The emotional benefits of family mealtime are well established. But there are physical benefits to family mealtime as well.

I really admire parents who make family dinnertime a priority, where everyone sits around the table at once, enjoys their meal and discusses their day.  Family is more important than anything (even health!) and one of the best ways to foster a familial relationship is by eating together whenever possible.  Family dynamics can make this a challenge (i.e. kids’ after-school activities, sibling rivalries, long work hours, etc.) but the long-term benefits to your kids’ and your own life makes the effort worthwhile.

But when I think of family meals, I don’t think of them as being a treatment for a medical malady.  A treatment for emotional well-being?  Sure.  But for physical problems?  Uh-uh.

Don’t tell that to University of Illinois researchers, though.  Because after observing children with asthma, researchers discovered a relationship between the severity of kids’ asthma symptoms and how intimate their family was.

Of course there are many ways to assess how close a family is, but for the purposes of this study, researchers used family mealtime.

For six weeks, 63 families with at least one son or daughter with asthma were observed via camcorder.  In addition to these observations, researchers collected questionnaires that the boys and girls (between the ages of 9 and 12) completed regarding their mental and physical health.  Portions of the questionnaire gauged the extent to which the kids suffered from separation anxiety, as anxiety tends to exacerbate asthma-related symptoms.

After six weeks of observation and review of the pertinent data, researchers found an inverse relationship between the severity of kids’ asthma and how close the families were.  The more involved the kids were in family conversation and taking on different roles (e.g. setting the table, clearing off the table, getting drinks, etc.) the less severe their symptoms tended to be.

But it wasn’t the family dinnertime activity itself that seemed to affect’ asthma symptoms.  It was the quality of those family dinnertimes.  For instance, some families did very little conversing throughout dinner.  And for them, by and large, kids symptoms were worse.  In addition, these kids were more likely to answer questions indicative of separation anxiety.

While the quality of family meal times was a factor in asthma’s severity, the quantity of those family meal times was important as well.  Not the quantity of food being eaten, but rather how consistently the family ate dinner together.

According to Dr. Barbara H. Fiese, a professor of human and community development at the University of Illinois, having family meals on a consistent basis “allows children to build up expectations about how their parents and siblings will react from day to day.  As a result, kids develop a sense of security.”  And a sense of security is precisely the thing a boy or girl needs to overcome separation anxiety.

The study is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Asthma is a breathing disorder that often presents itself in childhood.  It’s characterized by wheezing, tightness in the chest, coughing, and shortness of breath.  The disease itself is mysterious because there’s no known cure for it, yet asthma-related complications can disappear on their own over time.  Still, approximately 20 million people in the United States have asthma at any given time, about half of them under the age of 10.

If you have a son or daughter with asthma but don’t eat together regularly, you now have a reason to start eating together regularly.  Understand that it may be difficult to establish a consistent family mealtime due to the aforementioned reasons, but I’m confident you’ll be pleased with the camaraderie that it engenders over time.

And hey, it may be just what your son or daughter needs to kick asthma to the curb for good.

Sources:
health.google.com
sciencedaily.com

If you have asthma and smoke, you can reverse the damage it's causing to your lungs by quitting now.

Generally speaking, when people make bad choices they tend to adversely affect the person making those choices more than anyone else.  But that’s not the case with smoking.  Smoking is a bad choice that adversely affects the health of the people around them almost as much as it does the smoker.  Some would say even more so.

There is no better example of this than with people who have asthma.  Cigar and cigarette smoke is the leading cause of asthma attacks, thanks to the very thing that makes cigarettes so deadly to our health: tobacco.

When people smoke and blow out those noxious fumes into the air, they don’t just disappear.  They all go somewhere, most of them winding up in the lungs of passers-by.  And if one of those passers-by happens to have asthma—and there’s a one in 15 chance that they do—it’s an asthma attack waiting to happen.  Because when tobacco smoke enters the lungs, it severely hampers its every day functioning capability.  How?  By damaging hair-like structures on the walls of the lungs (called cilia) that keep dirt and dust from going any farther.  So instead of sweeping dust molecules away as they normally would, the particles gather and gather until the asthmatic has a difficult time breathing, thus triggering an asthma attack.

So as bad as secondhand smoke is for non-smoking asthmatics, how devastating must it be for smoking asthmatics?  Pretty dang devastating, because each and every puff they take exacerbates the damage that’s already there as a result of their asthma.

But there may be hope for them.  As research from the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine indicates, the damage smoking does to the lungs of asthmatics can be reversed if they snuff the puff.

Researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands recruited about 150 patients and assessed the “structural integrity,” for lack of a better word, of their lungs.  Most of them had never smoked before (66 of them), a little less than 50 of them were ex-smokers and about 35 of them still smoked.

Through bronchial biopsies and the administering of questionnaires that gauged their asthmatic symptoms, they found that the smokers’ lungs were far different from everyone else’s, both in phlegm production and the lining of their lungs.  For the smokers, the epithelial lining of their lungs was much thicker and they produced a whole heck of a lot more phlegm. This explains why smoking tends to exacerbate asthmatic symptoms, because there’s far less room for air to roam freely, combined with the blockage from the excessive amounts of phlegm.

As for the non-smokers and ex-smokers, logic would suggest that the non-smokers had the healthiest of lungs.  But surprisingly, there was no statistically significant difference in their epithelial lining and phlegm production compared to the non-smokers.

Reporting on the findings, the study’s lead author Dr. Martine Broekema said, “This study shows again how important smoking cessation is for pulmonary health, and this appears to be especially true for asthmatic patients.”

Broekema went on to say how the findings suggest that smoking can reverse the damage cigarettes cause to the lungs of asthmatic patients.

If nothing else, this study shows that it’s never too late to quit.  And if you have asthma, this truth especially applies to you.

Sources:
sciencedaily.com
webmd.com