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A HAPPY AND HEALTHY 2008 FROM EVERYONE AT HEALTHY AND ESSENTIAL.
All the staff at Healthy and Essential would like to wish you and your familiy a healthy 2008.
As Sight Training becomes the new best-seller in the Nintendo DS charts, a 2007 study suggests that parents should be placing a sharper focus on Omega-3s in their diet, if they want to set their sights on great visual health for their baby.
Researchers from the USA and Sweden believe parents should keep their eye on the ball when it comes to nutrition, particularly during a pregnancy. Premature babies have a higher risk of having a DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) deficiency and of being born blind, so the time in the womb and the nutrition derived from the mother can be hugely important to the child’s vision.
Babies born before their eyes are fully developed, frequently experience the eye disease retinopathy, which involves the loss of blood vessels in the eye, causing the retina to be deprived of oxygen. This sets off alarm signals in the baby’s body, resulting in new vessel growth. This condition, called ROP, leads to excessive branching of the vessels, which can cause bleeding, scarring and blindness. Stevie Wonder is reputed to have suffered ROP, due to being a premature baby.
Currently, retinopathy affects 5 per cent of premature babies in the UK. As the retina is the light sensitive part of the eye, where nerves pick up images conveyed into the eye, just like the film in a camera, retinopathy can greatly affect a child’s view of the world.
The American and Swedish study involved feeding Omega-3s and Omega-6s to mice with retinopathy. Those with a Japanese diet, based on Omega-3s, experienced half as much abnormal vessel growth as those fed a Western diet, based more on Omega-6s. Their retinas were also less inflamed, with the warning signals that lead to vessel growth being much better controlled.
Diabetics and older people suffering from AMD, a disease of the macula part of the eye, which controls central vision, can also experience retinopathy and should also welcome the results of the new study. If, as Dr Kip M Connor, of the Children’s Hospital Bolton, points out, just a 2 per cent change in dietary Omega-3 fed to mice results in a decline in retinopathy severity of 40-50 per cent, the use of Omega-3s in this field could have wonderful possibilities.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School, the National Institute of Public Health Mexico and the Schools of Medicine and Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, have also carried out research suggesting Omega-3s greatly assist the vision of premature babies.
They found that adding DHA to baby formula significantly improved the visual performance of pre-term infants at two and four months of age, when their results were measured against a statistical base taken from studies carried out over the last 35 years.
Their work supports other experiments showing that long chain polyunsaturated acids may enhance the function of photoreceptors - the elements in the eyes that allow us to process images. Whilst they still do not know if the improvement in a newborn’s visual function extends into later life, or whether the impact of DHA also applies to non premature babies, the findings are helping a weight of evidence stack up in support of DHA’s positive benefits for pre-term babies.
DHA supplementation is something in which Healthy & Essential and its team of medical experts have long believed. We no longer derive our Omega-3s via our diets, thanks to the move away from fish and animal brain based diets, to ones based on animal fats, over the course of centuries. Nutritional imbalance results, with our bodies not having been able to evolve the efficient enzyme systems to break these fats down into essential fatty acid metabolites.
Deficiencies in DHA and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) are continuously linked to slower cognitive development, reduced head size and brain weight, behavioural and learning problems in young children and poorer visual ability in infants.
With hundreds of studies suggesting that Mums-to-be should take DHA supplementation, to help feed their foetus the nutrients their body cannot naturally supply, our adult DHA capsules are a big favourite with customers.
Our range also enables a mother to continue to offer her child the support of DHA after birth, by slipping the contents of a capsule into baby milk. The junior range then becomes the option for the child able to take their own capsule, enjoying its pleasant fruit flavour, or having it incorporated into a drink or meal.
Well before your child is able to take advantage of sight training through a computer game, you can help your child’s view of the world develop before your eyes. If you are not blind to the advantages of Omega-3s for your child, you may well see and experience tangible results.
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