Health
Fun and Healthy Easter Basket Ideas
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Use these Easter basket ideas for kids, teens, and even adults, to get the whole family involved in a healthy and fun celebration.
The Easter bunny has requested for some of his friends to stay home this year to stay safe. But, just because the kids may not be able to do a neighborhood Easter egg hunt doesn’t mean that the holiday fun is on lockdown. This year, let Easter basket ideas be about more than just chocolate bunnies and candy treats.
Easter is one of my favorite springtime holidays! Make the most of this holiday and use it as a wonderful opportunity to introduce more healthy habits into your celebrations. Luckily, nutritious treats and family fun games are never on lockdown! Check out these Easter basket ideas and activities that you and your family can do at home. Not everything has to be sparkly and newly purchased to be fun – this is time to recycle and get creative.
Healthy Easter Basket Ideas
Let’s jumpstart a healthy lifestyle change starting with healthier Easter baskets! These ideas can be used with toddlers, kids, teens, and adults! Shift the focus away from excess sweet treats this year, and fill your Easter baskets with items that are better for you all. It’s okay for children to have the occasional treat, but holidays shouldn’t be a free-for-all. Plus, the last thing that parents need after the craziness of the past year is a kid with a chocolate bunny sized sugar rush. So, swap out some of the marshmallow peeps and try these healthy Easter basket ideas instead!
Bunny Cupcakes
Bake or purchase whole-grain carrot mini muffins and decorate with bunny cupcake toppers for extra fun! Can’t get the toppers shipped in time? Make your own – find some bunny clipart online, print it out and tape to toothpicks, then get decorating.
Mix-Up the Easter Egg Fill-Up
Fill Easter eggs with:
- sugar-free gum
- chalk to keep them drawing on the stoop or driveway (it’s okay you’re not going anywhere)
- colorful Easter erasers
- popcorn
- stickers
- temporary tattoos
- bouncy balls
- mini bubbles
- or trail mix with dried cranberries and golden raisins
Search through your junk drawers for that unopened pack up gum, stashed gifts, stickers, or anything that can add a little holiday flair. Bonus – you’re cleaning out those drawers! For a good laugh, wrap up a roll of toilet paper in Easter-colored paper and decorate with stickers. By now, your kids will know how valuable this is!
Freeze-Dried and Dried Fruit
Freeze-dried fruit tastes just like candy – kids love bananas, mango, and apples. Be sure they brush their teeth afterward! Dried mango without added sugar and other dried fruits work too. If your child is young enough, put in some “plum candy” (dried prunes) and a recipe you can make together that uses prunes to sweeten brownies or cake (I promise it’s tasty!).
Too Cute Fruit
Cuties or Halos will add a bold splash of spring color and are sweet treats kids will love to eat. Mini red and green apples work well too. Canned pineapple, canned mandarin oranges, or whatever fruit you’ve been rationing, added to the basket will have higher value now!
Easter Coloring Books
Include Easter coloring books and crayons, as well as educational books that teach kids eating healthy can be fun. Check out the Super Crew Cookbook and Activity book, with 50 breakfast recipes and over 100 nutrition activities to keep your kids busy. Or, print out some of our free coloring pages and activity pages and put them in the basket. Sharpen up some old color pencils and bundle them with a colorful ribbon to add them to your fun Easter basket!
Fun Easter Basket Themes
Looking for an Easter basket theme? Try one of these Easter basket ideas to get your kids thinking about healthy food!
Art-Themed Basket
Fill the basket with some of the following:
- food shaped stencils (or pull out some tin cookie cutters to trace)
- food-themed stickers
- a couple of gourds to paint
- water-based paint
- paintbrushes
- ink pads
- pads of paper
- colored pencils
- pastel sticks
- markers
- food coloring
- child-safe scissors
Perhaps assemble an egg painting kit to allow your little artist to show off their Easter-themed creativity.
Gardening-Themed Basket
If you have a backyard and a child with a green thumb, fill the basket with one of each:
- kid-sized watering can
- kid-sized rake
- shovel and trowel
- child-sized apron
- child gardening gloves
- kid’s sized gardening hat
- seeds
- small pots
- seed starter sets
- plant labels with stickers for your kids to identify what they are growing.
Then let your child know this an activity that you can do together! See 5 tips to start gardening with your little ones.
Cooking-Themed Basket
Got a mini chef in the family? Make a basket for them. Kitchen attire could include a kid’s apron (or one of yours) or a little chef hat or bandana. Let your child feel in charge with their own chef tools (new or old). Include some of the following:
- child-sized mixing utensils
- a cutting board (that one in back of your pantry that’s hardly used)
- a kid-friendly knife
- measuring cups and spoons
- different shaped cookie cutters
- kid-proof spiral slicer
- pre-measured dry ingredients for a recipe you will make together (like pizza dough or bread)
- a kid-friendly cookbook, or a few print-outs of recipes based on their food preferences
You can also add in some black, red, and yellow corn kernels to make homemade popcorn together in the microwave or stovetop. Let your little chef experiment with tasty new ways to enjoy this whole grain. Check out these 10 tasty popcorn ideas to start!
Sports-Themed Basket
Is your child the next Cristiano Ronaldo or Serena Williams? Even if your kid’s favorite sports are currently on hold, it doesn’t mean that the fun stops there! Make a sports-themed basket for your kid’s number one fan. Magazines. Collector cards. Include some activity coupons that give him access to playtime with you. If you have a backyard, consider making coupons for 20 minutes of catch, soccer drills, or football plays. Your kid will be thrilled to share their passion with you! Or, if your home space permits, you can also consider putting up a mini basketball, hockey, or soccer net. Remember those nerf balls and plastic hoops we had hanging on our bedroom doors? Make your own with cardboard, and use a plastic loofah or mesh sponge as the ball. It also makes for a fun-filled Easter activity for the whole family.
Animal-Themed Basket
For the animal lover of the household, consider stocking an Easter basket filled with:
- animal plushies
- coloring books
- stickers
- puzzles, and more
Your kid will be thrilled to line up their new animal friends two-by-two for an imaginary quarantine escape on Noah’s Arc. Or, perhaps for some new tea-time companions. That counts as social distancing, right? For the ambitious parents, dig through that old fabric drawer and find enough scraps to make a teddy bear together. Or wash those old and forgotten stuffed animals, tie a bow around them, and let your child know they’re back from safari.
Even though Easter is still a little different than typical years, it doesn’t take away from its meaning. Easter is about celebrating your faith, spending time with family, and creating lifelong memories. This year, start a new healthful tradition that doesn’t revolve around chocolate and candy. Establish new traditions filled with a balance of sweets, healthy treats, and fun-filled games.
Read about more of our healthy Easter ideas for families.
Health
Walmart Is Selling a $300 Power Tower for Just $128, and Shoppers Say It's 'Surprisingly Sturdy'
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When building a home gym, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the equipment options, especially when you’re working with limited space and a tight budget. But when you focus on versatile gear and hunt for deals, creating a useful setup is easily doable. Thankfully, Walmart has been slashing prices on a ton of fitness equipment, including its bestselling adjustable dumbbells and even a complete home gym system. Now, it’s reduced the price of a popular power tower by over $170, and it even ships for free.
The Pooboo Body Champ Multifunction Power Tower is on sale for $128, a 57% discount on its normal price of $300. This incredibly versatile workout station has earned nearly 250 five-star ratings from Walmart shoppers who’ve praised its “strong and sturdy” build and “quality fit and finish,” and it’s currently one of the top 5 bestselling models on the site.
Pooboo Body Champ Multifunction Power Tower, $128 (was $300) at Walmart
Don’t let the brand’s bizarre name fool you—this power tower is a well-made piece of gym equipment. It features steel construction and is rated to hold up to 480 pounds (the tower itself weighs 66 pounds). A nearly 42-inch H-shaped base gives it excellent stability, so it won’t wobble or shake when you’re exercising, and anti-slip feet on the bottom keep it securely planted on the floor. It’s also adjustable (from 71.4 inches to 94 inches) to accommodate users of varying heights. And, once it’s set up, you can use it for a huge range of exercises, including dips, pull-ups, chin-ups, push-ups, vertical leg raises, knee raises, and more.
According to Walmart reviewers, the Pooboo Body Champ stands out for its solid build and usefulness. “It’s a surprisingly sturdy piece of equipment,” a shopper said. “Everything about this fitness tower is perfect. I originally purchased this with the intention of only doing pull-ups on it, but after quickly assembling the power tower, I came to realize just how versatile it is. It has cushions for knee and leg raises, it’s sturdy, and the perfect width for dips.” Another shopper agreed, saying, “This was a much-needed addition to my home gym.”
“This thing is amazing and worth every penny,” said another, who added that it’s “easy to install and can hold a lot of weight.”
At just $128, this Pooboo power tower is a screaming deal, and it’s sure to get lots of use during your workouts. But this discount won’t last long, so grab one today before the price pumps back up.
Health
Alzheimer’s Drug May Save Lives Through ‘Suspended Animation’
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By Lindsay Brownell | Wyss Institute Communications | Harvard Gazette
Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital
Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Using Donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.
“Cooling a patient’s body down to slow its metabolic processes has long been used in medical settings to reduce injuries and long-term problems from severe conditions, but it can only currently be done in a well-resourced hospital,” said co-author Michael Super, director of immuno-materials at the Wyss Institute. “Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”
This research, published Thursday in ACS Nano, was supported as part of the DARPA Biostasis Program, which funds projects that aim to extend the time for lifesaving medical treatment, often referred to as “the Golden Hour,” following traumatic injury or acute infection. The Wyss Institute has been a participant in the Biostasis Program since 2018, and has achieved several important milestones over the last few years.
Using a combination of predictive machine learning algorithms and animal models, the Wyss’ Biostasis team previously identified and tested existing drug compounds that had the potential to put living tissues into a state of suspended animation. Their first successful candidate, SNC80, significantly reduced oxygen consumption (a proxy for metabolism) in both a beating pig heart and in human organ chips, but is known to cause seizures when injected systemically.
In the new study, they once again turned to their algorithm to identify other compounds whose structures are similar to SNC80. Their top candidate was DNP, which has been approved since 1996 to treat Alzheimer’s.
Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.
–Michael Super
“Interestingly, clinical overdoses of DNP in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have been associated with drowsiness and a reduced heart rate — symptoms that are torpor-like. However, this is the first study, to our knowledge, that focuses on leveraging those effects as the main clinical response, and not as side effects,” said the study’s first author, María Plaza Oliver, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute when the work was conducted.
The team used X. laevis tadpoles to evaluate DNP’s effects on a whole living organism, and found that it successfully induced a torpor-like state that could be reversed when the drug was removed. The drug, however, did seem to cause some toxicity, and accumulated in all of the animals’ tissues. To solve that problem, the researchers encapsulated DNP inside lipid nanocarriers, and found that this both reduced toxicity and caused the drug to accumulate in the animals’ brain tissues. This is a promising result, as the central nervous system is known to mediate hibernation and torpor in other animals as well.
Although DNP has been shown to protect neurons from metabolic stress in models of Alzheimer’s disease, the team cautions that more work is needed to understand exactly how it causes torpor, as well as scale up production of the encapsulated DNP for use in larger animals and, potentially, humans.
“Donepezil has been used worldwide by patients for decades, so its properties and manufacturing methods are well-established. Lipid nanocarriers similar to the ones we used are also now approved for clinical use in other applications. This study demonstrates that an encapsulated version of the drug could potentially be used in the future to buy patients critical time to survive devastating injuries and diseases, and it could be easily formulated and produced at scale on a much shorter time scale than a new drug,” said senior author Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
This research was supported by DARPA under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0027, the Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, and the University of Castilla-La Mancha (NextGeneration EU UNI/551/2021).
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This story is reprinted with permission from The Harvard Gazette.
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Health
Can Stuff in Rosemary Extract Fight Cocaine Addiction?
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Researchers have discovered that an antioxidant found in rosemary extract can reduce intakes of cocaine by moderating the brain’s reward response, offering a new therapeutic target for treating addiction.
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The study in the journal Neuron describes researchers’ focus on a region of the brain called the globus pallidus externus, which acts as a gatekeeper that regulates how we react to cocaine.
They discovered that within the GPe, parvalbumin-positive neurons are crucial in controlling the response to cocaine by changing the activity neurons releasing the pleasure molecule dopamine.
“There are currently no effective therapeutics for dependence on psychostimulants such as cocaine, which, along with opioids, represent a substantial health burden,” says corresponding author Kevin Beier, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine.
“Our study deepens our understanding of the basic brain mechanisms that increase vulnerability to substance use disorder-related outcomes and provides a foundation for the development of new interventions.”
Findings in mice revealed that globus pallidus externus parvalbumin-positive cells, which indirectly influence the release of dopamine, become more excitable after being exposed to cocaine. This caused a drop in the expression of certain proteins that encode membrane channels that usually help keep the globus pallidus cell activity in check. The researchers found that carnosic acid, an isolate of rosemary extract, selectively binds to the affected channels, providing an avenue to reduce response to the drug in a relatively specific fashion.
“Only a subset of individuals are vulnerable to developing a substance use disorder, but we cannot yet identify who they are. If globus pallidus cell activity can effectively predict response to cocaine, it could be used to measure likely responses and thus serve as a biomarker for the most vulnerable,” Beier says. “Furthermore, it’s possible that carnosic acid could be given to those at high risk to reduce the response to cocaine.”
The next steps in this research include thoroughly assessing negative side effects of carnosic acid and determining the ideal dosage and timing. The team is also interested in testing its efficacy in reducing the desire for other drugs and in developing more potent and targeted variants.
Scientists from the University of West Virginia and the University of Colorado participated in the study.
Support for this work came from the National Institutes of Health, One Mind, the Alzheimer’s Association, New Vision Research, BrightFocus Foundation, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.
Source: UC Irvine
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Previously Published on futurity.org with Creative Commons License
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