Eat, Save, and Be Healthy

With March around the corner, and in promotion of National Nutrition Month I’d like to encourage involving children of all ages in the kitchen. When we work together as a family to put a meal on the table it helps everyone to have a sense of responsibility. As a part of the family, everyone has a place and a task to do, even young children can put napkins or plastic cups on the table. Here’s a short list of other skills that can be accented by kitchen activities.
*Following directions, as in making a recipe and involving children with the steps
*Developing reading and language skills (not to mention cooking terms like whisk, beat, or dice)
*A great science experiment—taking all the individual ingredients and coming out with a final product
*Measuring is math, fractions and counting
*Develops motor skills with fine muscle control, hand-eye coordination and directionality (hand beating an egg—which way does the mixture flow?)
*Think of all the kitchen gadgets you may have to do specific tasks- to peel, mash, slice, etc.
*It’s a great time to work together on a recipe and experience accomplishment when it’s all finished

Learning in the kitchen is sensory learning at it’s best, we can touch, smell, hear, watch and taste most of the things that we put together. Along the way we can talk about taking turns and using our manners to be considerate of one another. In the end, our home classroom can be the base of family traditions as we have our family pizza night, or game night with healthy snacks. Beginning when the children are young is a great way to keep them involved as they grow older. If you have older children, ask them what they would like to make or rotate cooking nights. Whatever you choose, draw everyone to the kitchen, it’s a great way to have conversations and work together to create a healthy and strong family in more ways than one!

Women need to save and plan for retirement; unfortunately, we know that many women do not adequately prepare for retirement. Many women believe a major obstacle to investing is the lack of dollars to invest. Even $20 dollars each week from your paycheck will build your nest egg for retirement.

Start to save using payroll deduction through work or transfer $20 to your savings account from your checking account each week. Once you have saved $100 open a CD account at your bank or talk to a broker who invests money. Check out this website to help women become more comfortable with saving and investing www.retirewell.uiuc.edu look under the Plan Well, Retire Well section.

Source: Cora French-Robinson, CFLE

Many teens experiment with alcohol in their high school and early college years.  However, when teens experiment, often they engage in more risky drinking behaviors, most notably binge drinking– drinking 5 or more drinks in a short period of time.

A recent study found that binge drinking could be affecting the teenage brain in ways we didn’t realize before. The teen brain is still developing into the early twenties. Because of this, the brain is more at risk to harmful effects.  The study found that in comparing those who engaged in binge drinking with those who did not, those who drank did worse on memory and thinking tests.  Most notably, the girls performed more poorly on spacial functioning, while the boys did more poorly on test involving attention or focus.

“The magnitude of the difference [in tests] is 10 percent.  I like to think of it as the difference between an A and a B”,  said Susan Tapert, the neuroscientist who conducted the research.

What is possibly more enlightening is that these differences were not only seen on written performance tests, there were actually differences in the brain images of the two groups.

Click here for more information on this study.

This study obviously sheds more light on the dangers of binge drinking.  However, we all know that teens are more prone to engaging in these risky behaviors as they go through this period of life.

Do you think this is something that can be prevented, or something that we should accept as a natural course of a teen’s life?