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Tag: young kids

  • Beware Noodle Soup

    Beware Noodle Soup

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    When the weather turns frigid, there is only one thing to do: make a pot of chicken-noodle soup. On the first cold afternoon in early December, I simmered a whole rotisserie chicken with fennel, dill, and orzo, then ladled it into bowls for a cozy family meal. Just as I thought we’d reached peak hygge, my five-month-old son suddenly grabbed my steaming bowl and tipped the soup all over himself. Piercing screams and a frenzied taxi ride to the pediatric emergency room ensued.

    My husband and I waited in the ER with our pantsless, crying child, racked with guilt. But when we told doctors and nurses what had happened, they seemed unperturbed. As they bandaged my son’s blistering skin, they explained that children get burned by soup—especially noodle soup—all the time. “Welcome to parenthood,” a nurse said, as we boarded an ambulance that transferred us to a nearby burn unit.

    That children are frequently scalded by hot liquids makes perfect sense. But soup? Indeed, soup burns “are very common,” James Gallagher, the director of the Burn Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork–Presbyterian, where I’d brought my son, told me. After hot tap water, soup is a leading cause of burn-related visits to the hospital among young children in the United States. An estimated 100,000 American children are scalded by spilled food and beverages each year—and in many cases, soup is the culprit. Pediatric soup injuries happen so frequently that an astonishing amount of scientific literature is dedicated to it, generating terms such as meal-time morbidity, starch scalds,  and the cooling curve of broth.

    Anyone can get burned by soup, yet kids can’t help but knock things over. Infants have minimal control over their grabby little hands, and older children still lack balance and coordination. Give them a bowl of soup, or even put one near them, and you have a recipe for disaster. Consider instant noodle soup—the kind prepared by pouring boiling water into a Styrofoam container with dried noodles, or filling it with water and microwaving it. In one small study from 2020, 21 children ages 4 to 12 carried foam cups of blue paint—meant to mimic containers of instant noodles—from a microwave toward a table. Blue splashes on their white shirts revealed that nearly one in five children spilled the “soup,” most commonly on their arms.

    Part of the danger is the nature of soup itself. Boiling water is hot enough to scald skin. But salt, oil, and other ingredients raise water’s boiling point, meaning that soup can reach a much higher temperature and cause greater injury, Gallagher said. Soup also stays hotter for longer, prolonging the potential for harm: A 2007 study found that certain soups took more time to cool than tap water after being boiled. Even when slightly cooled, to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, it can cause “a significant scald burn,” one commentary noted.

    Not all soups are created equal. As the authors of the 2007 study found, noodles “may adhere to the skin” and cause a deep burn, calling to mind the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish. They may also stay hot longer than expected. “Noodles do seem to be particularly problematic,” Wendalyn Little, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine who studies soup burns, told me. Hearty soups are generally more hazardous than brothy ones: Engineers who studied two kinds of canned soup—chunky (chicken noodle) versus runny (tomato)—concluded that the former can lead to more severe burns because its solid constituents prevent it from flowing off the skin. “A runny soup seems a lot like water, but what if it’s a New England clam chowder? That’s real thick and stays in place,” Gallagher said. The chicken soup I’d made for my family was on the brothy side, but the orzo made it particularly viscous. (Thank goodness I hadn’t made gloopy congee that day.)

    For these reasons, perhaps the most dangerous soup of all is instant noodle soup. Nearly 2,000 American kids get burned by it annually, according to one estimate; in an analysis published earlier this year, this kind of soup caused 31 percent of pediatric scalds in a Chicago hospital over a decade. These products are dangerous for reasons beyond their contents. They tend to be packaged in tall, flimsy containers that are perilously easy to topple. Microwaveable versions can be dangerous for kids who haven’t yet fully grasped that a room-temperature product, heated for several minutes in a microwave, can come out piping hot. “Fluids like that can be superheated such that when you touch them, there’s almost like a mini explosion,” splashing boiling liquid onto skin, Gallagher explained.

    Soup burns can be quite serious. In a few cases, the burns can be so severe that they require tube feeding or intravenous narcotics. The 2007 study of children scalded by instant noodle soup noted that all of them had “at least second-degree burns,” which damage the first two layers of skin and usually erupt into blisters. The children who were burned on their upper body—mostly young kids, who tend to reach toward objects on elevated surfaces—stayed in the hospital for an average of 11 days.

    In most cases, however, burns from soup are painful but not life-threatening. Scarring, if it occurs at all, is worst in childhood, then fades away, Gallagher said. If burns do happen, he told me, immediately remove any clothes or diapers soaked with hot liquid, then run cool water over the injury for 20 minutes and call your doctor. Avoid applying ice to the injured area, he added, because doing so can damage tissue.

    Kids move on quickly. It’s the parents who deal with long-term consequences. “There’s a special kind of guilt when your baby is burned,” Gallagher said. A week after the incident, my family returned to the burn unit for a follow-up visit. Parents with small children filled the waiting room; we exchanged knowing glances. A nurse removed a thick bandage from my son’s thigh. Fortunately, unlike his parents, he emerged without a scar.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • American Families Have a Massive Food-Waste Problem

    American Families Have a Massive Food-Waste Problem

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    If you have children, you probably already understand them to be very adorable food-waste machines. If you do not have children, I have five, so let me paint you a picture. On a recent Tuesday night, the post-dinner wreckage in my house was devastating. Peas were welded to the floor; my 5-year-old had decided that he was allergic to chicken and left a pile of it untouched on his plate. After working all day, making the meal in the first place, and then spending dinnertime convincing five irrational, tiny people to try their vegetables, I didn’t even have the energy to convince them to take their plates into the kitchen, let alone box up their leftovers for tomorrow. So I did exactly what I’m not supposed to do, according to the planet’s future: I threw it all out, washed the dishes, and flopped into bed, exhausted.

    Tens of millions of tons of food that leaves farms in the United States is wasted. Much of that waste happens at the industrial level, during harvesting, handling, storage, and processing, but a staggering amount of food gets wasted at home, scraped into the garbage can at the end of a meal or tossed after too long in the crisper drawer. According to a 2020 Penn State University study, almost a third of the food that American households buy is wasted.

    On the individual level, all of this waste is expensive, annoying, and gross. In the aggregate, it’s unfortunate, given that about a fifth of American families reported not having enough to eat last year. But it’s also bad for the planet. Every step of the modern food-production process generates greenhouse gases. Before they ended up in the trash, all of those slimy vegetables and uneaten hunks of chicken were grown using water and farmland and pesticides and fertilizer. They were most likely packed in plastic and paper, and then stored and transported using fossil fuels and electricity. Throwing away food means throwing away all of the resources it requires, but the problems don’t end there: As food rots in landfills and open dumps, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. According to the United Nations, food loss and waste accounts for about 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

    Read: Your diet is cooking the planet

    Some amount of food waste is probably inevitable, especially with young kids. “The very youngest children … are still kind of understanding what they like, with novel foods and healthy foods. We want to give them that opportunity,” Brian Roe, a farm-management professor and the director of the Food Waste Collaborative at Ohio State University, told me. “You need to waste a little bit of food while they develop palates.”

    More saliently, Roe’s research indicates that food waste is often inversely proportional to spare time: We get busy, we eat out, and our well-intended groceries head to the trash. His data show a 280 percent increase in food waste from February 2021 to February 2022, right as pandemic restrictions were loosening and people with the income to do so started eating out more. In other words, as soon as people had the option to eat without cooking, they did. “When you’ve got more kids and more craziness and a time crunch, all of a sudden, what you thought was going to be 40 minutes to prep dinners is out the window,” he told me. Thus, “those ingredients are more likely to go to waste.”

    Wasting less food starts at the grocery store: Most financially secure families simply need less food than they buy. The sustainability consultant Ashlee Piper told me that she likes to take a picture of her fridge and pantry before heading to the store, in order to avoid buying duplicates. She also recommends shopping not for your “aspirational life” but for the one you are actually living: If, realistically, you’re never going to make your own pasta or pack gourmet lunches for your kids, don’t shop for those meals. “There’s no lunchbox sheriff,” she told me. (Comforting!)

    Once you unpack the groceries, experts say to be strategic about making perishable foods highly visible, accessible, and appetizing. Julia Rockwell, a San Francisco mom and sustainability expert, recommends an “Eat Me” station, whether it’s a basket, a bowl, a tray, or a section of the refrigerator, which she says is especially helpful for teenagers, inclined as they are to “go full claws into the fridge.” A designated place for high-urgency snacks reminds them, “Here’s a yogurt that you missed, or here’s a half of a banana, or here’s the things let’s go to first,” she told me. Leftovers and soon-to-spoil foods also make great dinners or lunches for younger kids, who will be happy to snack on items that don’t necessarily go together in a traditional meal.

    If you’re cleaning out your fridge and pantry strictly according to expiration dates, stop: If a food is past its expiration date but looks and smells fine, it probably is; most of the time, expiration dates are an indicator of quality, not safety. (Deli meats and unpasteurized cheeses are notable exceptions.) Brush up on the language of food packaging—“best by” is just a suggestion, while “expiration” is the date the manufacturer has decided when quality will begin to decline. Frozen food is pretty much always safe, and packaged foods and canned goods without swelling, dents, or rust can last for years, though they may not taste as good. (You can conceal your less-than-fresh nonperishables in another meal, such as adding older ground beef from the freezer to a chili. When in doubt about, say, an older vegetable, Roe says, “coat it in panko and fry it up.”)

    Read: Expiration dates are meaningless

    And whatever you’re feeding your kids, experts repeatedly told me, you should probably be feeding them less. How many blueberries does your pickiest kid really eat at the breakfast table? And how many do you put on their plate that you wish they’d eat? The difference in this pint-size math equation is an essential factor in food-waste management for families. Jennifer Anderson, a mom and registered dietician, discourages “wishful portions.” “You know the amount you want your child to eat, so you put that much on their plate … Take that amount, cut it in half, then cut it in half again,” she told me. “A practical portion is a quarter of what you wish they would eat.”

    Since talking to Anderson, I’ve kept her advice in mind. I still spend more time than I’d like trying to convince my kids to eat yellow peppers when they’ve decided the red ones are the only acceptable type. But the math is simple: Smaller portions on their plate means fewer leftovers in the trash later, and I’ve noticed a real difference.

    And I still find myself dumping plates of picked-over food into the trash or compost. But I move on to the next meal with more grace and less guilt for having helped my kids become little stewards of a healthier planet. I want them to understand that our food comes from somewhere, and that not eating it has consequences. That doesn’t mean guilting them for not liking dragon fruit, or demanding that they clean their plate at every meal, or scaring them about climate change. It’s more like bringing them along, helping them participate in a family project with planetary implications. Wish me luck with the peppers.

    This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

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    Alexandra Frost

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  • Are Colds Really Worse, or Are We All Just Weak Babies Now?

    Are Colds Really Worse, or Are We All Just Weak Babies Now?

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    For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.

    The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. “It’s not COVID,” they say. “I tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose.

    That something else might be the once-overlooked common cold. After three years of largely being punted out of the limelight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them, adenovirus, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, common-cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses galore—are awfully common again. And they’re really laying some people out. The good news is that there’s no evidence that colds are actually, objectively worse now than they were before the pandemic started. The less-good news is that after years of respite from a bunch of viral nuisances, a lot of us have forgotten that colds can be a real drag.

    Read: The pandemic broke the flu … again

    Once upon a time—before 2020, to be precise—most of us were very, very used to colds. Every year, adults, on average, catch two to three of the more than 200 viral strains that are known to cause the illnesses; young kids may contract half a dozen or more as they toddle in and out of the germ incubators that we call “day cares” and “schools.” The sicknesses are especially common during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temps, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breath. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing drove several of those microbes into hiding—but as mitigations have eased in the time since, they’ve begun their slow creep back.

    For the majority of people, that’s not really a big deal. Common-cold symptoms tend to be pretty mild and usually resolve on their own after a few days of nuisance. The virus infiltrates the nose and throat, but isn’t able to do much damage and gets quickly swept out. Some people may not even notice they’re infected at all, or may mistake the illness for an allergy—snottiness, drippiness, and not much more. Most of us know the drill: “Sometimes, it’s just congestion for a few days and feeling a bit tired for a while, but otherwise you’ll be just fine,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. As a culture, we’ve long been in the habit of dismissing these symptoms as just a cold, not enough of an inconvenience to skip work or school, or to put on a mask. (Spoiler: The experts I spoke with were adamant that we all really should be doing those things when we have a cold.)

    The general infectious-disease dogma has always been that colds are a big nothing, at least compared with the flu. But gentler than the flu is not saying much. The flu is a legitimately dangerous disease that hospitalizes hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, and, like COVID, can sometimes saddle people with long-term symptoms. Even if colds are generally less severe, people can end up totally clobbered by headaches, exhaustion, and a burning sore throat; their eyes will tear up; their sinuses will clog; they’ll wake up feeling like they’ve swallowed serrated razor blades, or like their heads have been pumped full of fast-hardening concrete. It’s also common for cold symptoms to stretch out beyond a week, occasionally even two; coughs, especially, can linger long after the runny nose and headache resolve. At their worst, colds can lead to serious complications, especially in the very young, very old, and immunocompromised. Sometimes, cold sufferers end up catching a bacterial infection on top of their viral disease, a one-two punch that can warrant a trip to the ER. “The fact of the matter is, it’s pretty miserable to have a cold,” Landon told me. “And that’s how it’s always been.”

    Read: Don’t worry, it’s not COVID

    As far as experts can tell, the average severity of cold symptoms hasn’t changed. “It’s about perception,” says Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. After skipping colds for several years, “experiencing them now feels worse than usual,” she told me. Frankly, this was sort of a problem even before COVID came onto the scene. “Every year, I have patients who call me with ‘the worst cold they’ve ever had,’” Landon told me. “And it’s basically the same thing they had last year.” Now, though, the catastrophizing might be even worse, especially since pandemic-brain started prompting people to scrutinize every sniffle and cough.

    There’s still a chance that some colds this season might be a shade more unpleasant than usual. Many people falling sick right now are just coming off of bouts with COVID, flu, or RSV, each of which infected Americans (especially kids) by the millions this past fall and winter. Their already damaged tissues may not fare as well against another onslaught from a cold-causing virus.

    It’s also possible that immunity, or lack thereof, could be playing a small role. Many people are now getting their first colds in three-plus years, which means population-level vulnerability might be higher than it normally is this time of year, speeding the rate at which viruses spread and potentially making some infections more gnarly than they’d otherwise be. But higher-than-usual susceptibility seems unlikely to be driving uglier symptoms en masse, says Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious-disease physician and microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Not all cold-causing viruses leave behind good immunity—but many of those that do are thought to prompt the body to mount relatively durable defenses against truly severe infections, lasting several years or more.

    Plus, for a lot of viruses going around right now, the immunity question is largely moot, Landon told me. So many different pathogens cause colds that a recent exposure to one is unlikely to do much against the next. A person could catch half a dozen colds in a five-year time frame and not even encounter the same type of virus twice.

    Read: Maybe consider not kissing that baby

    It’s also worth noting that what some people are categorizing as the worst cold they’ve ever had might actually be a far more menacing virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 or a flu virus. At-home rapid tests for the coronavirus often churn out false-negative results in the early days of infection, even after symptoms start. And although the flu can sometimes be distinguished from a cold by its symptoms, they’re often pretty similar. The illnesses can only be definitively diagnosed with a test, which can be difficult to come by.

    The pandemic has steered our perception of illness into a false binary: Oh no, it’s COVID or Phew, it’s not. COVID is undoubtedly still more serious than a run-of-the-mill cold—more likely to spark severe disease or chronic, debilitating symptoms that can last months or years. But the range of severity between them overlaps more than the binary implies. Plus, Marcelin points out, what truly is “just” a cold for one person might be an awful, weeks-long slog for someone else, or worse—which is why, no matter what’s turning your face into a snot factory, it’s still important to keep your germs to yourself. The current outbreak of colds may not be any more severe than usual. But there’s no need to make it bigger than it needs to be.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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