Topic: World Health Organization

Efforts underway to improve breastfeeding rates among black women

By Turner McCullough Jr. | September 5, 2008 |

August played host to World Breastfeeding Week during its first seven days. More hospitals are reaching out to new mothers to boost breastfeeding and their babies health.

An April report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found that African American mothers, who are less likely than white or Latina women to breastfeed, have reversed that trend and are now doing so in impressive numbers. Sixty-five percent of black women have nursed their infants at some point. This compares to a 36 percent rate 14 years ago. Still, only 20 percent of black mothers reach the government’s target goal of exclusively breastfeeding when their infants are six months old. Breastfeeding can help address health problems that plague both African American mothers and infants alike. Breastfeeding is the most natural and beneficial way to strengthen your baby’s immune system and provide the best possible nutrition for yourself, as a mother, and your baby. «Read the rest of this article»

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Face of fashion: You can be too thin!

By Christine Anne Piesyk | February 16, 2008 |

Europe’s fashion community made a bold move this month with the enforcement of Body Mass Index requirements for its high fashion models, refusing to use runway models who fell below BMI standards. In other words, you can be too thin.

Yes, the models will still be tall, thin, willowy, perhaps angular, but emaciated is OUT. It is a long-needed move toward better health with a long range goal of changing the perception of beauty from bone-baring thin to a more healthy shape.

In Hollywood films, on every TV channel, and in thousands of pages of fashion magazines, the icon of beauty for the past 20 years has been the ever-diminishing body mass of models. The concern exploded into public consciousness a few years ago with the skeletal form of TV’s Ally McBeal, and cross cuts social strata in the form of bulemia and anorexia, the health-endangering weight loss tactics used by too many women and girls in their efforts to be fashionably thin or meet some unrealistic standard of beauty. «Read the rest of this article»

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