Imagine dropping by the grocery store to buy some milk – but alongside cow’s milk you see human milk from donors too. The cow’s milk costs about $3 per gallon, and there are mountains upon mountains of containers on the shelves. The human donor milk costs more than $500 per gallon and shelves are nearly empty. While dramatized here, this is the situation some neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) and families encounter trying to feed their tiniest babies.
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Following a series of racist events and civil unrest, increased attention is being given to the interpretation of “race/ethnicity” – a construct that correlates with a person’s self-identified geographical origins and/or cultural affiliations – in health science research. In particular, researchers are making a conscious effort to recognize and articulate that racial/ethnic disparities in health and disease risk are due to social experiences and structural inequities that operate at institutional and interpersonal levels, and influence physiology.
I remember my grandmother talking about always being hungry during her four pregnancies. This makes sense: the advice at the time was to restrict gestational weight gain (GWG) to no more than 15 pounds. Flash forward to my own mother’s pregnancy when she was encouraged to “eat for two” and gain around 30 pounds regardless of starting weight. Now, during my first pregnancy, it’s my turn to grapple with the question of how much weight to gain.
Predicting who will develop diabetes mellitus, specifically type 2 diabetes (T2D), would greatly enhance the ability to care for people and help reduce risk. How far are we from being able to accurately predict the onset of diabetes?
Family socioeconomic status and the environments where children live, learn and play (i.e., their homes, neighborhoods, and schools) are known to contribute to children’s and adolescents’ health trajectory and may specifically impact metabolic risk. . Research shows that children living in deprived neighborhoods (i.e., high poverty and unemployment rates, lack of healthy food choices) are less likely to stay on a healthy developmental trajectory than their peers. Commonly used research indices on neighborhood environments only represent selected aspects of socioeconomic disadvantage, such as poverty, low income level and unemployment and don’t adequately describe other conditions in the same neighborhood that may counteract the risks associated with living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, such as access to healthy food choices.
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