Story By: by Kelle Hampton

Kelle Hampton’s daughter, Lainey, loved her little sister, Nella, before she even met her.

Kelle Hampton’s memoir is Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected.

I unraveled hopes those first few nights, pulled out all the things I loved about having a sister and grieved the loss of each one for my girls. Things like calling four times a day, trading recipes for stuffed green pepper soup, laughing about when we know we’re right and Mom’s wrong, asking advice for teething remedies and 2 year-old fits.

And what would my girls’ childhood look like? Would they fight over clothes and build secret forts in their closets?

While I cannot be certain what the future holds based on the span of two years, I can say that my 4-year-old daughter and her 2-year-old little sister have exactly what I had hoped for — a unique companionship and all the things my sister and I shared so many years ago. I have found my girls hidden under secret closet forts and have negotiated many crying fits over dolls and crayons and the last M&M.

Looking back I realize it was my sister who offered me my first bit of hope when she showed up at the hospital the day after Nella was born. The first to welcome her without any grief or apology. She held Nella close.

“She’s beautiful,” she exclaimed. Sensing my own doubts for what my girls would share, my sister continued: “Kelle, there’s always a plus side. Lainey might not call Nella for her chicken casserole recipe, but she’ll be changed in ways she wouldn’t be otherwise.”

You see, the best part about sisters is that they are mirrors in which we see ourselves, offering us more hope and compassion than we are sometimes able to give. Bonded by genetics and united by a shared past, my girls will have everything they need: each other.

Story By: by Nancy Shute

Keep the sanitizer on your hands and out of your mouth.

Teenagers can be pretty creative in their pursuit of a cheap buzz. Last month we reported on the “cinnamon challenge,” which involves snarfing down a spoonful of the powdered spice.

Now we’ve got teens quaffing hand sanitizer, and ending up sick in the ER.

A spike in the number of teenagers who became ill after drinking hand sanitizer in Los Angeles County — 16 cases in March and April, according to the California Poison Control System. Now there’s a flurry of reports from other parts of the country, too.

Hand sanitizer kills germs because it’s made with ethyl alcohol. That’s the same stuff that gives a glass of wine its pleasant buzz. I’ve never imbibed hand sanitizer, but my guess is that it lacks the complex bouquet of a good cabernet. Indeed, I’d guess that it tastes nasty.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out the reaction of comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who did hand sanitizer shots with actor John Cusack on Kimmel’s show last night. “I feel cleaner inside,” Kimmel said in the video (below). “And I also feel like I’m going to die.”

Teenagers apparently agree, and some have been using salt in an attempt to separate the gel from the alcohol.

Hand sanitizers are typically about 60 percent alcohol, according to Cyrus Rangan, an assistant medical director for California Poison Control. That’s 120 proof, on a par with some really strong vodkas. His organization has tracked about 2,600 cases of hand sanitizer ingestion since 2010, most of them in small children who ate it by mistake.

The spike in hand sanitizer poisonings among teenagers is “unusual,” Rangan says, which led him to turn to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to help publicize the issue. No one has died from ingesting hand sanitizer, he says, but ethyl alcohol is toxic.

“Parents should regard hand sanitizer as you would a medication,” Rangan says, and keep it tucked away. Inconvenient, to be sure, but “it does give you some measure of control.” The other option, he told Shots, is to go for less appealing foam hand sanitizers.

Those of us who weren’t born yesterday may recall teenagers’ attempts to get a buzz by drinking mouthwash, or Robitussin cough syrup, or even vanilla extract.

Mouthwash now has much less alcohol in it as a result, Rangan says. And many retailers have moved cough syrups with dextromethorphan, the ingredient that provides a bit of a buzz, behind the counter.

Will Purell be the next victim of teenagers’ pursuit of mind-altering chemicals, no matter how dopey the form?

Story By: by Steve Henn

The LouseBuster uses heated air to dry lice out and kill them, along with their eggs.

When your kids are infested with head lice, a certain amount of panic — even desperation — can spread through the house. But one biologist has made it his mission to find a better way to rid his home of a common household pest.

The bugs are basically harmless, but teacher Sheri Nacht knows all too well the knot that can form in the pit of a parent’s stomach at the sight of a louse. Nacht teaches kindergarten in Santa Cruz, Calif. Last winter, she discovered that she had lice, which she hadn’t had since she was a child. As Nacht puts it, “It was a total nightmare.”

“I had the nurse come down and check my whole class,” she says. “We found out that there was another little girl who had lice, so they went ahead and sent the letter, and it’s just a letter saying somebody in the school has lice and make sure to check your hair.”

The letter didn’t name names, but Nacht was still mortified.

“I combed and combed and shampooed and combed for three weeks, and had a friend combing my hair every other night,” she says. “It was very difficult to get rid of, and I wasn’t sure that I was done with it.”

Turns out, she wasn’t.

An Expert Approach

Even researchers who study lice for a living — Ph.D.s in entomology — can become helpless when faced with a live, fertile louse loose on the scalp of their child.

Former Harvard researcher Richard Pollack says he’s “5 percent entomologist, 95 percent therapist.”

Scientists now know a bit more about these bloodsuckers, thanks to genome analysis.

A new study finds an oral drug used to treat certain parasites in people also kills lice.

New ways to kill head lice include electrocution, suffocation and a shrinkwrap-like lotion.

“My wife and I couldn’t get rid of the head lice,” says Dale Clayton, a co-evolution and parasite expert at the University of Utah who’s been researching lice for decades. “Here I am supposed to be an expert on lice — and there are not many of us in the world, by the way — completely clueless about how to get rid of human head lice.”

When Clayton’s kids were little, they — like millions of others — got lice, and Clayton spent weeks combing and picking and shampooing to get them out.

“Even then it was already pretty well known that lice were evolving resistance to many of the shampoos that are available in drugstores and grocery stores and so on,” says Clayton, so he made it his mission to build a better louse trap.

“The first attempt was to take pigeon lice — and I am not making this up — and put them in my hair and then put on my mother’s bonnet hair dryer and see if it had any effect on them — if it killed them,” he says.

It didn’t. But one thing you should know about Clayton is that he’s not crazy — he just knows a lot about lice. For example, he knew that pigeon lice could never survive and breed on a human head.

Airing Them Out

So when Clayton moved his lab from Oxford, England, to Utah and his lice started dying off, that got him thinking.

“It’s quite arid here,” he says. “We couldn’t keep lice alive on our birds, and we couldn’t figure out why for a few months.”

Then it came to him: Sudden changes in climate can kill lice, and lice get most of their moisture from the air. If you suck all the moisture out of a louse, you can dry it out, desiccate it, kill it.

A bunch of dead lice may have been bad for Clayton’s research, but as a parent who was sick of nit-picking, he saw an opportunity: He imagined building a machine that could kill these annoying little bugs by the thousands.

“We tried a bunch of different approaches to drying out lice,” he says. He tried hair dryers, bonnets from beauty parlors and handhelds; he tried those wall-mounted hand blowers you see in bathrooms; he even tried a leaf blower.

“At one point, we infested my kids with head lice — male lice only so they couldn’t breed — and treated them in the lab,” Clayton says. “They’re in college now, but they like to tell that story to shock their friends.”

Eventually, he and a team of engineers built the LouseBuster. It looks like an old canister vacuum cleaner, but instead of sucking air in, it blows hot air out. On the end of it there’s an attachment that looks a bit like an overgrown plastic porcupine with 28 little nozzles that direct air along the top of the scalp.

Getting treated with a LouseBuster takes about half an hour, and it feels a bit like a heated head massage. It kills lice and their eggs, the nits. Sheri Nacht says it also may have saved her sanity.

“It’s magic. It’s amazing because nothing else kills the eggs,” she says. “If you can’t kill the eggs and you don’t find every last one of them, then you’re starting all over again.”

Today, Clayton’s company sells the LouseBuster to nurses, schools and hospitals, and it leases it to salons with names like Nitless Noggins and Hair Whisperers. Clayton doubts his invention will ever make him rich, but he says it has at least allowed him to scratch his entrepreneurial itch.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The discovery this week of the fourth U.S. case of mad cow disease was one of two things for food safety experts: a validation of a decade-long focused surveillance regime or a lucky break that highlights the need to revisit previously scrapped efforts for more comprehensive surveillance.

For now, calls for greater monitoring seem likely to go unheard, both because the “atypical” case appeared to be a one-in-a-million genetic mutation that officials said posed no threat to the food supply, and because of tightening budgets.

Funding for cattle health programs in the proposed 2013 budget is set to fall by 20 percent compared to two years earlier.

Discovery of the infected dairy cow at a rendering plant in central California may stoke an intensifying debate over food safety in the United States, already a major topic after the “pink slime” furor this spring, fungicide-tainted orange juice from Brazil and never-ending efforts to control disease in food caused by salmonella and e Coli bacteria.

While major importers from Japan to Canada pledged to maintain beef shipments and U.S. officials stressed that the “atypical” case had occurred in the cow spontaneously and was not in others animals, critics were quick to respond.

“Yesterday’s announcement of the fourth case of BSE, or mad cow disease, in the United States clearly highlights the need for a comprehensive national animal identification system,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the USDA and a frequent critic of its handling of livestock issues.

“We were lucky to identify this case.”

MAD COW SAFEGUARDS WORKED – USDA

But government officials say luck had nothing to do with it.

While the USDA tests only a fraction of the herd for mad cow — about 40,000 head a year, versus a total of 34 million slaughtered last year — it does so under a protocol that is aimed at higher-risk animals and, it says, can detect mad cow at the level of less than one in a million head.

In the past decade, efforts to impose more thorough surveillance and testing measures and a system to track cows back to potentially infected herdmates were knocked back, deemed too onerous and costly for the industry to bear.

The two major U.S. safeguards are a ban on using cattle protein in cattle feed, which can lead to animal-to-animal transmission, and keeping parts of the cow that can carry high concentrations of the disease, such as brains, spinal cords and nervous tissue, out of the food supply.

“We test for BSE at levels ten times greater than World Animal Health Organization standards,” said USDA chief veterinarian John Clifford in a blog posted on Wednesday.

The disease takes years to develop, so when it does occur spontaneously it chiefly found in older cattle. In the United States, most slaughter cattle are butchered before two years of age, too young for the disease.

The California cow is the fourth known U.S. mad cow case. The first was in 2003, and no Americans have been diagnosed with mad cow from the animals. Government and industry officials lined up after the Tuesday’s announcement, touting the detection of the infected animal as proof of the strength of the existing U.S. measures.

“I am confident of the safety of American beef,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who insists U.S. testing is based on world standards, told Reuters Insider TV.

COST, LIABILITY SHELVED ANIMAL ID PLAN

Still, the USDA itself has in the past put forward stricter trace-back measures for protecting against BSE, which can cause a fatal disease in humans who eat infected meats.

Just after the first mad cow was identified in 2003, USDA proposed a mandatory system of registering livestock facilities and major food animals with the goal of tracing a disease outbreak to the home farm in 48 hours. Animals would get ID numbers assigned by the tracking system and the information would be kept in a database.

The idea withered in the face of objections of high costs for high-tech tags, government intrusion onto private property and fear among producers of facing liability claims.

USDA subsequently proposed a rule in 2011 that covers livestock shipped across state lines and initially exempts feeder cattle, the bulk of the cattle population. The USDA rule allows eartags, brands, ear tattoos and breed registry certificates to be used, a potential welter of identifying marks and documents, but a familiar approach for producers.

A final version of the rule is expected to be issued by the end of this year, says USDA. It asked Congress for $14 million for the new “animal disease tracability” system in the new fiscal year, an increase of $5.6 million.

“This is the fourth time we’ve had a warning shot that if we had a major BSE problem, we wouldn’t be able to find where all the exposed cohort ended up,” said Sarah Klein of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which says the nation has “a third-world animal identification system.”

Such measures could prove a tough sell in Washington’s current climate, where both political parties are looking for ways to reduce the growing federal deficit.

Funding for cattle health safety programs at the USDA this year will fall to $99 million from $112 million in fiscal 2011, and drop further to $90 million, under a White House proposal for fiscal 2013. Funding to fight two diseases, Johne’s in cattle and chronic wasting disease in wildlife, would end but more money is sought for a livestock-tracking plan.

“We will certainly review this case to see what could be improved but it would be premature at this point to assume it merits additional funding,” said a spokesman for Representative Jack Kingston, who chairs the House subcommittee that writes the USDA budget. “In this case, the system worked.”

While the specter of mad cow disease as a health scourge has faded during a decade of success in controlling the disease — only 29 cases were reported worldwide last year, down from a peak of over 37,000 in 1992 — the latest case has emboldened those in favor of more testing.

Japan tests all cattle over 20 months of age and European nations test cattle over 30 months, said Michael Hansen of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who said the U.S. needs to adopt more stringent measures.

“Surveillance has to include a percentage or all animals over a certain age,” said Hansen.

(Editing by Matthew Robinson and Bob Burgdorfer)

Story By: by Rob Stein

Connor and family.

“The choking game is a strangulation activity that some kids participate in, using either their hands or something like a rope or a belt or something like that,” she says.

Why? Thomas A. Andrew, New Hampshire’s chief medical examiner, who has studied the trend, explains: “As the brain is deprived of oxygen, there’s this sensation of lightheadedness, which is interpreted as a high. And then once the pressure is released and blood flow is restored in a fashion, they see stars and the feeling is described as a rush,” he said.

According to a study Hedberg’s colleagues published today in the journal Pediatrics, around 6 percent of more than 5,000 middle-schoolers surveyed in Portland, Ore., have tried the choking game. And about a quarter of them have tried it at least five times, the researchers reported.

“With each of those episodes, obviously, just a little bit of the brain is being damaged,” Andrew said. “So who knows what the long-term effects may be on children who do this repeatedly?”

And no one really knows how often the game is being played or how many kids may have died. Back in 2008, a national estimate put the death toll from the choking game at about 82 between 1995 and 2007. But the study relied on media reports that couldn’t be verified independently. And many deaths that weren’t reported in the news could have been missed.

Cleveland pediatrician Nancy Bass, who has also studied the game, hopes the new research will help parents, doctors and teachers spot kids at risk. The survey found that despite the game’s reputation as being a “good kid’s high,” those participating in the game also engaged in other high-risk activities, such as drug and alcohol use.

“The thing that haunts me is that every parent that I’ve taken care of their child that has done this did say to me, ‘If I just knew. I mean, I saw hickeys or red marks on my child’s neck. I saw scarfs tied around the bedpost or the closet rod being bowed,’ ” Bass said. “And, ‘If I would have just known what that meant, I could have talked to my child and gotten them some help.’ “

In hindsight, Galloway remembers telltale signs about Connor. Since he died, she has gotten involved with a group of other parents who lost children to the game, hoping her story will at least help prevent more deaths. Galloway and her husband are both teachers.

Even so, she said, “Neither one of us had never, ever heard about it before.”

Story By: by Nancy Shute

The brains of people who grow up speaking two languages are wired differently, and those differences protect them from dementia as they age.

That’s the news from two studies out this month from a scientist in Canada who has spent decades trying to figure out whether being bilingual is bad or good. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, tells Shots. “Suddenly people are interested. I figure it’s because everybody’s scared about dementia.”

Since about 20 percent of Americans are bilingual and as many as 60 percent of people in big cities like Los Angeles grew up speaking two languages, this is no small issue.

Not so long ago, it was thought that being bilingual was a disadvantage, because bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in both languages and are slower in word recall. But more recent research finds that bilingual children are better at “executive processing,” which includes being able to pay attention, plan and organize thoughts.

That’s the focus of one of the studies, which concludes that kids who grow up speaking two languages are better at switching between tasks than kids who spoke only one language. Researchers gave 104 children a common executive function test on a computer that asked them to sort images of either colors or animals on a computer screen. This “switching” task tests working memory and the ability to change from one rule to another.

The children who were bilingual in French, Chinese or Spanish were better at switching categories – in essence, multitasking. That may well be because they learn early on to toggle between the two sets of rules for English and their other language. Bialystok is one of the authors of this study published in the journal Child Development.

So does it do you any good when you’re grown up? That’s been a big question in research on the bilingual brain. The second recent study adds to growing evidence that being bilingual as a child helps a lot later in life.

It reviews the state of research on bilingual adults, and finds they maintain better executive functioning later in life than monolingual people. That extra “cognitive reserve” may allow the brain to better cope with the damage caused by dementia, thereby delaying symptoms. (Being physically and mentally active has also been shown to have cognitive benefits.) The article, also co-authored by Bialystock, is in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

But what about those of us who aren’t bilingual? Are we doomed?

“The kind of story we’re telling about bilingualism and dementia is not that bilingualism is the only inoculation against dementia, but rather, bilingualism is one of the many things we know that contributes to cognitive reserve,” Bialystok says. “It’s why you’re supposed to do crossword puzzles and exercise and learn a musical instrument. If you’re not bilingual but you’re active and engaged, you’re getting cognitive reserve.”

Still, bilinguals do have a natural advantage, she notes, because they can stay active and engaged without making a huge effort.

“Nobody spends all day every day doing crossword puzzles, but everybody spends all day every day talking,” Bialystok says. “It’s a way to get massive doses of this stimulating activity without doing anything special.”

News reports of a feeding tube diet popped up, followed by a slew of TV reports on the new “trend.”

But for people who survive by feeding tubes — patients with diseases such as cystic fibrosis, certain autoimmune diseases, problems with malabsorption — the idea of using a medical tool for vanity is upsetting.

“That people would do this intentionally to themselves to lose weight when thousands of children have no choice — why would someone willingly make a choice to do this?” asked Julie Springer, a mother of two children who use feeding tubes.

What made it particularly disturbing was how blasé they appeared about this medical procedure, she said.

“It’s just absurd. For us, this isn’t a choice,” said Springer, the media coordinator for the American Partnership for Eosiniphilic Disorders.

The diet reportedly uses a nasal gastric tube, which doesn’t require a surgical procedure like the gastric feeding tubes. These feeding tubes have a piece inside the stomach and a type of clamp to keep them in place.

Samantha Pecoraro, 14, has a permanent feeding tube in her stomach because nearly all foods trigger a violent reaction in her digestive tracts.

“They’re making it sound like a fun privilege, which it isn’t,” she said about the tube diet.

“That’s so disgusting, that makes me so upset. If you’d like to lose weight, exercise and go on a diet. They’re making a mockery of it; they make it look so simple. They take it out in 10 days, I can’t take [my feeding tube] out in 10 days.”

Samantha gets most of her nutrition from a formula fed through the gastric feeding tube. She has a rare autoimmune disease called eosinophilic esophagitis, in which white blood cells build up in the esophagus and react to foods and allergens.

For Samantha, it’s bizarre logic to use a survival tool for nourishment and twist it into a way to help people lose weight through caloric deprivation.

“Feeding tubes are for survival, not for cosmetics,” said her mother, Susan McArthur.

In an interview with CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen, bioethicist, Art Caplan of University of Pennsylvania said using feeding tubes for weight loss was “stupid” and “outrageous.” This is not a customary use and has not even been tested for safety.

Related:

Like-minded patients and advocates who are familiar with life on a feeding tube started several Change.org petitions that read: “Many people in this world are tube fed in order to survive and gain weight.” One decries the use of feeding tubes for weight loss and another protests the way the story was presented on NBC’s “Today” by hosts Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford. In the segment, the hostesses giggled over the story.

“You’re carrying around a bag all the time,” Kotb said. “If it gets knocked out, what if you fall down?”

Gifford asked: “What if you have a nightmare and it just flops out of your nose?”

Ellyn Kodroff, president of the Cured Foundation, an organization that promotes research on eosinophilic diseases, found little humor.

“To think that is something so easy to pick up, the whole portrayal of why people would need a feeding tube, it’s a joking matter. It’s making fun of people who are on feeding tubes,” she said.

For Samantha, the feeding tube has nothing to do with vanity. It’s her own way of survival. Like many kids, it is what helps her grow, gain weight, get her nutrients and energy.

Allergic to eggs, wheat, soy, milk, seafood and nuts, Samantha can only tolerate small bits of white potato and turkey. Eating other foods will cause Samantha to have nausea, vomiting, throat constriction, stomachaches, lethargy and bowel upsets.

“It could last for an hour,” said the high school freshman. “I’ve had it last up to a week until it gets out of my system.”

Her mother sums it up as, “She’s allergic to the world.”

“It’s an invisible, silent disease,” McArthur said. “She looks great like she’s thriving, but her insides are being destroyed by the very thing she needs to survive.”

Samantha also has a nickel allergy. Her jewelry choices are limited. When the snap button on her jeans touches her abdomen, it makes her skin red and inflamed, so she has a piece of cloth sewn over it to protect her. She also has environmental allergies to molds, dust mites, certain fall pollens and certain trees. Their home has been stripped of carpet.

The rare disorder was discovered soon after Samantha’s birth. She would often violently vomit, despite different formula changes. At preschool and school, she complained of stomach pains and health problems.

“I definitely remember when I was younger, I was vomiting 24-7,” Samantha said. “It set in at fourth grade. I realized I’m definitely different because my other friends feel fine and can just eat school lunch.”

In January last year, Samantha gave up all foods and became dependent on the feeding tube.

“There are things I miss,” she said. “I miss Italian food. I miss normal things like mac and cheese, salad and my mom’s chicken soup.”

A morsel of food can trigger illness and symptoms. During a typical day, she goes to school for the first period — usually a culinary class or a computer course. She returns home and takes online computer courses everyday and sees a tutor, who helps her with math. When Samantha leaves home, she carries a feeding bag — even during short trips to the mall, the movies or a friend’s house.

The feeding bag is “a pain in the butt to load up and have it at all times. When I get hungry, I get extremely sick,” Samantha said.

It’s with her at all times. When she falls asleep, the feeding tube is connected to her stomach, slowly dripping Neocate, a hypoallergenic formula, into her system.

A feeding tube is “not an easy fix,” she said. “This is a long process.”

She finds her comfort in food, though. She watches Food Network, especially Rachel Ray and Giada de Laurenta, as well as Cake Boss’ Buddy Valastro. She often cooks for her family, including Sicilian dishes like braciole as well as Chinese stir fry. She bakes frosted sugar cookies and chocolate cupcakes for her mom.

Samantha has a different perspective than dieters.

“I’d give anything to be an obese person who can eat anything,” she said.

Her medical team and her family are trying to give her little bits of food to see if she can tolerate them.

She has had bad medical reactions to about 20 other foods, including beef, chicken, eggs, peas, white rice, broccoli, carrots and fruits.

“We don’t know how long this is going to be for,” Samantha said about her feeding tube. “We haven’t made any progress. I’ll have it in my 20s.”

Story By: Talk of the Nation

In a new book, Relics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machine, Harvard entomologist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki documents his travels, from New Guinea to New Zealand and beyond, looking for organisms whose genes can tell us something about conditions on Earth millions of years ago.

But it can make you feel not so great the next day. Luckily, there are ways to feel normal (or very close!) after a rocky night’s rest.

1. Open your shades

A big dose of sunshine is the first thing you’ll want to try. “Natural light resets your body clock, helping you function better all day,” Walsleben says. “Even the low light on a cloudy or rainy day wakes you up better than any indoor bulb.”

Early-morning sunlight is best for helping you start the day feeling rejuvenated. To perk up fast, open your shades as soon as you get up.

Health.com: 7 tips for the best sleep ever

2. Grab the right eats

“When we’re tired, our instinct is to reach for sugary foods for a quick rush,” says Samantha Heller, R.D., clinical nutrition coordinator at the Center for Cancer Care at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Connecticut. “But those foods make your blood sugar spike and crash, setting off a roller coaster of energy highs and lows.”

For lasting energy, start your day with healthy protein and whole-grain carbs, Heller says. Try a whole-wheat English muffin with peanut butter and a sliced banana.

Health.com: America’s healthiest fast-food breakfasts

3. Try this if you can’t take a nap

The ideal remedy for the mental fatigue that occurs after sleep loss is an afternoon nap, says Matthew Edlund, M.D., author of “The Power of Rest.” But since that’s not possible for most people with jobs, the next best thing is a form of active rest called “paradoxical relaxation.”

Edlund explains: Focus on one muscle group in your body for at least 15 seconds, concentrating only on how it feels and nothing else. Repeat up and down the body. Surprise — you feel recharged.

4. Drink your coffee nice and slow

No need to gulp down that morning brew: Pour it into a thermos and sip slowly enough to make it last most of the workday. People who consumed the caffeine equivalent of just 2 ounces of coffee per hour still got a kick, according to a study in the journal Sleep. Just cut off the java by 3 p.m., or you may have trouble falling asleep that night.

Health.com: Big perks: coffee’s health benefits

5. Take a walk to wake up

The time of day when the sleep deprived drag the most is between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., says Michael Breus, Ph.D., author of “The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan.” If you find yourself yawning through afternoon meetings, try stepping out for a 10-minute walk.

“Movement boosts core temperature and stimulates the heart, brain, and muscles, preventing a slump,” Breus says. Even pacing around your office will help kick your body back into gear.

Health.com: How to instantly boost your energy

6. Go to bed on time

As tempting as it is to crash at 8 p.m. the evening following a rough night’s sleep, you’ll feel most refreshed if you hit the sack close to your usual bedtime.

“Our bodies have a natural rhythm of sleep and wake — you’ll get the most restorative sleep if you stick to that pattern,” says Janet Kennedy, Ph.D., a New York City–based clinical psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders. “Changing your schedule to make up for lost sleep can actually lead to other problems, like early waking and even insomnia.”

Instead of hitting the sack (or sacking out on the couch) after dinner, go to bed no earlier than an hour before your normal bedtime and wake up no later than an hour past your normal wake time to catch up on lost sleep without overdoing it.

Health.com: Alarm clocks for heavy sleepers

7. Hang around the water cooler

Sleep deprivation can mildly dehydrate you, even if you’re not suffering from a happy-hour hangover. And dehydration actually compounds fatigue, Breus says — so sipping water will help lessen sleepiness. Drink enough so you’re not thirsty and you have clear-ish urine, Breus recommends.

Another trick: Throw in a few ice cubes. “Unlike warm drinks, which tend to relax you, cold beverages can increase alertness because they are more refreshing,” Kennedy says.

Copyright Health Magazine 2011

Story By: by Nancy Shute

The brains of people who grow up speaking two languages are wired differently, and those differences protect them from dementia as they age.

That’s the news from two studies out this month from a scientist in Canada who has spent decades trying to figure out whether being bilingual is bad or good. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, tells Shots. “Suddenly people are interested. I figure it’s because everybody’s scared about dementia.”

Since about 20 percent of Americans are bilingual and as many as 60 percent of people in big cities like Los Angeles grew up speaking two languages, this is no small issue.

Not so long ago, it was thought that being bilingual was a disadvantage, because bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in both languages and are slower in word recall. But more recent research finds that bilingual children are better at “executive processing,” which includes being able to pay attention, plan and organize thoughts.

That’s the focus of one of the studies, which concludes that kids who grow up speaking two languages are better at switching between tasks than kids who spoke only one language. Researchers gave 104 children a common executive function test on a computer that asked them to sort images of either colors or animals on a computer screen. This “switching” task tests working memory and the ability to change from one rule to another.

The children who were bilingual in French, Chinese or Spanish were better at switching categories – in essence, multitasking. That may well be because they learn early on to toggle between the two sets of rules for English and their other language. Bialystok is one of the authors of this study published in the journal Child Development.

So does it do you any good when you’re grown up? That’s been a big question in research on the bilingual brain. The second recent study adds to growing evidence that being bilingual as a child helps a lot later in life.

It reviews the state of research on bilingual adults, and finds they maintain better executive functioning later in life than monolingual people. That extra “cognitive reserve” may allow the brain to better cope with the damage caused by dementia, thereby delaying symptoms. (Being physically and mentally active has also been shown to have cognitive benefits.) The article, also co-authored by Bialystock, is in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

But what about those of us who aren’t bilingual? Are we doomed?

“The kind of story we’re telling about bilingualism and dementia is not that bilingualism is the only inoculation against dementia, but rather, bilingualism is one of the many things we know that contributes to cognitive reserve,” Bialystok says. “It’s why you’re supposed to do crossword puzzles and exercise and learn a musical instrument. If you’re not bilingual but you’re active and engaged, you’re getting cognitive reserve.”

Still, bilinguals do have a natural advantage, she notes, because they can stay active and engaged without making a huge effort.

“Nobody spends all day every day doing crossword puzzles, but everybody spends all day every day talking,” Bialystok says. “It’s a way to get massive doses of this stimulating activity without doing anything special.”