Science, however, suggests that ‘pre-mastication,’ or the pre-chewing of adult food for infants, is actually a traditional and healthy feeding method.

Standard practice among our blender-lacking ancestors, pre-chewing is still the norm in many non-Western cultures.

The act exposes infants to their mothers’ saliva, giving them an immune system boost that they can’t get from the sterile, pulverized baby food bought in stores.

According to research led by Gretel Pelto, an anthropologist at Cornell University, pre-mastication was the solution to feeding infants during this interim period for most of human history, and remains the method used in many cultures today.

Rather than being unhygienic, Pelto and many other scientists think the feeding method carries on the immune-system-building process that begins with breastfeeding.

By exposing infants to traces of disease pathogens present in a mother’s saliva, it gears up their production of antibodies, teaching their immune systems how to deal with those same pathogens later.

It may also prevent the onset of autoimmune diseases, such as asthma, that are very common in industrialized societies.

These conditions arise when one’s immune system mistakenly attacks one’s own cells, and such ailments have been strongly linked to underexposure to diseases during childhood.

The most common argument against pre-mastication is that infants occasionally catch infectious diseases from the saliva itself.

For example, women with HIV are advised against pre-chewing their babies’ food.

However, research shows that disease transmission through pre-mastication is far less common than was previously assumed, because natural antibodies in saliva significantly reduce the infectiousness of the disease pathogens present there.

Research by the immunologist Samuel Baron of the University of Texas Medical Branch has demonstrated that the risk of HIV transmission via saliva is actually very low, lower than the risk of transmission via breast milk.

Breastfeeding was outmoded in the 1950s, and has since seen a renaissance.

“The evidence for breast milk is overwhelming,” Pelto said. We think the story is identical for both breastfeeding and pre-mastication, they save lives by ensuring good nutrition and good development of the immune system. The evidence for pre-mastication has yet to be completed, but the logic is clear and the epidemiological evidence supports it.”

A review of 20 years worth of research found that the more often children were slapped, spanked or yelled at when they were naughty the more likely they were to display similar behavior when they grew up.

The authors noted that societies view of physical punishment had changed over the past 20 years and it was no longer considered the best way to deal with unruly children.

The authors of the latest review said spanking children could be counter-productive when they pointed to one study of 500 families that found children were less likely to challenge adults when the parents were trained to stop punishing them physically.

They added that many of the studies found that raising a hand to a child increased their chances of developing mental health problems such as depression.

In the U.S a recent poll found most parents said they used ‘time outs’ or took away favorite toys as punishment. However, a fifth said they were ‘very likely’ to spank their children.

Smacking is currently legal in the U.S with some restrictions which vary from state to state. However, it is banned in 20 European countries, including Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

In Britain ‘reasonable chastisement’ in the home is allowed however this was not allowed to ‘leave a mark’ on the skin from 2004. A recent poll found 71 per cent of parents would support a smacking ban.

Appropriate approaches include recognizing that toddlers tend to say no to everything and ignoring them for 10 seconds when they act up before redirecting their behavior. Another method is to lay down rules but also explain why they are used.

According to Dr. Joan Durrant, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, ‘They (parents) are more likely to believe that their child is being defiant or intentionally bad, but in most cases, children are simply doing what is normal for their development.’

The American study involving around 56,000 women with at least one child, concluded that mothers who breastfed for at least six months were less likely to develop hypertension over a 14 year period than those who bottle fed.

Researchers found women who gave their babies formula or breastfed for less than three months were almost a quarter more likely to develop blood pressure problems.

While the findings do not prove breastfeeding was behind healthier blood pressure, researchers said it added to evidence that the practice was good for mothers as well as babies.

Current Department of Health guidelines urge all mothers to breastfeed their children exclusively for the first six months of life, if they are able to.

The research, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, estimated that up to 12 per cent of high blood pressure cases among women with children could be linked to ‘suboptimal’ breastfeeding.

“Women who never breastfed were more likely to develop hypertension than women who exclusively breastfed their first child for six months or more,” said Dr. Alison Stuebe, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who led the study.

Previous studies have shown, women who breastfeed have lower risks of diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease later in life.

Dr. Stuebe said, “If this is a causal relationship, then taking away barriers to breastfeeding could make a difference in women’s health later on.”

Women who had either never breastfed or done so for three months or less were almost one-quarter more likely to develop high blood pressure than women who had breastfed for at least a year.

Factors such as diet, exercise and smoking habits were taken into account.

Dr. Stuebe, cautioned that none of the findings proved breastfeeding itself gives long-term protection against high blood pressure.

She said it was possible that other factors hindered women from breastfeeding as well as contributed to their high blood pressure, such as a stressful work environment.

Breast milk lowers levels of growth hormone and insulin in the blood, which slows the rate of growth even after the baby has started on solid foods. Slower weight gain is known to encourage healthier eating patterns of children.

Breastfeeding may help cut the child from the risk of developing diabetes and becoming obese later in life.

On the other hand, formula milk may increase the production of fat cells, which encourages weight gain for babies throughout their childhood.

The results come from analysis of a wider study of diet and well-being following 330 children at nine, 18 and 36 months.

‘We can see that breastfeeding has a significant, measurable effect on the important growth regulators in the blood and insulin. The more times the child was breastfed, the lower the hormone levels,’ said Anja Lykke Madsen, a member of the research team.

The findings from the Faculty of Life Sciences at Copenhagen University in Denmark also suggest that the longer the period of breastfeeding, the lower a child’s weight at the age of 18 months.

Research has shown that breast milk protects babies against stomach bugs, chest infections, asthma, eczema, and allergies, and appears to bring general health advantages in later life.

Breastfeeding can help new mothers to regain their shape, by burning an extra 500 calories a day. The Department of Health recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life.

It can also reduce the risk of pre-menopausal breast and ovarian cancer and osteoporosis in mothers.

In Sweden, 98 percent of new mothers breastfeed while in Britain, by four months old, 75 per cent of babies drink formula rather than breast milk.

However, the new results show that breastfeeding also affects levels of growth hormone and insulin at nine months, at a time when the children are well into eating solids. The longer the children were breastfed, the lower their weight at 18 months.’

Professor Kim Fleischer Michaelsen, of Copenhagen University, said: ‘It is well known that children who are breastfed grow slightly more slowly than children who are given formula, and it looks as if this growth pattern is optimal because it reduces the risk of developing lifestyle diseases later in life.

The findings suggest that pregnancy can be impacted by exposure to stress itself rather than the factors that often accompany or cause stress, such as poverty, the researchers said.

An investigation of how the stress of a major 2005 earthquake affected pregnant women in Chile.

The investigators analyzed the birth certificates of all the babies born in Chile between 2004 and 2006, which was more than 200,000 per year.

The birth records provided information about the babies and their mothers, including how close the mothers lived to the epicenter of the magnitude 7.9 earthquake.

Reporting in the Dec. 8 issue of Human Reproduction, the study authors found that exposure to the earthquake during the third month of pregnancy reduced the ratio of male to female births.

“Generally, there are more male than female live births. The ratio of male to female births is approximately 51:49, in other words, out of every 100 births, 51 will be boys.

Our findings indicate a 5.8 percent decline in this proportion, which would translate into a ratio of 45 male births per 100 births, so that there are now more female than male births.

This is a significant change for this type of measure,” Dr. Karine Kleinhaus, an assistant professor of psychiatry, obstetrics & gynecology, and environmental medicine at New York University, said in a journal news release.

This finding may be related to previous research, which has found that male fetuses tend to grow larger than females and need more resources from the mother, and therefore are more likely to miscarry in times of stress.

In addition, male fetuses may be less robust than females and may be less capable of adapting their development to a stressful environment in the womb.

The study also revealed that women who experienced the earthquake during their second and third months of pregnancy had shorter pregnancies and were more likely to have premature babies.

Compared to women in parts of Chile unaffected by the earthquake, the pregnancies of women exposed to the earthquake in the second month of pregnancy were an average of 1.3 days shorter, and the pregnancies of those exposed to the earthquake in the third month of pregnancy were an average of about 2 days shorter, the findings showed.

More than nine in 100 women exposed to the earthquake in the third month of pregnancy had a premature baby, a 3.4 percent increase over the normal rate of about six in 100.

The effect was most notable among baby girls, close to a 4 percent increase in premature birth if the mother was exposed to the earthquake in the second month of pregnancy and a 3.8 percent increase if it occurred in the third month.

Earthquake exposure had no statistically significant effect on the risk of having a premature baby boy, the researchers noted.

The research tends to support the Philippine government’s decision to control the ads for infant formula which can discourage mothers from breast-feeding that provides health benefits for newborns.

In a study published by the Social Science and Medicine Journal, mothers were 6.4 times more likely to stop breast-feeding babies within one year of age, it exposes risk to illness and mortality for the infant.

International health experts recommend that mothers must breastfeed their babies for the first six months and continue breast-feeding, supplemented by solid foods, until their babies are 2 years old.

A research in the Philippines noted that marketing breast milk substitutes was to blame for a drop in breast feeding in the Southeast Asian country, among them are multinational companies who fought legally their right to sell their baby formulas.

Said companies also take the issue to court when the Philippine government tried to regulate its advertising laws for milk products.

However, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled in favor to Department of Health’s authority to regulate advertising of breast milk substitutes but it came short in its decision to support a total advertising ban due to freedom of speech.

Breast feeding rates among Filipino babies up to four months old dropped from 47.3 percent in 1998 to 40.1 percent in 2008, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) data.

Despite the WHO’s adoption in 1981 of the International Code of Marketing Breast Milk Substitutes to curtail unethical marketing promotions, few countries have fully implemented the code’s ban on advertising or other forms of promotion, according to the authors of the study.

Infants weighing less than 4lb (1.8kg) could be more prone to developing autism than children born at normal weight, a study suggests.

Of the 862 New Jersey children born at a low birth weight from birth to the age of 21 that the U.S. researchers had followed, about 5 percent were diagnosed with autism, compared to 1 percent of the general population.

However, experts suggest that more research is required to confirm and understand the link.

Previous research has established a relation between low birth weight and a range of motor and cognitive problems among children.

But this is the first study according to researchers to have established that children may also have a greater risk of developing autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The involved babies were from three counties of New Jersey and born between September 1984 and July 1987. They all weighed below or a maximum of about 4.4 lbs.

Around 623 children were screened for risk of an autism spectrum disorder at age 16, and 117 were found to be positive in that screening, 70 were assessed again later at age 21 and eleven of that group were found to have an autism spectrum disorder.

Based on the results, the researchers calculated an estimated prevalence rate of ASD of 31 out of 623 children, which is equal to 5 percent.

Jennifer Pinto-Martin, professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and director of the autism center where this research was conducted, said: “Cognitive problems in these children may mask underlying autism.

“If there is suspicion of autism or a positive screening test for ASD, parents should seek an evaluation for an ASD. Early intervention improves long-term outcome and can help these children both at school and at home.”

But Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, said it was important to put the findings in perspective.

“The association looks real, but nevertheless, most low birthweight children don’t have autism, and most children with autism don’t have low birthweight.”

Georgina Gomez, action research leader for The National Autistic Society, said more research is needed to confirm the link between low birthweight and autism and better understand why babies born underweight may be more prone to developing autism.

“Low birthweight has been linked to a range of motor and cognitive problems and often goes hand-in-hand with premature birth and birthing complications.

“It is important to dig down further to try to understand the biological processes and events that could explain this proposed connection.”

Experts say it could mean women being told to watch their stress levels as well as their diet and lifestyle when trying for a baby.

According to Dr. Cecilia Pyper, from the Department of Public Health at Oxford University, the research is addressed to healthy women in UK trying for a baby; this area is important to research because it needs to identify ways of making pregnancies and babies as healthy as possible.

Scientists who monitored women in the months before they became pregnant found that those who were suffering from long-term stress had more girls.

Those who had short-term anxieties also took longer to conceive.

It is the latest study to suggest that the circumstances in which babies are conceived, such as their parents’ diet and lifestyle, plays an important role in their development.

At the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, 338 women from Britain who were trying to become pregnant were asked to keep daily journals about their lifestyles and their sex lives.

Their levels of two hormones known to rise with stress, cortisol and alpha-amylase, were also measured in the six months before they conceived.

Cortisol is linked to long-term stress such as money, work or health worries, while alpha-amylase levels can be triggered by a sudden release of adrenalin after a difficult journey or an argument, for instance.

Results for the 130 women in the group who went on to have babies were ‘indicative of a strong female excess,’ with 58 boys but 72 girls.

Normally in Western countries, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls.

Most strikingly, the odds of having a boy were 75 per cent lower among the women with the highest cortisol levels and 69 per cent lower in those with the second-highest levels.

Scientists are now starting to untangle the complicated issues of stuttering with the hope of finding a better treatment.

Researchers say stuttering is really a speech production problem, dispelling longstanding misconceptions that the underlying causes are language problems or psychological problems like anxiety or trauma.

Speaking involves brain area responsible not only for language, but for hearing, planning, emotion, breathing and movement of the jaw, lips, tongue and neck.

“People who have stutter have motor difficulties in producing fluent speech,” said Luc De Nil, a speech language pathologist at the University of Toronto.

“They don’t have difficulty developing words or syntax, although they may process language differently. They have difficulty with efficient coordination of motor movements and speech is such a high demand fine motor skill that requires extremely fast sequencing and timing.”

Anne Smith, a stuttering expert at Purdue University, said that in stutterers, “the generals in the brain, who control soldiers, which are the muscles, aren’t sending out the right signals to the soldiers, so they just get all mixed up and run around.”

“We really have not been able to find indicators of stuttering before the first day it emerges,” said Nan Ratner, an expert at the University of Maryland.

The late start contributed to myths that bad parenting could cause stuttering, she said. It usually begins “when you’re starting with the grammar of the language.”

The complexity of grammar, in fact, seems to be a part of the problem. Stutterers’ brains respond to meaning errors as normal speakers’ brains do, but have a much lower response to grammatical errors, said Dr. Smith.

About 75 percent of children eventually stop stuttering some with therapy and some without, but there is no predicting who will recover.

So far, drugs have shown unimpressive results, or caused severe side effects, and experts say the problem is so complex that a single pill is unlikely to cure all stuttering.

But scientists are examining images of the brains of people who began stuttering as children and those who started after a stroke, Dr. De Nil has found excess activity in areas involved in speech motor control and coordination of the movements needed for speech.

These brain areas may be working overtime because stutterers do not develop the “automatic pattern of speaking” that non stutters have, said Dr. Smith.

Only about a third of stuttering children have other language or speech problems, but Dr. Ratner found that while stutterers perform within normal limits on standardized tests, on average their scores are lower than non stutterers.

Genes almost certainly play a role for about half of all stutterers: environmental factors may contribute too. Trauma and stress do not cause stuttering but it can exacerbate it.

For unclear reasons, boys are likely to stutter, and up to 4 times as likely to continue into adulthood.

It says that may be because of the make-up of breast milk that contained large quantities of a particular type of fatty acid, as well as growth factors and hormones, which were important for the development of the brain and nervous system.

Also, breastfeeding may lead to better mother-baby interaction which could mean the babies learn more about acceptable ways of behaving.

Breastfeeding is already associated with other health benefits for babies, including lower rates of infection and less obesity in later life.

Researchers are looking at the feeding habits of 10,037 mothers to their babies, they were asked to assess problems in their children by the age of five, including anxiousness and clinginess, restlessness, and lying or stealing.

Only 6 percent of children who were breastfed showed signs of behavior problems, compared with 16 percent of children who were formula-fed. Breastfed children also get ill less often, which may affect their behavior.