Eating food high in fat and sugar during pregnancy can rewire your baby’s brain and turn her into a junk food addict even before birth, claimed a study this week that found junk foods had the same addictive effect on brain chemistry as opium, heroin, and morphine.
Bringing up baby is not easy. The stories about parenthood being the greatest adventure of your life are just smart window-dressing. Sanchita Sharma writes.
In 2011, 16.55 lakh children under 5 died in India, six times more than China’s 2.49 lakh. One reason for the staggering numbers is that 27 million babies — the highest in the world — are born in India. The others are malnutrition and under-vaccination, writes Sanchita Sharma.
Singletons have more than double the risk of having a heart attack than those who are married, reported a large population-based study from Finland this week. Sanchita Sharma writes.
The last time I got a gaggle of tests done to find out things discernibly wrong with me, a very sombre doctor walked in with my path reports and shook his head and said, "your FBC (full blood count) shows blood abnormalities." Sanchita Sharma writes.
Nothing quite boggles the mind as trying to understand how the brain works. Think about it: even identical twins who share 100% of their DNA and grow up in the same home have widely different personalities and react to situations differently. Sanchita Sharma writes.
Most of us still get them, nightmares about landing up for a physics exam after staying up nights studying chemistry. About struggling to finish the test paper or, worse, accidentally leaving out questions we could have aced.
Sanchita Sharma writes.
Personal tragedies aside, news reports from Delhi and across India over past few weeks have left us all shaken and stirred. At times like this, when my thoughts jump all over the place, the only thing that can get some semblance of calm in my head is music.
Much like the prescription Santa hats on Christmas eve and hateful hangovers the next morning, all health columns leading up to the new year are inevitably on innovative permutation-combinations of how to live a sober, fitter and better life. At the risk of being contrarian, I won’t go into all that.
All they want is a polio-free world, and it is a colossal tragedy that we cannot protect the polio workers from the rumours and gunshots of politics and ignorance writes
Sanchita Sharma.
Understanding teenage behaviour, I've been told by people who study the mysteries of the mind, is tougher than detecting a photon without destroying it. Unravelling its mysteries would, like the photon experiment, win you a Nobel, not for physics but for peace (and quiet). Sanchita Sharma writes.
Fad diets are a bit like new infections, a new one pops up almost every year. Sanchita Sharma reports.
Fast food advertisements: out of sight, out of mind.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” This existential question has perplexed philosophers since time began, and annoyed the rest of us since school began. Sanchita Sharma writes.
James Bond's Mega Boss 'M', for me, never stood for "Mother" until cyber-outlaw Javier Bardem blamed his mangled mind and dodgy dentistry on her and went on such an Oedipal overkill in Skyfall that even flinty Bond got teary-eyed. Sanchita Sharma writes.