Lisa's Lessons of Late

I have learned some crazy and random things the past few weeks. So I decided to share...

1. Onset of puberty is SUPER YOUNG.
Boys start puberty at age 9, and girls between 7 and 8. I don't know about you, but that's a lot younger than I remember starting puberty. The onset of puberty has been decreasing in the past 175 years and scientists don't know why. I've heard people claim that it's related to environmental toxins, I've even heard the blame land on genetically modified foods. Who knows what is to blame, but puberty starts early!

2. Breastfeeding guidelines.
So people who hate on public breast-feeders are just hating on good moms, because babies should be breastfed 8 to 12 times a day for ten to fifteen minutes per breast. Do the math, that's up to 6 hours a day of breastfeeding. If moms don't want to breastfeed in public, then they better do errands quickly and stay home all the time, because they should be breastfeeding every 1.5 to 3 hours.

**Public Health Note: Breastfeeding is really good for babies, and should not be replaced with formula feeding! It gives babies an immune boost, feelings of warmth and love from mom, and has all the nutrients a baby needs for the first 4 to 6 months of life!

3. The origin of the word hypochondriac.
We are learning about the abdomen, and when we discuss the different structures, we refer to 9 regions created by what looks like a tick-tack-toe board on the abdomen (see photo on left). The "hypochondriac regions" lie beneath, or "hypo," to the cartillage, or "chondriac," of the ribs. In ancient medicine, patients would often come to their doctors with pains in the hypochondriac regions. Sadly for those ancient hypochondriacs, the doctors believed that those regions held anxiety and melancholy, and dismissed the patients even though they may have had serious problems. Today, people who claim that they have bundles of medical problems without any clinically observable information to back it up are still called hypochondriacs.

**Public Health Note II (I know, again): I wonder if current doctors are making the same mistakes their predecessors did by dismissing patients with problems that they can't find answers to.

4. Most of the world is lactose intolerant after early stages of development:
My professor seemed to think that people drinking milk that is not from their mother is a really weird and crazy concept. Some Caucasian groups of people gained the gene for lactose tolerance and were able to survive better with food available somewhere during evolution. So people here are often lactose tolerant, but in most parts of the world, they are not.

As my professor said, "So if you are lactose intolerant, you do not have a disease, you are not a genetic freak. You are normal. Most animals cannot drink milk past an early age, most humans can't drink milk past early stages of development."