percent
Increased understanding of mental disorders in children has also led to a rise in the pediatric diagnosis of ADHD, by as much as 400 percent or higher over the last 25 years, according to some estimates. It is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder in childhood, affecting between 3 percent and 5 percent of school-age children in the United States . Worldwide use of prescriptions to treat ADHD in children has increased by 274 percent, with the United States prescribing more medication for ADHD than any other country.
“More attention was paid to mental health issues in children during the ’90s when people realized that a lot of conditions that related to the brain start in childhood,” says Dr. Ben Vitiello, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and a leading expert in child and adolescent ADHD.
Vitiello says that some of the increase could be due to partial diagnosis of ADHD in children. He discounts the theory that environmental toxins are the cause of the majority of ADHD, though new research has been done examining whether food additives and coloring contribute to ADHD. “The impact of these environmental toxins is very small, if present at all,” he says.
Sometimes children with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed to have ADHD. Children with sleep disorders can present with ADHD symptoms, so sometimes they are diagnosed with the mood disorder as well.
Bipolar Disorder: A 40-fold increase among kids
Bipolar disorder is another area in which kids have shown more susceptibility in recent years, a phenomenon experts attribute to improved understanding that mental illness affects children as well as adults.
A study published in the September 2007 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry reported a 40-fold increase in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder over the last decade. The study isn’t comprehensive enough to determine the reasons why, but a snapshot view of the trend, says co-author Dr. Gonzalo Laje, an associate clinical investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health. “What this study could be suggesting is that there may be an increased recognition of the disorder and therefore it is being diagnosed more,” says Laje. “It could also mean it is an overdiagnosis, but we can’t in any way categorically say it is or it isn’t. Probably it is a combination of both.”
The study of serious mental illness in children and adolescence is more recent. “Twenty-five years ago people would even debate whether the diagnosis [for bipolar disorder in children] existed,” Laje says. “Symptoms of serious mental illness in children and adolescents are now recognized. Today nobody argues that this diagnosis exists.”
To identify bipolar disorder in children a physician still relies on an adult model of symptoms, however, so they are still defining how the symptoms manifest in the pediatric population. “We are catching up on our criteria,” says Laje.
There is also a noteworthy overlap in the pediatric population between bipolar and ADHD. According to Laje, 30 percent of children with bipolar also have ADHD, and it is an area for further study.
Allergies: 40 percent of children now have allergies
Dr. Asriani Chiu, associate professor of allergy and immunology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, says more children react today to allergies due to the interplay between genetics and environment. “There are genetic tendencies—we know that allergies run in the family—but [there are] definitely environmental triggers as well,” Chiu says.
Chiu says an increase in industrial pollutants, combined with cleaner living conditions, have interfered with the natural function of our immune system, which is meant to be exposed to germs and protect our bodies from illness. “Because we are not exposing ourselves to all of the dirt and the endotoxins that we would have seen, say, if we lived on a farm, our bodies have nothing else to do,” says Chiu. “Then pollutants make our respiratory tract more susceptible,” and our immune system kicks into overdrive—essentially overreacting to foods, or to other allergens, in children already prone to allergies.
Allergies are divided into two categories: food allergies and upper respiratory tract allergies. The later type of allergy is less closely associated with food allergies, and more closely associated with asthma (a condition of the lower-respiratory tract).
>From 1997 to 2002, child food allergies increased from .68 percent to between 2 percent and 4 percent; adult food allergies remained the same slightly more than 1 percent. And Chiu says there has been an increase in upper respiratory tract allergies, now affecting 40 percent of children. Another troubling side effect of allergies is the link to asthma: Two-thirds of patients with allergies affecting their upper respiratory tract also develop symptoms in their lower respiratory tract.
Asthma: Up by 160 percent
Asthma, an inflammation of the lower respiratory tract that creates coughing, wheezing, and difficulty breathing, is closely linked to allergies and has also been on the rise among children. Chiu says that asthma, like allergies, has increased due to an increase in environmental pollutants that irritate the lungs, making them more susceptible to inflammation and asthma. She also attributes more diagnosis of asthma to an increase in awareness of symptoms. “It could be that we are better at identifying these conditions,” says Chiu. “There are doctors and families and teachers noticing this more.”
Asthma rates in children under age 5 increased more than 160 percent from the 1980s to the 1990s. Of people with asthma, 70 percent also have allergies—and children, Chiu says, are more likely than adults to get asthma triggered by an allergic reaction. “More than 70 percent of people with asthma also suffer from allergies, meaning there is an allergic component to their asthma,” says Chiu. “We realize that there is a strong connection between the two.” So much so that an oft-used way to treat asthma is to first treat allergies. “It is the single airway hypothesis,” says Chiu. “If you can gain better control of the upper respiratory symptoms, then you have better control of the lower.”
Sleep Disorders: Difficulty Here May Be a Cause or a Symptom
Sleep, or rather lack of it, is a favorite topic among parents who incessantly ask each other: Are you getting any? Some childhood sleep troubles are normal. Others, it turns out, could be a red flag.
We now know that 25 percent of children have some type of sleep disorder, but data on whether this is an increase is scarce. “We haven’t been keeping statistics on sleep for all that long,” says Dr. Judy Owens, an associate professor of pediatrics at Brown Medical School in Providence , R.I. , who runs a pediatric sleep disorder clinic. “The few studies that have looked at prevalence of sleep disorders in general pediatric clinics show higher rates of sleep problems now compared to 30 years ago.”
Now that sleep is on the radar, researchers are discovering it plays a key role—both as a precursor to serious childhood disorders and as a side effect. Sleep issues in children have been linked to obesity, asthma, allergies, ADHD, and bipolar disorder.
Obesity, asthma and allergies in kids are risk factors for sleep apnea. The misery of allergies and asthma (trouble breathing, itchy skin, some medications) can also disturb a child’s sleep. But the relationship between sleep and ADHD, as well as other mood disorders, is just now beginning to be understood. “There is mounting evidence that sleep problems may be the early sign of psychiatric disorders,” says Owens. “Clearly sleep problems exacerbate mood issues, and mood issues make sleep problems worse.”
The link between bipolar disorder and sleep is less understood, except that children in their manic phase need less sleep. “I do see a lot of kids who initially get diagnosed with ADHD and the diagnosis evolves to bipolar, and those kids have tremendous sleep disorders,” says Owens.
It’s more common for children with ADHD to have sleep issues, she says, due to issues that often go along with the disorder, such as anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems. A subgroup of kids with ADHD has trouble regulating its sleep, just as it has trouble regulating its attention. But if your child can’t sleep, and is having trouble focusing at school, don’t worry yet. Conversely, Owens says, a child with sleep problems often displays ADHD symptoms, so it’s possible you just need to figure out how to get that kid more ZZZs. Please check out my website at www.workathomeunited.com/tanyaf . It deals more with the business side, but if you contact me I would be glad to share with you how you can be a perferred customer and have a healthier home!!
