SUNDAY, Sept.1, 2024Backpacks. Notebooks. Folders. Pencils. These are all essentials for a good start to your children’s school year, but what about their nutrition? As summer ends and kids return to classrooms, one culinary medicine expert offers up easy ways to help your children eat healthy foods during the school day. School lunches have gotten…  read on >  read on >

A new, tougher rule on the sale of tobacco products will require retailers to check the IDs of any buyers under the age of 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday. The final rule, which will go into effect Sept. 30, also restricts tobacco vending machine sales to spaces that are limited to people…  read on >  read on >

Teaching schoolkids to practice mindfulness can boost their mental health — and, maybe, even their grades. That’s the takeaway from a new review of more than three dozen research studies on school-based mindfulness interventions, such as seated or slow-walking meditation.  In a nutshell, these programs teach kids to pay attention to the present moment and…  read on >  read on >

Breastfeeding helps women shed those extra pounds of “pregnancy weight,” a new study finds, and the effect is even more pronounced for moms who were overweight before their pregnancy. Among women who exclusively breastfed their baby during its first year, women who were normal weight prior to pregnancy lost weight, but still retained about three…  read on >  read on >

Classroom cellphone bans should help improve learning environments in schools, a child development expert says. Keeping the devices out of classrooms would help focus attention, improve problem-solving and — by allowing kids to occasionally lapse into boredom — spur creativity, says Jon Piacentini, a child and adolescent psychologist at UCLA Health. “There are more harms…  read on >  read on >

A new study supports the notion that women age 40 and older get a mammogram each year rather than every two years, to help catch breast cancers early. The rate at which mammograms revealed a tumor in its later stages was significantly lower among women who got an annual mammogram versus those who spaced the…  read on >  read on >