Adding more vegetables to children’s meal serv­ings results in increasing their vegetables intake, says a study conducted by Penn State University, USA and published in the journal Appetite (June). Ac­cording to university researchers, when they doubled vegetable servings from 60 to 120 gms, children ate 68 percent more vegetables, or an additional 21 gms. Sea­soning the vegetables with butter and salt, however, made no difference in consumption. The study sample covered 67 children aged three-five years.

“The increase we observed is equal to about one third of a serving or 12 percent of the daily recom­mended vegetable intake for young children. Using this strategy may be useful to parents, caregivers and teachers trying to encourage children to eat the rec­ommended amount of vegetables throughout the day,” says Hanim Diktas, graduate student in nutritional sci­ences at Penn State.

Teens at risk of self-harming can be identified a decade earlier

Researchers at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sci­ences Unit, University of Cambridge, have iden­tified two subgroups of adolescents who self-harm, and say it is possible to predict individuals at greatest risk almost a decade before they begin self-harming. The study published in Journal of the Ameri­can Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (May) identified adolescents who reported self-harm at age 14, from a nationally representative UK birth cohort of approximately 11,000 individuals. They discovered sig­nificant risk factors present as early as age five, nearly a decade before they reported self-harming.

The first group showed a long history of poor mental health, as well as bullying before they self-harmed. For the second group, however, self-harming behaviour was harder to predict early in childhood. But one of the key signs was a greater willingness to take part in risk-taking behaviour, which is linked to impulsivity.

“Our results suggest that boosting younger chil­dren’s self-esteem, making sure that schools imple­ment anti-bullying measures, and providing advice on sleep training, could help reduce self-harm levels years later,” says Ducan Astle, programme leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

Mindfulness training helps children sleep better

Children who learn techniques such as deep breathing and yoga sleep longer and better, says a Stanford University study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (July). According to university researchers, at-risk children gained more than an hour of sleep per night after participating in mindfulness curriculums at their elementary schools. Children in the study lived in two low-income, primarily Hispanic communities of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The study is the first to use polysomnography tech­niques, which measure brain activity, to assess how school-based mindfulness training changes children’s sleep. The curriculum taught children how to relax and manage stress, but it did not instruct them on how to get more sleep.

“The children who received the curriculum slept 74 minutes more per night on average, than they had be­fore the intervention. That’s a huge change,” says the study’s senior author, Ruth O’Hara, Ph D, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford.

Children who overload on sugar develop health problems

Children who consume excess sugar are at a greater risk of developing obesity, hyperactivity and cognitive impairment in adulthood, reveals a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience (June).Queensland University of Technology (QUT) research­ers, who conducted the study trial on mice, found that sugar consumption over a 12-week period “significantly boosts” weight gain, and elicits an “abnormal and ex­cessive” stimulation of the nervous system. It also neg­atively impacts memory, which is one of the symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

According to Prof. Selena Bartlett, QUT neuroscien­tist and lead author, many children, adolescents, and adults in more than 60 countries have a diet consist­ing of more than four times the sugar (100g) recom­mended by the World Health Organisation (25g per person per day). “Human trials would need to be done but our study suggests a link between the long-term overconsumption of sugar, beginning at young age, which occurs more commonly in the Western diet, and an increased risk of developing persistent hyperactiv­ity and neurocognitive deficits in adulthood,” she says.

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