Women who breathed in secondhand smoke as children or young adults were later more likely to have trouble getting pregnant and suffer more miscarriages than women not exposed to smoke, US researchers reported. They said toxins in the smoke could have permanently damaged the women’s bodies, causing the latter problems, and said their finding support restrictions on smoking. Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York studied 4,800 women who were asked to give details of all pregnancies, attempts to get pregnant, and miscarriages, as well as their history of smoking and breathing secondhand smoke. Overall, 11 per cent of the women reported difficulty becoming pregnant, and about a third lost one or more babies, the researchers wrote in the journal Tobacco Control. Women who remembered their parents smoking around them were 26 per cent more likely to have had difficulty becoming pregnant and women exposed to any secondhand smoke were 39 per cent more likely to have had a miscarriage, the team reported.Vitamin D may prevent Type 1 diabetesA new analysis of current research provides “the strongest evidence to date” that giving small children supplemental vitamin D will help prevent them from developing type 1 diabetes later on, according to the review’s co-author. Vitamin D is produced in the skin with sun exposure. Deficiency in the nutrient can lead to a host of health problems. Because breast milk typically contains little vitamin D, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends vitamin D supplements for nursing infants and UK public health authorities say that all children should receive the supplements for at least the first two years of life. Overall, they found, infants who were supplemented with Vitamin D were 29 per cent less likely to develop type 1 diabetes than children who had not received supplements. Fish diet may protect against clogged arteriesA diet rich in oily fish, which contains omega-3 fatty acids, may be why middle-aged men in Japan have fewer problems with clogged arteries than White men and men of Japanese descent in the United States, a study has found. The research, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that Japanese men living in Japan had twice the blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids and lower levels of atherosclerosis compared to middle-aged White men or Japanese-American men living in the United States.
