Natural Remedies for Diaper Rash

Diaper rash is usually caused by skin irritation from prolonged contact with the urine and feces. This is due to the fact that diapers create a hot moist environment that traps urine and feces next to the delicate skin of an infant or toddler. The result is skin irritation and can even cause bacterial or fungal infection.
Natural treatments are growing in popularity as problems derived from chemicals are discovered everyday it seems. Some people are concerned with the chemicals and additives in traditional diaper rash creams. Some of which can even cause more skin irritation. If you share these concerns you may opt to use homeopathic or natural remedies. These treatments will not have ingredients that will cause concern and are therefore the preferred treatment.
Try one of these Remedies
Oatmeal is one of the popular natural treatment for diaper rash. This is a commonly used home remedy for many skin problems. You can add oatmeal to your child's warm bath water. Let your baby soak in this water for 15-20 minutes. Keep the water moving with your hands. Pat dry with soft towel and moisturize.

Vegetable oil is also a great way to cure diaper rash. Just apply some on your child's bottom.
You can also mix one teaspoon apple cider vinegar in a cup of water and apply it over the rash with a soft cotton ball to soothe the skin.
Here's a unique one that you may want to try. Roast enough flour in a frying pan that can last a few applications. Heat the flour till it turns light golden brown. Apply a light dusting of this flour on the rash at each diaper change.
Try some Baking Soda, add two tablespoons of baking soda to a tub of warm water and give the baby a sitz bath for 10 minutes 3 times a day.
These are just some natural remedies for diaper rash. Give some of them a try and see which one works for your baby.
Diaper rash is certainly not the only condition that natural remedies can help. Natural remedies for many ailments are available today. There are homeopathic remedies for headaches, PMS. Diabetes, cancer prevention, high blood pressure and more. Treatments for healing and protecting your digestive system, eliminate the Flu virus, boost the immune system, and recover faster from colds, look younger, and treat any skin problem. You can make your own natural hair care products and save a bundle in hair treatments. And so much more. Through the wonderful power of the internet these treatments are accessible in e-books which can be downloaded instantly to your computer for quick use. And they are easy to prepare and affordable.By David Faircloth 

High Blood Pressure in Infants

If you are under the impression that high blood pressure or hypertension is a condition limited to adults, think again. Newborns, infants and teenagers could also suffer from hypertension. It is estimated that nearly 5% of kids may have high blood pressure and the chances of a newborn having high blood pressure is unfortunately on the rise.

Newborn babies usually have high blood pressure when they are born pre-term or they have congenital problems with the heart or the kidneys. It has been noticed however that when kids have high blood pressure usually there is a family history of such conditions and/or coupled with a poor lifestyle including bad diets, obesity and inadequate physical activity.

High blood pressure in infants are however, caused by premature birth or they have problems with other organs like the kidneys, lungs, heart or even their vascular system. Premature babies are often born with a condition called broncho-pulmonary dysplasia, which is essentially immaturity of the lungs.

These babies many also have problems like coarctation of the aorta, which means that the major blood vessel which carries blood to the heart is narrowed. High blood pressure in infants could also be due to a blood clot in a kidney blood vessel.

Other causes include side effect of some medications, exposure to hallucinogenic drugs like cocaine while in the womb, some types of tumors, genetic problems or issues related to the thyroid gland functioning. Newborn babies are supposed to have blood pressure as 64/41 and it rises as the baby grows. So an average baby between one-month to 2 years would have the blood pressure reading as 95/58. Slight variations from these figures should not be a matter of concern but more than this medical help should be sought immediately.

Though high blood pressure symptoms are mostly absent from infants but there could be symptoms of the condition that is responsible for the high blood pressure or HBP. These include bluish or pale skin, zero weight gain or growth, frequent urinary tract infections, rapid breathing etc.

Other common symptoms when the infant has very high blood pressure could be easy irritability, vomiting, troublesome breathing and even seizures. To be sure that the infant has indeed HBP, the only way is to measure the blood pressure, which for infants is done using an automatic device.

For instance, if the HBP is due to coarctation of the aorta, the pulses in the legs could be reduced. Other tests to diagnose high blood pressure in infants include angiography, lab tests of blood and urine, X rays of chest and abdomen, ECG and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Treatment for high blood pressure in infants largely depends on the cause behind the condition and may include: drug therapy, dialysis or surgical intervention like transplantation or coarctation repairing. The recovery rate for the infant would again depend on the cause.

For instance, whether the baby is born with other health problems or there has been any damage done resulting from high blood pressure etc. Possible complications could include failure of the heart or kidneys, seizures or any other organ damage.

As a parent you ought to be alert when to seek medical help and these would be when you notice your baby is not gaining weight or has bluish skin, suffers from urinary tract infections often and seems irritable all the time.

Unfortunately there is no way that high blood pressure in infants can be prevented. However there are some steps one can take to reduce the risk of such conditions. For instance, take the advice of a doctor before becoming pregnant, if you have a family history of congenital heart disease, hypertension or kidney disease. Also if you are on medication, taking them during pregnancy may also harm the baby and cause such situations to develop. Thus it is best to consult the doctor before you decide to become a mother.

Incidentally, a study done in the Netherlands involving 450 babies was done, and reported in the August 1, 2007 issue of Insider medicine confirms that babies born to smokers have a high chance of developing high blood pressure. The study also confirmed that babies born to smokers were considerably smaller and shorter compared to those born to non-smokers.

By Samuel Baron

Why Does Baby Vomit Milk and How to Solve the Problem?

Currently, many fresh parents find their babies vomit milk, but they do not know why and have no effective methods to avoid it. After seen a breastfeeding by fresh mother, I found out the crux of baby vomiting milk, which was caused by the improper breast-feeding way.

I pointed out that during the whole feeding process, there are at least 3 points which do not meet the requirements:

First, mother should change baby diaper first and then feed him. As soon as mother saw her infant crying, she knew that her infant was hungry and cannot wait to pick up and breastfeed him. After baby was full, mother changed the diapers for baby. Baby was turned over from left to right in bed, and when mother started to wear diaper for him, the legs and buttocks of baby were lifted. The stomach of newborn was in a horizontal position and the capacity of the stomach is small, its cardiac sphincter was flabby too, and together with the disruption when changing diapers, it is not strange that infant vomiting milk!

The right way to feed baby is that mother should change his diaper first, and then wash her hands and breastfeed him.

Secondly, when breastfeeding baby, mother should stuff her entire nipple and the most of areola into the mouth of baby, rather than just stuff the nipple in. If mother uses feeding-bottle to feed him, the rubber nipple should be full of milk to assure no air contained.

If mother only stuffs her nipple in but without areola, or the rubber nipple is with half milk and half of the air, when newborn sucking milk, the air can be easily inhaled at the same time. If too much air was inhaled and mixed with milk in the stomach, the gas would rise, belch would bring together with the milk, the newborn would vomit milk.

Thirdly, after feeding milk, mother cannot let her infant sleep immediately on the bed, but should pick up him and put his head on the shoulder of mother, pats his back gently at the same time to make the stomach gas expel from the stomach. After baby eructs several belches, put it on the bed and let him lie on his right side. It is not suitable to let newborn lie horizontal because if he vomits milk, the milk will easily be inhaled into cavity or even trachea. The light one will cause pneumonia, and the serious one will cause respiratory tract asphyxia and death.

Actually, infant vomiting milk is not always caused by the wrong feeding methods. Some of the pathological factors can also lead to sick up milk, such as stomach esophagus back-streaming, pyloric spasm, congenital hypertrophic pyloric, digestive tract obstruction, infectious disease, brain hemorrhage and so on.

As a result, if infant vomiting milk is not caused by the improper feeding methods, parents should bring him to hospital in time to find out the reason, so that infant can receive targeted treatment as soon as possible.

By Eric Bird

Breakfast Cereals and Junk Foods - Poison for Our Children

The truth about the so-called 'Super Food' of the Century

Breakfast cereals have never been more popular than they are today. Packed with vitamins and minerals, they promise power, health and vitality, especially to the young generation. There is hardly a commercial breakfast cereal in the world that does not seem to contain everything a child needs to receive the 'perfectly balanced' dietary nutrition. However, despite this 'valuable' contribution to family health, a frightening number of children show signs of ill health and lacking immunity. The vitamins that are added to the cereals supposedly protect the child against the vitamin-destroying sugar, but it seems that this guarantee is no longer guaranteed.

Besides cornflakes, which still top the list of American and European breakfast cereals, the sales of new 'tasty and healthy' breakfast foods soar as never before. The main marketing targets for these 'healthy' breakfast foods are children. Research suggests that as many as 79 percent of all households use ready-made breakfast cereals to start the day. Children are usually very keen to try the latest cereal model, which contains essentially the same ingredients as all the other types but comes in a different shape and color. The well designed packaging depicting a healthy-looking family or natural scenery promises the parents that the contents are of pure and natural origin, often organically grown, and good for the entire family. The kids love the happy friendly figures on the cardboard. "If Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, or the strong Dinosaurs like the cereal, then it must be good for me, too," some children might argue.

Packaging has a powerful manipulative influence on children. Researchers at Packard Children's Hospital in California asked 63 children, ages three and five, to taste-test servings of hamburger, French fries, chicken nuggets, baby carrots and milk. Some of the servings were wrapped in containers with a McDonald's logo, and some were wrapped in containers with no logo. As expected, most of the kids thought the food in the McDonald's containers tasted better than the identical food with no logo.

It doesn't take much to convince an unsuspecting mother that the beautifully packaged foods are actually good for her children. The mother, who naturally wants to secure the best possible nutrition for her child, finds her mind put at ease when she learns about the high nutritional value of the product in the food table. It convincingly states that the cereal has the balanced amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fats, and is most importantly enriched with all the essential dietary supplements. If the right amount of milk (mostly pasteurized and homogenized, which is the wrong choice) is added to the super food, the child would have the best possible start of the day that nature could provide, or so she may believe.

Shocking Revelations

Yet the reality of the matter is quite the opposite. An American team of researchers decided to prove to the world once and for all that factory-made breakfast cereals are truly man's super-food. So they fed the common breakfast cereals enriched with the most important vitamins and minerals to young, healthy laboratory rats. The researchers divided a total of 240 rats into two groups; one group received cereal and water and the other one normal food and water. The experiment lasted for 45 days. The result was totally unexpected and devastating. The rats that were fed with cereals, which according to common nutritional sense and advertising should have turned them into strong and vital grown-up rats, were close to death. They suffered from fatty livers, anemia and high blood pressure. In a separate experiment, rats were fed with cornflakes, which consisted of useless cornstarch and white sugar. In this group some of the animals died.

The researchers had expected that the animals would grow faster with cereals, yet they did not grow at all, and some of them even lost weight. Especially the rats which received cereals with high sugar content (sugar is thought to be fattening), had the least growth rates. This is a summary of the results:

• The products that contained the least amounts of fat significantly increased the cholesterol levels of the rats. Some products were able to lower the rats' cholesterol levels but also caused fatty livers.


• Those rats that were fed with cereals containing only small amounts of salt increased their blood pressure whereas the ones that received cereals with higher salt contents lowered their blood pressure.


• Some of the products were enriched with iron, which should have raised hemoglobin concentrations in the blood of anemic animals. However, the results took the researchers by surprise:
  a) There was no connection between higher intake of iron and hemoglobin levels. The rats stayed anemic despite ingesting large amounts of iron.
  b) Those rats that had little iron in their blood deposited excessively large amounts of iron in their liver, which led to worsening of anemia (for a similar reason it is very questionable to give extra iron to people who suffer from anemia).

Poison that Tastes and Looks like Food

The main conclusion we can draw from this experiment is that the purely theoretical approach to diet and nutrition (using food tables and daily nutritional recommendations) has not only been insufficient to raise the standard of health in the population but has in fact caused more harm and confusion than is currently assessable.

Sanctified by theories of nutrition, which in actuality contradict the body's natural responses to food, the food industry has been given the green light to produce anything that fulfills the official nutritional requirements, even if the 'foods' have a poisoning effect and create havoc in the body.

There is no legislation to test man-made foods on animals before giving them to millions of human beings. The average consumer takes it for granted that the food produced by a reputable company must be safe for human consumption, even if it contains plastic (using animals to find out whether these foods are poisonous or not is cruel and I don't advocate animal testing. I have reasons to believe that all man-made foods have harmful effects on the human body, and I therefore recommend that you avoid eating them).

Not all governments support this disconcerting trend. According to an August 2004 issue of the Guardian, some few health-conscious governments in Europe that are less dominated by the food industry and big pharmaceutical companies, are beginning to protect their people from obvious harmful practices.

Health officials in Denmark recently banned the addition of vitamins and minerals to 18 varieties of breakfast foods and cereals produced by Kellogg Co. The reasons given include increasing evidence that eating those products regularly can ruin the health of children and pregnant women. Cereal is one of the first solid foods introduced to babies, and pediatricians typically encourage parents to start feeding cereal to their babies from between 4 and 6 months. Their advice grossly contradicts findings from a study that cereals introduced in the diets of babies increased the risk of insulin-dependent diabetes in the children.

Kellogg had hoped to add iron, calcium, folic acid and vitamin B6 to some cereals and cereal bars, as it is so common in other countries. However, Danish health officials believe that these toxic additives in the cereals can seriously harm the livers and kidneys of children as well as unborn fetuses in pregnant women. A government laboratory delivered the ban after examining the ingredient lists provided by Kellogg.

By Andreas Moritz