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Avoid Coffee When Pregnant to Safeguard Brain Development
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Sip Non-Alcoholic Beer to Improve Liver Disease Non-alcoholic beer is booming, with U.S. sales up by 39 percent last year, and it now poses a health benefit as a study-proven dietary supplement for people with cirrhosis of the liver. Many nutritional supplements don’t work for such patients because of limited availability, cost, poor taste and side effects such as bloating, nausea and abdominal pain. Theorizing that non-alcoholic beer has the advantage of being inexpensive and easy to consume while having many anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds, Mexican researchers provided 43 liver cirrhosis patients with dietary improvements and simple exercise routines. Half the patients drank non-alcoholic beer with their meals; the control group drank water. After eight weeks, the non-alcoholic beer group showed improvements in blood vessel health, exercise performance levels and muscle mass, along with a better perceived quality of life compared to the control group. “A clear trend towards an improvement in social function and mental health was observed in the group receiving non-alcoholic beer,” conclude the authors in World Journal of Hepatology. “Moreover, hops have been shown to improve symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress over a four-week period, partially explaining the results found.”
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A mother’s coffee drinking during pregnancy can change important pathways in an infant’s developing brain, raising the risk of behavioral issues, attention difficulty and hyperactivity years later, say researchers at the University of Rochester, in New York. Analyzing thousands of brain scans of 9- and 10-yearolds, researchers found clear changes in how white matter tracks, which form connections between brain regions, were organized in children whose mothers reported consuming caffeine while pregnant. “These are sort of small effects and it’s not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal, but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long-term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy,” says John Foxe, Ph.D., principal investigator of the university’s Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Previous studies have found that a fetus does not have enough of the enzyme necessary to break down caffeine when it crosses the placenta.
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