The Checkup

Would you be more willing to administer CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to a stranger if you could skip the mouth-to-mouth part?

New research presented last week at the American Heart Association's Resuscitation Symposium shows that would be just fine. In fact, performing the rapid, deep chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth breathing may actually boost a heart attack victim's survival odds.

Soldiers serving the small former Soviet country Moldova are being fed extra garlic and onions in hopes that those foods will help fend off swine flu.

Is that really likely to help keep them healthy?

The Associated Press reports that 24 out of 6,500 Moldovan soldiers have come down with H1N1 influenza in the past two weeks. To stem the tide of sickness, the army is adding the equivalent of a small onion and a few cloves of garlic to their daily diets.

The country apparently received a supply of H1N1 influenza vaccine earlier this month. It's not clear whether any of that was allocated to the armed forces.

As I wrote a few months ago, vaccination is the best defense against influenza. Experts I interviewed noted that, while maintaining a healthful diet, level of physical activity and sleep schedule can help keep your immune system in shape so it's prepared to fight infections such as influenza, there are no magical foods that specifically fend off the flu.

Garlic (and, to a lesser extent, onions, which are relatives in the Allium family) has long been believed to possess immunity-boosting and other health-promoting properties. Recent research suggests that the chemical allicin, which garlic contains in spades, releases sulfenic acid, a strong antioxidant, when it decomposes. (This is why experts recommend crushing garlic before eating or cooking with it.) Those antioxidants may help keep us healthy by interfering with the ability of roaming oxygen cells, known as free radicals, to damage our cells.

Unfortunately, scientific research into garlic's capacity to keep us healthy has been quite limited. What little there is suggests that garlic might reduce the length or severity of a cold. But there's nothing to show that garlic has any power over influenza, of the H1N1 variety or any other.

Which is not to say that garlic and onions aren't excellent foods. The former contains such good-for-you nutrients as manganese, Vitamin B6, Vitamin C and selenium; onions provide chromium (which helps our bodies use insulin), Vitamin C and several other antioxidant flavonoids. And both can make healthful dishes more appealing by adding lots of pungent flavor.

I just hope those Moldovan soldiers are being issued breath mints, too.

Don't think I don't see you glaring at me. Yes, those are my kids, coughing up a storm. And, yes, if they were your kids, I'd be glaring at you.

I wish I could hang big signs around my son's and daughter's necks saying "No longer contagious -- we think." As I wrote last week, both kids have been vaccinated against both seasonal flu and H1N1. They got the latter shots, though, only after they'd both had a bout of what the pediatrician's office figured was likely H1N1. A cough came with each of their illnesses. When the other symptoms faded away, the cough remained.

I followed the rules: I kept them home for 24 hours after fever subsided. I've kept an eye on them to make sure some secondary infection has not set in, looking for new symptoms such as difficulty breathing. And, while you might not have noticed with all that hacking going on, I have reminded them frequently -- and they have obeyed -- to cough into their elbow rather than in the open air.

Still, I feel awkward taking them out in public. If I were a stranger, I'd back away if I saw/heard one of them coming. That's where those signs-around-the-neck would come in handy.

To reassure myself that I've not committed a public disservice by releasing my coughing children into the world, I spoke with Henry Bernstein, professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. He said that as long as I'd kept them home until their temperature had been back to normal, without help from Tylenol, for 24 hours, it was fine to let them loose without fear that they'd infect others.

That lingering cough, he added, is characteristic of many respiratory-tract infections, not just H1N1. "Any virus that invades the upper respiratory tract can cause persistent cough," Bernstein said. Having the cough linger longer than a week or 10 days, as my kids' have, isn't all that common, though, so I still should be on the lookout for those secondary infections.

But in general, Bernstein explained, a cough is a protective mechanism designed to keep foreign stuff out of the airway during illness and afterward. "The virus disrupts the epithelium lining the airway, and that takes a while to heal," he said, which explains why a cough might last a while, too.

As for me and my multiple sclerosis, which places me at risk of complications should I get influenza, I've still not been able to get an H1N1 vaccination because my risk category isn't as high a priority as others such as pregnant women and health-care workers. I've got a packet of Tamiflu in my purse, just in case symptoms show up.

How about you? How is this flu-and-cold season treating you and your family?

Remember the old joke about walking and chewing gum at the same time? Well, there's new evidence out today about what might be the modern equivalent: Walking and talking on a cell phone. And it's no laughing matter.

Researchers at the University of Illinois studied 36 college students as they talked on a cell phone while walking on a treadmill in a "virtual environment" meant to simulate crossing a busy street. Those who were talking on a cell phone took 25 percent longer to cross the street than those who were not on the phone, the researchers report in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. They were also more likely to fail to cross the street in the 30 seconds alloted. Those who were not on the phone had no problem making it across in time. Those who were listening to music did just fine

In a second, unpublished study, the researchers performed the same study on 48 adults ages 60 and older, including some with a history of falling. Older adults on the phone got "run over" about 15 percent more often than those who were not chatting on their cells and those with a history of falling fared even worse. (None of the college students were run over.)

Is your teenage kid overweight? If so, you're not alone (though sometimes it probably feels as though you are). Federal statistics show that nearly a third of American children and teens are overweight or obese.

I've been learning a lot about how to help overweight kids get to a healthy weight as I researched this week's "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column. While much of the advice out there sounds reasonable, some of it seems to come from people who have never raised a teen. I'm particularly put off by the widely held and overly simple notion that parents' modeling healthful behaviors leads to children following their lead. I think that may work with younger kids, and I know it can pay off later in life (my mother's daily 3-mile-walk certainly inspired my current commitment to daily exercise). But not many teens I know are outwardly eager to mimic their parents' behavior. Aren't the teen years when they're supposed to start separating themselves from us?

But, as I said, some of the tips seem as though they might really work. Here are a few I that seemed most likely to help:

• Get a physician involved in evaluating your teen's weight. He or she can take an objective view as to whether your child is in fact overweight and dispassionately discuss a game plan for getting on track.


• Start early. It's much easier to instill healthful habits in little kids than to get teens to adopt new ways all of a sudden. Still, be prepared for your child to abandon some of those healthful habits once you're not the only one providing his meals and overseeing his daily activities.


• Consider "diet" a four-letter word. Instead of focusing on deprivation or even directly on weight loss, talk in terms of developing healthful eating and exercise habits that will serve your teen well now and throughout his or her life.


• Provide mostly healthful foods, but allow for occasional treats.


• Help your teen learn to figure out when he or she is really hungry or just wanting to eat for reasons having nothing to do with fueling the body.


• Let your teen help plan meals and shop for food.


• Make sure your kid gets plenty of sleep -- 8 to 9 hours a night -- and regularly eats breakfast.


• Take a hard look at how much time your teen spends in front of screens -- TV, computer and video -- and work with him or her to come up with a reasonable limit. Most experts advise no more than 2 hours' screen time per day.


• Expand your definition of physical activity, of which kids should get 60 minutes' worth a day. For kids who don't enjoy -- or have time for -- organized sports, that can mean dancing, hula-hooping or kicking a ball around the yard. And remember that six 10-minute sessions throughout the day work just as well as one 60-minute block of activity.


• Don't single out the overweight kid. Involve the entire family in new, healthful eating routines and physical activities.

Fox Broadcasting Company's breakout hit show "Glee" tackled a tough issue in the episode aired last Wednesday evening: Is it possible for able-bodied high-school kids to really understand what life is like for a kid in a wheelchair?

Left to right: Jenna Ushkowitz, Chris Colfer, Kevin McHale, Amber Riley and Lea Michele play singers in "Glee," which evokes "Election" and "Grease." (By Carin Baer -- Fox)

The plot, in brief: Glee club advisor/teacher William Schuester is disappointed when the kids in the club are content to have their one wheelchair-bound club-member ride to a competition in his father's car rather than raise money to rent a wheelchair-accessible bus. So he obtains a bunch of wheelchairs and insists that all the glee-clubbers spend at least three hours a day in them -- and perform a song-and-dance number in them, too. Enhanced appreciation ensues.

But the episode, clearly intended to raise awareness of the challenges people in wheelchairs might face in going about their daily business, has met with criticism from advocates for disabled people.

The issue: The gifted young actor who plays the student in the wheelchair is not himself in a wheelchair. The advocacy group argues that there are plenty of young performers in wheelchairs who could have been cast in that role. The "Glee" people counter that they've worked hard to make their cast inclusive and that finding a star who can sing, act and radiate personality the way actor Kevin McHale does was daunting enough.

IMHO, "Glee" is the best thing to happen to television in years. It's one of the few shows you can watch with your teen-aged kids knowing that everyone will love it. It has juicy story lines that don't get too edgy, and it's bursting with toe-tapping music. If you haven't tuned in already, I recommend you give it a try.

I was going to blog about one of the show's weaker story lines involving a woman who's faking a pregnancy to keep her husband (the glee-club advisor) in line. How common is it for women to fake pregnancies? I'll come back to that question another day. Because this wheelchair issue is much more compelling.

I can see both sides of the story. Perhaps there is a young person in a wheelchair out there who could act the role of Artie as well as -- or better than -- McHale has. On the other hand, the show's creators clearly are trying hard to do right by people of varying races and ethnicities, sexual orientations and levels of high-school popularity.

The episode featuring the wheelchairs also features a subplot about a student with Down syndrome, played by a young actress with Down syndrome, and another involving a mentally handicapped person, again played by an actress who appears to be mentally handicapped.

So I'm inclined to give "Glee" a pass on this. How about you? Please share your point of view in the comments section, and register your opinion in today's poll:

When my family saw the current ad for Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats the other night, we all guffawed. The commercial depicts what I guess is a boxing match between a great big Mini-Wheat and a tiny little Honey-Nut Cheerio. The message: Mini-Wheats have "more than double the fiber and whole grain in every tasty bite."

Well, duh! That Mini-Wheat is enormous. Of course it's going to beat that puny Cheerio in any kind of match up, right?

A new and very small study shows that kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to have worse handwriting than their non-ASD peers.

Of 14 kids with ASD and 14 without who were asked to complete a standardized handwriting test, those with ASD specifically had trouble forming letter shapes correctly. Otherwise their handwriting was fine. They spaced and aligned letters correctly and -- perhaps because the test dictated the size of the letters -- made them the right size.

In the ongoing debate about which diet is the best, here's a question you may not have heard before: Which diet is most likely to make you happy?

A new study, surprisingly, indicates that when it comes to elevating your mood, not all diets are created equal.

Among the interesting things I learned while reporting this week's "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column about chewing gum's role in weight management was that those of us who prefer traditional sugar-sweetened gum to sugar-free are in the minority -- and, for the most part, out of luck.

Gilbert Leveille, executive director of the Wrigley Science Institute, told me that "Clearly the consumer preference has been for sugar-free gum," largely because of what he called the "perceived effect" of sugared gum on the increased incidence of dental caries (cavities, to you and me) in children. (That relationship, he noted, doesn't in fact hold true.) Nonetheless, it's increasingly hard to find a decent stick of sugar-sweetened gum on store shelves. Even Wrigley's traditionally sugared brands such as Juicy Fruit, Big Red and Doublemint now include, in addition to sugar, a tad of the artificial sweetener aspartame as flavor enhancer.

As I've written before, I don't care for artificial sweeteners. Whether they're safe to use or not, I just don't like the way they taste or feel in my mouth, and I don't enjoy the headache I often get after consuming them. I used to enjoy an occasional piece of sugar-sweetened gum; the little bit of sugar (10 calories' worth, as opposed to the 5 calories per stick in sugar-free gum) often was just enough to keep me from craving a bigger dose of sweets.

Sure, there are still sugar-laden gums on the market. But what grownup really wants to chew a big wad of Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum? (Okay, this grownup, but only once in a great while....) In any case, even Wrigley's Hubba Bubba has artificial sweeteners now, too.

I find the mass switch to artificial sweeteners particularly interesting in light of Americans' apparent insatiable thirst for calorically sweetened (via sugar or, more often, high fructose corn syrup) sodas. We drink so much of the stuff that many experts think taxing sweetened sodas is a good way to attack the national obesity problem. It would appear that consumer preference is not quite as strong for sugar-free soft drinks.

Do you miss sugar-sweetened chewing gum? How do you reconcile the demand for sweetened sodas with the demand for artificially sweetened gum? While you're chewing on that, please take part in today's poll.