Dear Healthy Friend,

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what will be my child's future call? That's wishful thinking... magic mirrors only really exist in the fairytales I read my child at bedtime. There is no real crystal ball or mirror that can see into the future and tell me what my child will be or how she'll look in years to come... But there is an element that I can control to make sure she doesn't become overweight in the future...

Dr Ferril tells us to teach our children when not to share.

In the name of good health,

Taryn Strugnell
Managing Editor of Nutrition & Healing

P.S. Gas is embarrassing for most of us. Generally it's an uneventful passing... but what happens when it is painful? Why does this happen and how do you relieve it? See what Dr Wright has to say...

When sharing is no longer caring...
Dr William Ferril
Contributor to Healthier News

If you'd like a glimpse into your child's future, you don't need a fortune teller or a magic mirror. You just need to see who he or she is eating with.

It turns out those eating buddies play a direct role in how much your kids munch - and they're not exactly good influences.

I'm already greatly concerned by the eating habits of our children. Kids in general suffer from some pretty serious nutritional deficiencies and a study in the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that those bad habits are contagious.

It found that children with friends who eat too much are likely to do the same.

While it's nice to know that your kids are learning to share, bad eating habits are the one thing you don't want your child picking up from friends.

Researchers allowed 130 kids between the ages of 9 and 15 to eat as much as they wanted while in certain scenarios, with friends and strangers of different weights. They found that kids ate more when with friends, which makes sense. But they also found that kids ate even more - a lot more - when with overweight friends.

And the worst match-up of all was an overweight kid with an overweight friend. These kids were likely to eat up to 300 calories more when with each other than they would with a thin friend.

While I don't like to take a fatalistic approach when it comes to health, your weight IS within your control - if you're willing to discipline yourself. The numbers don't lie. I remember a Harvard study from 2007 that found that adults are 57% more likely to become obese if a friend does. Our odds of getting fat also go up by 40% if a sibling becomes obese and 37% if a spouse does.

So if your pack of friends is starting to resemble cows rather than wolves, maybe it's in your interest to stray from the herd a bit - or at least keep a closer eye on your waistline and take charge of your eating habits.

And when it comes to your kids, you're better off trying to take charge of their eating habits rather than choosing their friends for them. There's one simple way to do that: Start making their lunches for them instead of giving them money to run to the tuck-shop during break.

Sure, they might issue the standard complaints at first. But if you involve them, let them help plan and even make those healthy lunches, your kids could soon have meals that everyone around them will envy. Let your child influence his or her friends rather than the other way around...

A solution for painful gas

Q: I've been having a problem with terrible, painful gas on a daily basis. Do I need to cut out certain foods, or is there a natural treatment I can try?

Dr. Wright: It's true that you could have gas because of what you ate last night, but the location and quantity of the gas can be clues to more serious problems.

For example, if most of the gas is located in your upper abdomen in the "V" between your lower ribs, it's in your stomach. Empty stomachs aren't supposed to have gas in them: Gas in the gastrointestinal tract is almost always the result of microbial fermentation, which means there are germs lingering there.

Since normal stomach acid kills all micro-organisms (except for Helicobacter pylori, the ulcer-causing bacteria), stomachs should be sterile. As one of my med school professors said, a sterile empty stomach is a "collapsed bag" containing no food - and no gas, either.

So, if you have gas in your stomach when you haven't eaten, you very likely don't have enough acid even to kill germs, much less to digest all your food properly.

Excessive gas elsewhere in the abdomen could have several causes. It could be that your digestive enzymes are low and you aren't properly digesting and absorbing a variety of nutrients. If that's the case, you should take digestive enzymes after meals.

Another possibility is that you have a food allergy. You could also have lactose intolerance or gluten-gliadin sensitivity, which is similar to allergies, but not exactly the same. Or maybe it's Candida overgrowth or other "unfriendly" microorganisms.

Nearly all of these conditions will interfere with normal digestion and assimilation to one degree or another, so it's important to find out which condition (or combination of conditions) may be causing all of this gas.

The best course of action is to make an appointment with a physician skilled in nutritional and natural medicine who can test you for allergies and sensitivities and measure your stomach acid and overall digestive function. To find such a physician in your area, contact the South African Society of Integrated Medicine on (021) 887-5364 or lucia@integrativemedicine.co.za.