According to a study by researchers from Melbourne’s Swinburne University, published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, a family history of ‘pink disease’ is a strong risk factor for developing autism.
Never heard of pink disease? Its official name is infantile acrodynia, and it was a form of mercury poisoning that was quite widespread in the first half of the 20th century, courtesy of the widespread use of teething powders that contained mercury.
In those days, it’s estimated that pink disease occurred in approximately one in every 500 children who were exposed to the powders, resulting in symptoms of speech loss, apathy, hypersensitivity to pain and/or light, and in some cases, death.
When mercury was identified as the cause, it was eliminated from teething powders and similar products, effectively putting an end to pink disease.
However, the Swinburne study suggests that this genetic sensitivity has far-reaching ramifications, with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) being six times — an astonishing 500 percent — more likely to occur among the grandchildren of pink disease survivors.
This study adds more weight to the existing argument that ASD is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors and, although there is little one can do about an inherited sensitivity to mercury, there is a great deal that can be done to minimise a child’s exposure to it, including opting for amalgam-free fillings and preservative-free vaccines (mercury may otherwise be included), and being careful about which fish a child eats, and how often.
The Australian Marine Conservation society offers a downloadable sustainable seafood guide covering over 100 seafood species sold in fishmongers and restaurants, including canned, imported and regional species, to help you decide which fish are healthiest for you, your family, and our oceans.
Your say: Do you know anyone who suffered from pink disease?
Year after year I wonder what I’ll put in our front flower bed, and year after year, after tossing up between stocks and delphiniums, or California poppies, or a froth of nemesia or dianthus, I plant the same again — petunias.
They’re not always the same petunia. These days I go for the ‘spreading petunias’, preferably in purple, which I love, though other years the bed has been red, because fire engine red looks good against the dark stone walls behind.
We’ve never had a bed of white petunias, because I am married to a man who hates white flowers. Why waste time and garden when the flowers could be coloured, he says, refusing to admit that white is a colour at all, insisting that it is just an absence of colour.
This year they’re mauve petunias, the wonderful spreading variety that can grow to about a square metre per plant.
Petunias also look fabulous spilling out of hanging baskets or pots. They grow fast, give more flowers per square metre than possibly any other annual and are very, very hard to kill, unless the snails get them in their first few vulnerable weeks, in which case your petunias will vanish faster than the dog’s dinner.
Like most annuals, petunias grow readily from seed, and seeds are certainly the cheapest way to get an abundance of petunias. But although I am an eager seed planter, I mostly buy my petunias in punnets.
I reckon that no one needs a bed of flowers to tend in mid-summer that is bigger than four punnets of spreading petunias, minus a few square metres to the snails.
Petunias can begin to bloom a few days after you’ve planted the seedlings or even while they are still in punnets if the weather is hot and they are watered well.
Otherwise they sulk and sit there till the days warm up and they go zoom.
They’ll survive droughts, and the two weeks you are away on holiday and can’t water them, but they won’t grow much either.
Petunias do best when lovingly watered and fed every month or so, so they keep putting out more and more blooms.
Trim them back if they get a bit straggly, especially in hanging baskets, and give them another feed and water when you do.
But otherwise what they need is just sunlight (good strong Aussie summer sun) and there will be a thousand petunias in the front garden, a shaded pergola, friends to lunch with and something cool to drink. Summer doesn’t get much better.
Queen Elizabeth beamed throughout her visit to Floriade today, and the Duke of Edinburgh seemed heartily amused with the first official engagement of the couple’s 16th Australian tour.
The 85-year-old monarch and her 90-year-old husband took a barge from Government House to the annual Canberra flower show.
After a few tense moments while a blushing naval officer struggled to moor the boat, the queen emerged smiling broadly and adeptly deploying her famous ‘royal wave’.
The monarch looked lovely in a Lavender-coloured outfit with matching hat and her ever-present black handbag.
Prince Philip was similarly dashing in a suit and jaunty hat, and took time to smile and wave at crowds while Elizabeth accepted flowers and gifts from local children.
The royal couple then got into a Range Rover for the short drive into the centre of the gardens, before getting out to stroll through the displays of flowers.
The queen took great interest in the flora, asking a multitude of botanical questions of her guides, including Floriade’s head gardener.
Philip, on the other hand, seemed to find the whole affair rather amusing, cracking jokes almost continuously.
“The queen was asking lots of questions, smiling and seemed very interested,” Floriade volunteer Ankie Dunn said.
“She obviously loves flowers but the Duke… he has a very dry sense of humour. He certainly made a lot of comments. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was chuckling away.”
Nicknamed the ‘Duke of Hazard’ by British media outlets, Philip is infamous for his many gaffes.
In his 60 years as royal consort, he has said hundreds of culturally insensitive things, including asking a driving instructor in Scotland how he kept the locals sober long enough to pass their tests, quizzing a group of Australian aborigines if they were “still throwing spears” and enquiring how a British student trekking in Papua New Guinea had managed to avoid being eaten by the “natives”. If he said any similar comments today, the volunteers who overheard were keeping it to themselves.
Subjected to incalculable child abuse, Kim Noble’s young mind shattered into multiple personalities when she was just three years old. In an exclusive extract from her autobiography, this extraordinarily brave woman explains how she survived, became a mother and what it feels like to live a life literally in pieces.
Kim Noble was born on 21 November 1960. She grew up in Britain with her parents and sister and enjoyed an ordinary family upbringing.
Her parents both worked and, from a very early age, Kim was left with a number of childminders — although they weren’t called that in the 1960s.
Sometimes it was family, sometimes neighbours, sometimes friends. Communities stepped in to help in those days. Most were kind and loving.
Some were different. They didn’t look after Kim Noble. They took advantage. They subjected baby Kim to painful, evil, sexual abuse. Regularly and consistently from the age of one.
Kim was helpless. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t complain. She couldn’t fight. She didn’t even know that the abuse was wrong. But she did know it scared her. She knew it hurt.
Yet she was so small, so weak, so dependent on her abusers for so much, what could she possibly do? And then her young, infant mind found a way. If it couldn’t stop Kim’s physical pain, it could do the next best thing. It could hide.
At some point before her third birthday, Kim Noble’s mind shattered, like a glass dropped onto a hard floor. Shards, splinters, fragments, some tiny, some larger.
No two pieces the same, as individual as snowflakes. Ten, 20, 100, 200 pieces, where before there had been just one. And each of them a new mind, a new life to take Kim’s place in the world. To protect her.
At last, Kim Noble was happy. No one could find her now.
Chicago, September 2010. I never imagined the day I would find myself sitting in a television studio on the other side of the Atlantic.
I certainly never expected to be invited by the most powerful woman in world media, Oprah Winfrey, to appear during the final season of the planet’s leading chat show.
But here I am and, as I take my seat facing Oprah’s chair, I can barely contain my nerves. The most-watched program in America is about to be filmed and I am that episode’s star guest.
And yet, as soon as Oprah sits down opposite, my inhibitions disappear.
“Do you remember what happened to you as a child?”
Three hundred people fall suddenly silent. A few sharp intakes of breath. Then nothing, as they all crane forward expectantly for my reply.
“I remember parts of it,” I reply. “Not any abuse.”
Murmurs buzz around that vast hangar of a room. Oprah looks momentarily thrown. If you watch carefully you can almost see her thinking, I was told this woman had been abused!
Oprah maintains her composure. Then, ever the professional, she rephrases the question.
My answer is the same. “No one did anything to me.” But I know what she means and decide to help her out. “I have never been abused,” I clarify. “But this body has.” And then she understands.
Throughout our interview, Oprah referred to me as “Kim”. I don’t mind. I’ve grown up with people calling me that. It’s all I ever heard as a child, so it soon becomes normal.
I’ve grown up accepting lots of things that seemed normal at the time. Like finding myself in classrooms I didn’t remember travelling to, or speaking to people I didn’t recognise or employed doing jobs I hadn’t applied for.
Normal for me is driving to the shops and returning home with a boot full of groceries I didn’t want. It’s opening my wardrobe and discovering clothes I hadn’t bought or taking delivery of pizzas I didn’t order.
It’s finding the washing-up done a second after I’d finished using the pans. It’s ending up at the door to a men’s toilet and wondering why. It’s so many, many other things on a daily basis.
Oprah found it unimaginable. I doubt she was alone. I imagine millions of viewing Americans were thinking, “This is mad!”
After all, it’s not every day you meet someone who shares their body with more than 20 other people — and who still manages to be a mum to a beautiful, well-balanced teenaged daughter and an artist with many exhibitions to her name.
You shared each other’s lives, possibly a house and maybe children. But can you really share friendship with an ex?
We’ve all got a couple of exes knocking around. How to deal with them can be a dilemma. Impossible as it sounds, some choose friendship. But can a platonic relationship ever replace an intimate, sexual one?
“Yes… and no,” says relationship coach Frances Amaroux (www.lovecoaching.com). “It depends on the type of person you are and the type of break-up you had. What you need to do is be honest about why you want to be friends.”
It’s nice to think you’re just being grown up, but maybe you have ulterior motives. Perhaps you never wanted to let your ex go, or you’re keeping them as back-up. Maybe you don’t want anyone else to have them, it’s an ego boost to keep them dangling, or you want to make a new partner jealous.
“If it’s for any of those reasons, you’re not helping anyone,” says Frances. “Spending quality time with someone, which is what you’re doing if you’re making a concerted effort to see your ex, means strengthening the bond with them. This can stop you both moving on with life.”
That includes meeting someone else. If your ex is filling a certain role, particularly if you’re indulging in sex with the ex, you might stop looking for someone else to fill that role.
Dramas also occur if you’re not on the same page. “If you want to stay friends but you know your ex is still mad about you, tread carefully,” says Frances. “They won’t be able to complete the grieving process — that’s what happens when a relationship dies — if you give them hope reconciliation is on the cards.”
Children also complicate things. Arguing won’t do them any favours, but playing happy families could give the wrong message.
“It’s great if you can stay friendly,” says Frances. “But make sure the children understand. Explain you still want to spend time together as a family, but you don’t want to be a couple.”
Jo Comans has done just that. Her marriage to Richard ended in 1977 after seven years and two children. She married her current husband Ray three years later, and they had a child. Meanwhile, Richard also married someone else, Jo’s friend Narelle, who was a bridesmaid at their wedding. They have four children.
“We have a wonderful extended family life,” says Jo. “We visit each other, celebrate our children’s milestones together and share four grandchildren. Some people don’t understand, but we’ve worked hard to achieve this and our children are grateful.”
Such a success story requires effort from all concerned. And although Frances believes this scenario is becoming more common as the family unit evolves.
“It’s no longer always one mum, one dad and a couple of kids,” she says adding it might never be possible for some.
“Like anything, what works for one person won’t work for another. So just be honest. If your ex wants to be friends but you’re not ready, say so. It might become possible later. If it’s the other way around, give them space.”
Once a person is no longer your partner you might not want them in your life anyway. But if you do, honesty really is the best policy.
Is your postcode making you unhealthy? Caitlin Reid, accredited nutritionist and exercise physiologist, provides you with tips for living the healthy life irrespective of your location.
Location, location, location! It’s one of the most important things to consider when buying or renting a place. However, few of us think about how this postcode may impact our health.
Rising property prices and a competitive rental market, combined with people wanting larger homes has seen many of us move to the outer suburbs. This phenomenon, known as urban sprawl, is characterised by unplanned and uncontrolled spread of urban development, and results in a dependency on cars or public transport to travel from home to office.
Thanks to urban design, not all of us have access to parks, gyms and sporting fields, nor do we have any healthy food outlets close by. Many of us aren’t within walking distance to local shops and often there are no decent footpaths to walk on. Alarmingly, growing research is suggesting that the shape of our cities could be dictating the shape of our waistlines.
Irrespective of income, research shows people living in sprawled cities are less likely to walk due to safety concerns; are less likely to purchase healthy food as more fast food outlets are present; have a higher body mass index; and exercise less because they have access to fewer kilometres of walking tracks.
One US study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found living in an area with a high density of fast-food outlets to be associated with a 1.4kg increase in weight and a 2cm increase in waist circumference. The same study also found that people who lived in areas promoting walking lost 1.2kg and 1.6cm from their waist during the course of the study. Additionally, people living in neighbourhoods promoting physical activity and healthy eating have been found to have a 38 percent lower incidence of type 2 diabetes.
While changing your postcode may not be a feasible strategy, awareness of how your living environment influences your health can help you choose to live a healthier lifestyle. Here’s how:
Know your surroundings: Investigate your local area for parks, walking tracks, healthy cafes and takeaway outlets, fitness centres, public transport routes, supermarkets and corner stores. Identifying what you have access to makes living a healthy lifestyle easier.
Exercise in numbers: If you’re living in an unsafe area, workout in numbers. Train with a group of friends or join a personal training group. Alternatively search for a local fitness club or workout in the comfort of your own home.
Become a smart traveller: While you may not be able to actively commute the whole way into the office, you can still walk or cycle part of the way. You could walk to the train station or get off a few stops early and jog the rest of the way.
Shop regularly: Plan your meals out each week and make an effort to visit the supermarket weekly. If you know you will be working back late, cook a lasagne or quiche on the weekend in preparation. This will reduce the need to swing by the drive thru after a long day in the office.
Walk, walk, walk: Ever noticed that it can take the same amount of time to drive to the shops as it takes to walk? So instead of wasting time in the traffic, get your daily exercise in by walking to get the paper or visit a friend.
Celebrity chef Matt Moran discusses Masterchef, ambition and Gordon Ramsay with The Australian Women’s Weekly editor-in-chief Helen McCabe.
Helen: MasterChef — how have you gone fitting in with the other three guys?
Matt: They’re very, very tight. I thought I might be intruding on what they have, but in actual fact, I felt as though with people like George [Calombaris] and Matt [Preston], I was giving them a break, so they could have days off also.
Helen: Are you closer to one more than the others?
Matt: I love Georgie, I think he’s just a beautiful, generous boy. I was overseas recently and I got a missed phone call from George, and I sent him a text back saying, “Buddy is everything all right?” And he wrote back in a text saying, “No buddy, I just miss you.” And he meant that. That’s George, he’s just very generous.
Helen: You’re famous now. Do you feel famous?
Matt: It kind of goes in waves. I don’t notice it as much as the people around me. My wife, Sarah, notices it a lot more. People do get kind of bewildered to see me in the restaurant wearing a chef’s uniform. But it’s where I live, really.
Helen: Where did you get your food thing from?
Matt: Nowhere. I didn’t know about it, didn’t care about it. I left school, did work experience in a bakery. I remember Dad cutting up lambs and thought I wanted to be a butcher, so I did work experience in a butcher shop. But I thought, early mornings, meat – I will get bored because I obviously have a short attention span, that’s probably my most annoying thing. So I started working at the Paramatta Returned Services League. And from day one, it was just food, grill, whatever. I thought, one day, maybe I could be head chef of an RSL. Then I got lucky and got a job at [the Sydney restaurant] La Belle Helene, seeing stuff that I’d never ever seen before, stuff like a fanned strawberry, just little things.
Helen: Are you hard on staff?
Matt: I’m not so much now, but yeah, I was, I was a tyrant. One, I’ve grown up. Two, I don’t have a chip on my shoulder like I used to.
Helen: What was your chip about?
Matt: When I was working at [Sydney’s] Paddington Inn, I think it was more that I wanted to succeed. I bought my own business, I wanted a chef’s hat and I wanted it to be exactly the way I wanted it to be. So in the kitchen, it was like, “It’s my name on that food!”
Helen: You were good friends with Gordon Ramsay. Do you still talk to him?
Matt: I’ve known Gordon for 16, 17 years. To be honest, in the last year, I haven’t been to London, he hasn’t been to Australia. Probably two texts from him this year, one to say, “Hi, I’m really busy”.
Helen: What do you think of everything that’s happened to him?
Matt: No matter how you look at it and what he’s done, who he is, what restaurants he’s opened or what he’s closed, he is a man driven and a man with an amazing cooking ability. Back in his day, you can’t take anything away from it. He was the best, no doubt. And no one’s sacrificed more than he did. I saw that when I first met him.
Dinner At Matt’s, published by Lantern, $49.95, will be released on October 3.
Read more of this story in the October issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Fad diets and crazy exercise regimes promise to help you slim down quickly but weight loss doesn’t have to be so difficult.
You can achieve longer-lasting results by making a few simple lifestyle changes. Here are some tips to help you get started on the right track.
Learn about your health:
Identify why you want to lose weight and the risks of not losing weight. Leaning about health will help give you motivation to make changes to your lifestyle such as increasing activity or changing dietary choices.
Read ingredient lists on food labels. Identify foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt but low in essential nutrients. For example, high fat takeaway, soft drinks, biscuits, cakes, confectionary.
Choose mostly whole foods, including lots of plant foods:
Whole foods — such as freshly prepared vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, seeds and grains — are packed full of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and fibre that are essential for vitality and wellbeing.
Limit processed foods:
Many processed foods have excess salt, fat and sugar and not enough of the essential nutrients and fibre that our bodies need.
Be active:
10,000 steps a day is a good start and can help with weight loss and lowering blood pressure. Talk with your doctor about an exercise level appropriate for you.
Be adaptable:
We all face unexpected challenges. It’s ok to change course occasionally, but if you miss an exercise session or over indulge, make sure you get back on track and don’t give up.
Give tastebuds time to adapt:
At first you may find foods that are lower in sugar, fat or salt to be a little bland. Give it a few weeks and you will find your tastes will change. Also look for alternate ways to add flavour such as using herbs or adding sweetness with fruit.
Finally, keep the big picture in mind:
Set some long-term goals — for example, make it a habit to have at least one check up with your doctor each year. Keep your own records of blood pressure, cholesterol and other things in a notebook so you can track your progress. Achieving a healthy weight will also improve other aspects of your health, such as cholesterol and blood sugar levels so there are a multitude of additional reasons to choose a healthy lifestyle.
Here are some simple steps to kick-start your new healthy lifestyle:
Identify why weight loss is important to you. It will make it easier to stick to your new eating habits.
Clean out your pantry and look at the labels of everything you have. Identify foods that are high in fat or salt and make a note to try a healthier alternative next time you do the shopping.
Swap one processed for each day for a non-processed alternative — for example, an apple instead of a muesli bar.
Swap coffee and cake for a 30 minute walk with a friend.
Try salt-reduced products for at least 14 days.
Take you coffee or tea without sugar for two weeks.
Have you ever wondered why ice cream gives you a headache? Or we 'kiss it better'? It seems there are perfectly sane solutions to some of life's little health mysteries.
Have you ever wondered why ice cream gives you a headache? Or we ‘kiss it better’? It seems there are perfectly sane solutions to some of life’s little health mysteries.
People die of a broken heart: The heart doesn’t break, but loss definitely causes stress, depression, and decreased immunity, with studies showing an increased sudden death rate among widows and widowers after a spouse’s death.
Air-conditioning causes colds: No — only cold viruses can give you a cold. However, air-con can trigger two cold-like reactions: the change of temperature and humidity causes the mucous membrane of your nose to swell and weep; and a unit may spray dust and mould into the air, giving you a runny nose and red eyes.
Older people grow long in the tooth: True. With age, we lose bone in our jaws, either to periodontal disease or osteoporosis, which causes the gum tissue to draw further back up the teeth. Plus gums, like other body tissues, shrink with age.
Eating ice cream gives you a headache: Yes — the pain is caused by the sudden stimulation of the cranial nerve (which carries sensations from the back of the mouth). To stop it, curl your warm tongue back against the top of your mouth.
Men hold their liquor better than women: Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered an explanation: women have much less of an enzyme that metabolises alcohol, so more pure alcohol moves from the stomach to the liver and brain. Therefore, if a woman and a man of the same weight both drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman is more likely to show signs of impairment.
We ‘kiss it better’: Scientists say it works by signalling the brain to release natural painkillers called endorphins.
Aristocrats have ‘blue blood’: This false notion originated in class-conscious medieval Spain, where the nobles avoided the hot sun so their skin remained pale. The veins looked blue, so the blood inside was presumed to be blue as well.
You can go ‘white with fear’: You certainly can. Faced with an imminent physical or emotional challenge, your body responds with a series of instinctive reactions designed to get you ready for fight-or-flight. One of these is the constriction of your surface blood vessels so that blood flows away from skin to the centre of your body — nature’s way of making sure you would lose less blood if you were injured in a battle.
‘Fear can make your hair stand on end, too’: Sort of. When you’re frightened, all your muscles tense up, including those in your scalp, which can make the hair shafts stand up a little. Hair would have to be super-short and fine to get the porcupine effect you see in cartoons, but even long hair will ripple a bit if you are scared enough.
Redheads have bad tempers: Not necessarily. But they do often have thin, fair or freckled skin that makes it easy to tell when they are angry and flushed with emotion.
People go crazy at full moon: Human beings have always associated certain behaviour with the moon’s phases (consider the word ‘lunatic’, from luna, the Latin word for moon.) In fact, blips in violent crime often do coincide with the full moon. University of Miami researchers charted all the murders in Miami over a 15-year period according to the moon’s phases, and found there was a clear increase in the murder rate about a day before the new moon, a peak period when the moon was full, and then a decline — with the cycle repeating itself with each new moon.
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