A Healthy Mom Means a Healthy Baby: 3 Important Pregnancy Health Tips to Practice Today

If you’re pregnant or trying to conceive, then you’re probably overwhelmed by all the information surrounding the topic. You can’t do this, you shouldn’t do that, you can’t eat this, and the list goes on and on.

The good news is that you can sit back and relax. It’s time to cut to the chase with the top three tips that you can use today to have a healthy, safe, and happy pregnancy before you welcome your bundle of joy into the world:

Consider your dental hygiene. When you’re pregnant, the last thing on your list may be making a dental appointment. But due to higher levels of progesterone and hormone changes during pregnancy, it can promote increased bacterial growth on your teeth. Basically, your gums will be much more susceptible to infection and inflammation, which leads …

Simple Strategies for Coping with Childhood Allergies

I will never forget the night my 12 year old woke me at midnight after waking with a swollen lip. At first glance I thought perhaps she had hit herself in the face and hadn’t noticed. Yet within an hour it had near doubled in size. I pulled out the liquid Benadryl and starting making calls.

What I didn’t know then was that night was the beginning of a long haul in allergy diagnostics. Two days later she woke yet again with another swollen lip, only the second time her entire body was covered in a mysterious red spotted rash.

The rash led to hives and the hives led to painful red skin. In fact at any given moment any one, or combination of these symptoms would randomly appear.

What began as a seemingly harmless swollen lip led …

What Are the 5 Best Foods to Burn Fat?

Is it really possible to eat well and lose weight at the same time? You may have heard of something called “calorie negative” foods. These healthy foods require more energy to digest than the calories that they provide to the body. On top of that, calorie negative foods can also provide a source of vital nutrients to stimulate healthy digestion and metabolism to burn fat.

Without further ado, here are the top five foods to add to your diet to burn fat and stay healthy at the same time:

Celery: Celery is a calorie negative food that only has 19 calories per cup. And celery will help to you to effectively burn calories since it takes much more than 19 calories to prepare, chew, and fully digest a cup of this vegetable. Celery is also full …

National Chocolate Day

October 28 is National Chocolate Day. Personally, I think it should be a statutory holiday where we all get the day off work to indulge in chocolate. Chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, chocolate candies, chocolate…well, you get the idea.

A Celebration of Chocolate
Chocolate is the world’s number one flavour. This tasty substance was first discovered by the ancient Mayans, who used the extract of the cacao plant as a beverage in ancient rituals. Later, after it had been discovered and brought to Europe by the Spanish, chocolate became a symbol of royalty, available only to those rich or powerful enough to obtain it. In Renaissance-era France, chocolate was officially reserved specifically for members of the French Royal Court.

Today chocolate is the favourite dessert of the masses. Whether on its own or blended as a subtle flavour it’s …

The Absence and a Little Story About One of the Most Unproductive Hospitals Ever

There has been barely any blogging action going on here over the past week. My apologies for that. While slow days are certainly an occurrence around these parts, a week of pretty much nothing new is highly unusual. It wasn’t planned. I’ve been doing my best to adapt to some lifestyle changes that have proven to be difficult and pretty damn exhausting. For one, caffeine withdrawal. Take someone who has been drinking two pots of coffee a day for the past several years and tell them that from this day forward, caffeine does not exist in their lives and while we’re at it, neither does any type of stimulant in any form. You’ll see a whole new side of that person. More than likely, you will be seeing a lot of their angry side, but …

First-Ever Infertility Tax Credit Legislation Could Improve Access to Medical Treatment and Encourage Potential Donors

On May 12, 2011, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the first-ever legislation that, if passed, would dramatically improve access to infertility medical treatment by way of tax credits. The Family Act of 2011 fills a void in current political legislation that aims to directly support the growth of families through the course of in vitro fertilization.

In the United States today, the cost of in vitro fertilization starts at around $12,400 per cycle. Most often, it takes multiple cycles of IVF in order for it to prove to be effective and still, at the end of your treatment, there is no guarantee that you will come out with the success you had hoped for.

Infertility is recognized by the World Health Organization as a legitimate disease and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has …