First Lady Michelle Obama recently sat down to record video responses to questions from you. Last week, we posted responses on how you can get involved with Let’s Move! and what inspired the First Lady to start the initiative to combat childhood obesity. Check out a couple more:

By Courtney Hutchinson

Between San Francisco’s attempted ban on infant circumcision and the move by 19 state governments to defund Medicaid coverage for the procedure, the millennia-old act of removing a newborn boy’s foreskin has undoubtedly become a point of controversy in America.

Twenty years ago as much as 67 percent of all infants born in U.S. hospitals were circumcised. Today, that number hovers around 32 percent, in part because of decreased funding for the poor and a rise in controversy over the merits of the practice. Opponents of circumcision, who call themselves “inactivists” because they wish to leave the foreskin alone, lampoon the practice as a violation of human rights, a form of genital mutilation and as medically unnecessary.

This spring ABC News tracked the war waged on the procedure in San Francisco as circumcision opponents put forth a ban on it. Though they succeeded in getting the anti-circumcision bill on the ballot, it was later struck down by a judge over a legal technicality.

Campaigns to withdraw state Medicaid funding for infant circumcision were more successful with two new states, South Carolina and Colorado, adding such defunding measures this year. Though state officials cite economic reasons for the defunding, a 2009 UCLA study suggests that the withdrawal of coverage to the poor will have a large impact on circumcision rates: In the study, hospitals in states without Medicaid coverage for circumcision were half as likely to perform the procedure as a matter of routine.

Ironically, increased public doubt about the long-routine practice of circumcision comes at exactly the time when there is the most medical evidence to support its health benefits, says Dr. Aaron Tobian, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Along with his colleague Dr. Ronald Gray, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, Tobian puts forth an argument for the medical benefits of infant circumcision in the October edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, released Tuesday.

“The anti-circumcision campaign is very similar to the anti-vaccination campaigns — the more vocal you are, the more press coverage, and people believe what people are yelling, despite what the medical evidence shows.”

“The foreskin is there for a reason,” Lloyd Schofield, who spearheaded the San Francisco anti-circumcision bill, told ABC News in May. Shofield called circumcision an “unnecessary surgery” with no “sound medical evidence” behind it.

Recent studies, especially in the past five years, suggest otherwise, Gray and Tobian say. As recently as 2005, when his first child was about to be born, Tobian considered not circumcising him (his firstborn was a girl, so it didn’t end up mattering). By the time his son was born in 2008, there was no question in his mind that they would circumcise for both the child’s immediate urinary health and for his future sexual health that of his sexual partners.

Tobian was part of a Ugandan study published this year that tested the effect of circumcision on STD transfer in married Ugandan couples. When comparing those who were circumcised for the study with those who remained uncircumcised, researchers found that circumcision reduced the risk of HIV infection risk by 60 percent, genital herpes by 30 percent and cancer-causing human papillomavirus by 35 percent in men. Female sexual partners of the circumcised men benefited from a 40 percent or greater reduced risk of bacterial vaginosis or parasitic trichomonas spread during sex, as well as HPV infection, which can lead to cervical cancer. Sexual satisfaction for the men, the long-standing bugaboo among opponents to circumcision, was reported to be just as great or more so after circumcision.

Though this study was done in Africa, the results closely match the observational studies done in the U.S., Tobias says. What’s more, there are U.S. studies that how the infant of circumcision can benefit, as it reduces the chance of penile infections.

“Boys who are circumcised have fewer urinary tract infections during infancy,” Dr. Douglas Diekema, director of education for the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Hospital told ABC News during the San Francisco anti-circumcision bill controversy in May. “These are serious infections that require hospitalization,” he said.

Circumcision is yet to get full support of major health organization,s however, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics remain neutral on the practice.

“No medical association promotes circumcision,” said Schofield. “If there was sound and repeated scientific evidence, there’d be a medical association promoting it.”

And that is the impasse that proponents like Tobian and Gray find themselves at – as long as major medical associations remain neutral, it will be hard to change health policy or change public opinion. In their editorial, Tobian and Gray call for these agencies to review the “overwhelming medical evidence” and reconsider their stance on male circumcision.

By David Beasley

ATLANTA — The two-thirds of U.S. teenagers who get less than eight hours of sleep on school nights are more likely to smoke, drink and fight, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a survey of more than 12,000 teens, 68.9 percent reported that they sleep less than eight hours on an average school night.

In 10 of 11 categories, those students were more likely to engage in risky behavior than students who sleep more than eight hours on school nights, the study found.

Those behaviors include smoking cigarettes and marijuana and drinking alcohol. For example, 50.3 percent of students who slept less than eight hours reported drinking alcohol in the prior 30 days, compared to 36.7 percent of those who slept more than eight hours.

Students who slept fewer hours also were less likely to exercise, more sexually active and more likely to fight and contemplate suicide. They were more likely to use computers more than three hours a day as well.

Sleep-deprived teens did not watch more television than their counterparts, the study concluded.

The study, published online by the Preventive Medicine journal, is believed to be the first large, national survey of its kind, the CDC said.

Lack of adequate sleep can be a warning sign for parents that their teens have other problems, the study’s lead author told Reuters on Monday.

“I definitely wouldn’t ignore it,” said Lela McKnight-Eily, a clinical psychologist and epidemiologist at the CDC. “I think it’s important for parents and adolescents themselves to both be aware of the issue and what can be associated with it.”

By Anahad

For teenagers struggling to quit smoking, a new study has some advice. To break the habit, try breaking a sweat.

It showed that teenage boys who took part in a smoking cessation program and combined it with exercise were several times less likely to continue smoking than those who received only traditional anti-smoking advice. Exercise did not have a comparable effect on teenage girls; researchers aren’t sure why. But the research is among the first to show that an exercise plan for teenage smokers can help them kick two bad habits at once, smoking and inactivity, which often go hand in hand.

For young smokers, breaking the habit before adulthood can be particularly crucial. Studies show that starting as a teenager makes it much more difficult to quit later on. About 80 percent of adult smokers began their habit before turning 18. Yet every day, 3,500 teenagers light their first cigarette.

The new study, published this week in the journal Pediatrics, took place in a state with one of the worst teen tobacco problems, West Virginia, where roughly a third of all high school students are smokers. Previous studies have shown that in adults, exercise — even if it’s just a walk around the block or lifting some weights — can help curb smoking by easing withdrawal symptoms and controlling cravings when people are confronted with cigarettes and other strong cues. Since West Virginia also suffers high rates of teenage obesity, the researchers wanted to see what effect exercise could have in combating two major health threats.

“It seemed logical to address these two together,” said Kimberly Horn, a professor of community medicine at West Virginia University and the lead author of the paper. “Exercise is known to mediate factors that often co-occur with smoking cessation, like increased stress levels, weight gain, withdrawal and cravings.”

To find out, the researchers recruited 233 smokers ages 14 to 19 at West Virginia high schools, and randomly assigned each to one of three groups. Some students received a single smoking-cessation session. A second group went through a 10-week anti-smoking program called Not on Tobacco, or NOT. And those in the third group went through the NOT program and were given pedometers and counseling on starting an exercise plan, which they could then schedule on their own time.

After three months, the study found that only 5 percent of the students who got the single anti-smoking session had quit smoking. But almost twice as many who went through the 10-week program had quit. When exercise was added to the mix, the effect on boys was remarkable: 24 percent of male students in the exercise group quit smoking, while only about 8 percent in the 10-week program that did not encourage exercise had stopped. They were also more likely to have stayed away from cigarettes after six months as well. The teenage girls in the exercise group, though, were no more likely to have quit smoking than those who received only counseling on quitting smoking.

“The kids in this study were pretty hard-core smokers,” Dr. Horn said. “They smoked about a half pack a day during the week and up to a pack a day on weekends. They were pretty addicted, and most started when they were about 11 years old.”

The data did not explain why a gender divide would exist, but Dr. Horn speculated that a few things could be responsible. Teenage boys are generally more enthusiastic about engaging in vigorous exercise, and are “more confident in their ability to be physically active,” Dr. Horn said, while physical activity levels typically plummet as teenage girls get older.

“It’s puzzling to us; it was a surprise finding,” she said. “I think we also need to look at issues of self-confidence. It could be the girls started with some stronger fitness barriers to overcome than boys.”

Nonetheless, the results over all were encouraging, since getting teenagers to give up smoking — or change any potentially harmful habits — can be notoriously difficult.

“One of the important things to point out is that oftentimes people believe that kids aren’t interested in quitting smoking,” she said. “I think this demonstrates that kids can quit, they’re interested in quitting and they can be successful, given the right tools.”

By Eryn Brown

Watching just a short bit of the wildly popular kids TV show “SpongeBob SquarePants” has been known to give many parents headaches. Psychologists have now found that a brief exposure to SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and the rest of the crew also appears to dampen preschoolers’ brain power.

Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson, both of the University of Virginia’s department of psychology, wanted to see whether watching fast-paced television had an immediate influence on kids’ executive function — skills including attention, working memory, problem solving and delay of gratification that are associated with success in school.

Television’s negative effect on executive function over the long term has been established, the researchers wrote Monday in the journal Pediatrics, but less is known about its immediate effects.

To test what those might be, Lillard and Peterson randomly assigned 60 4-year-olds to three groups: one that watched nine minutes of a fast-paced, “very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea;” one that watched nine minutes of slower-paced programming from a PBS show “about a typical U.S. preschool-aged boy;” and a third group that was asked to draw for nine minutes with markers and crayons.

Immediately after their viewing and drawing tasks were complete, the kids were asked to perform four tests to assess executive function.  Unfortunately for the denizens of Bikini Bottom, the kids who watched nine minutes of the frenetic high jinks of the “animated sponge” scored significantly worse than the other kids.

“Connecting fast-paced television viewing to deficits in executive function … has profound impacts for children’s cognitive and social development that need to be considered and reacted to,” wrote University of Washington pediatrics professor Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, an authority on children and the media, in an editorial accompanying the study.

A different type of expert begged to differ. Nickelodeon, the network that airs “SpongeBob SquarePants,” told CNN that “having 60 non-diverse kids, who are not part of the show’s targeted demo, watch 9 minutes of programming is questionable methodology. It could not possibly provide the basis for any valid findings that parents could trust.” The network noted that “SpongeBob” is intended to be viewed by kids ages 6 to 11 and not by preschoolers.

By John Gever

Average daily sugar consumption among male teenagers in the form of sodas, energy drinks, and sweetened fruit juices was more than double the government’s recommended limit for all added sugar in the diet, a large national survey found.

Among boys and young men 12 to 19 years old participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2005 to 2008, so-called sugar drinks accounted for a mean of 273 calories in their daily diet, according to data compiled Cynthia L. Ogden, PhD, and colleagues at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily limit for added sugars in all forms — including candies, baked goods, ice cream, and other foods in addition to drinks — is 128 calories. The “DASH” diet for reducing blood pressure has an even lower limit of about 50 calories in sugar daily.

Findings from the NHANES analysis appeared in NCHS Data Brief No. 71, released this week.

Men in their 20s and 30s were not far behind their teen counterparts, with an average daily intake of 252 calories from sugar drinks in the NHANES data.

Sugar drinks were defined in the analysis as sugar drinks as sweetened fruit drinks, sodas, energy drinks, sports drinks, and sweetened bottled waters. They do not include diet beverages, 100% fruit juice, sweetened teas, or flavored milks.

Daily intakes were measured in NHANES from one in-person, 24-hour dietary recall interview.

In all age groups except for two- to five-year-olds, males out-consumed females when it came to sweetened beverages, and mean intakes tailed off with age.

Teen girls took in an average of 171 calories daily from sugar drinks, and women 20 to 39 years old drank a mean 138 calories.

People 60 and older appear to have lost their sweet tooth, at least when it comes to drinks, consuming daily averages of 70 and 42 calories of added beverage sugars for men and women, respectively.

Among children two to five, the daily average was 71 and 70 calories for boys and girls, rising to 141 and 112 in six- to 11-year-olds.

Notably, about half of NHANES participants reported they did not have a sugar drink on the day covered in the interview — including 30% of male children and teens.

But the top 5% of sugar-drink consumers took in at least 567 calories from the products. That’s equivalent to more than four 12-ounce cans of cola, Ogden and colleagues noted.

By Petra Rattue

The founder of Britain’s top weight loss organization has called a book about the story of a short overweight girl who diets and becomes the school soccer star “an outrage”.

The book, Maggie Goes on a Diet, written and self-published by Paul Kramer, is aimed at pre-teens with ‘Maggie’, the character, portrayed as a chubby, round jumper-wearing cartoon figure with orange pigtails holding up a tiny pink dress and looking wistfully at a skinny version of herself in the mirror. The book has just been unveiled on Amazon and is soon to be made available from other booksellers.

Alison Wetton, CEO of All About Weight, labels the book as a:

“Dangerous weapon promoting the message of body dissatisfaction among a highly vulnerable age group.

This is the wrong way to spread the message despite acknowledging children’s needs for more encouragement to be active and eat healthily. In her view it would simply encourage youngsters to concentrate on their body image, which is linked to a variety of appalling consequences like depression, eating disorders and bullying.”

Her weight loss organization does not cater for children because Wetton believes that prescribed diets for youngsters have a negative psychological effect, labeling the children as “fat”. She says, “The way we help with childhood obesity is by changing adults’ attitudes to eating, and hope parents will adapt and extend the healthy eating habits they learn on their All About Weight plan to the whole family.”

Alison added that consultants/mentors in her weight loss organization also encourage members to exercise as much as possible according to their ability; another benefit they could pass on to their children.

She concluded by saying:

“Losing weight is as much a process of education as it is a matter of will-power. Prevention is better than cure, and if we bring our children up with a healthy attitude to food and exercise, and teach them why it is the best way to live, we won’t have any Maggies looking sadly at themselves in the mirror!”

By Amanda MacMilan

(Health.com) — Amanda Santos wanted to send her 5-year-old daughter, Skylar, to a small private school. But after they interviewed, met the teachers, and submitted Skylar’s medical records, they never heard back from the school, despite repeated inquiries.

Santos, who lives in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, can’t say for sure why communication was cut off so abruptly, but she’s convinced that Skylar’s severe nut allergy was an issue.

“They knew going in that she had an allergy; they said it was no problem,” says Santos. “But until we sat down and had a meeting about the precautions they’d have to take — kids washing their hands, asking parents not to send nuts to school, that kind of thing — they didn’t realize how severe it was. I just think they didn’t want her there, didn’t want to deal with all of that.”

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Santos is not alone. According to a new study conducted in the U.K., families with children who are living with this potentially life-threatening condition often feel isolated, stigmatized, or unfairly excluded from activities, due to the allergies.

In many ways, nut allergies feel more like a disability than a chronic illness because of the stigma, the researchers say.

“Families reported some really very difficult and unpleasant experiences when they were trying to keep their child safe from risk,” says coauthor Mary Dixon-Woods, professor of medical sociology at the University of Leicester.

She was surprised by the study’s results.

“I was expecting to hear about problems with labeling and so on, but the extent of the stigma families reported was very troubling,” she says.

Peanuts are the most common food trigger of life-threatening anaphylactic shock, accounting for more than half of all fatal food-induced allergic reactions. Peanut allergies are on the rise, doubling in children between 1997 and 2002. About 1% of children in the U.S. have peanut allergies.

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Along with the rise in nut allergies have come more restrictions on schools and other public places, including nut-free classrooms and airplanes, as well as better labeling for products.

In recent years, there has been a bit of backlash against the greater focus on nut allergies. In 2008, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas A. Christakis published in the journal BMJ an editorial called “This allergies hysteria is just nuts.” While noting that allergies are a real problem, he wrote about the “overabundance of caution” at his children’s school and an incident in which a school bus was evacuated because a peanut was found on the floor.

To determine some of the challenges faced by parents of children with nut allergies, Dixon-Woods and her colleagues interviewed 26 families about their coping strategies and techniques for avoiding dangerous situations.

They found, however, that these parents were routinely made to feel that such allergies were nothing but a “frivolous and self-indulgent fad invented and maintained by attention-seeking people.”

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Parents interviewed for the study frequently encountered skepticism or hostility when they tried to explain their children’s allergies to others, says Dixon-Woods. Birthday parties became “nightmares,” and even just sending kids to school or leaving them with friends or family was terrifying.

Interview transcripts from the study reveal several scenarios in which parents felt ridiculed, ignored, or challenged on the subject of food allergies.

· In the lunchroom at school, children might feel bullied. “She was teased and things like that, people saying…’I've got nuts and I’m gonna come and touch you,’” said one participant.

· Said one participant about a family camping trip: “He’d caught her sort of pulling faces and complaining to other people that they’d had to put the peanuts away…they all laughed and it was awful…”

· At a social gathering, the hosts thought the family was overdramatizing the problem. “We got invited up for a party…gave them a list of what he could eat,” said one study participant. “[We] walked in there and I couldn’t believe my eyes, big bowls of peanuts in between all the food.”

· Forgetful or disbelieving relatives aren’t uncommon. In one family, a grandparent gave a child candy with nuts. “Now whether it was deliberate or not, I don’t know, but I blew a fuse,” said one participant. “I suppose in my heart of hearts I felt that he’d given it deliberately; my husband doesn’t want to believe that his father would do that.”

The study, published Monday in the journal Chronic Illness, was funded by the British charity Midlands Asthma and Allergy Research Association.

Dixon-Woods agrees that better food labeling, more education, and stricter regulation is necessary to reduce misunderstanding and negative attitudes about nut allergies especially in the United States, where peanut-based products are ubiquitous and the word allergy is frequently used to describe non-life-threatening conditions such as hay fever.

“It may be time to come up with a new term to describe the condition,” Dixon-Woods says. “‘Nut allergy’ is so poorly understood that it really is not a helpful term anymore.”

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The Santos family removed their daughter from preschool this year because a teacher gave her a food with traces of nuts. When she had a minor reaction, the school’s response was, “Well, she didn’t die, so she’s fine,” Santos says.

They’ve had flight attendants tell them that other passengers’ snack preferences were more important than Skylar’s safety. And they’ve gotten nasty looks from parents on Skylar’s T-ball team after her coach requested that a child who’d been eating nuts put them away and wash his hands.

“Generally speaking, the public awareness of food allergy in the U.S. has increased, and this has resulted in some real benefits to families,” says Brian P. Vickery, MD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine, in Durham. “For example, manufacturers are now required to put clearer labels on food items, many restaurants can provide better experiences, and schools are often more prepared to handle children with allergies.”

However, the situation is far from perfect, he says.

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“Bullying in school does happen. The risks of anaphylaxis are not always appreciated,” says Dr. Vickery. “Many families continue to struggle over and over again with obstacles, limitations, skepticism, and judgment.”

Each family handles the challenges differently, but “we try to provide as much practical and scientific guidance as we can, and equip them to handle anything that might happen,” he says.

By Sy Kraft

According to new analysis, music and instrument based therapies appear to have incredible effects on cancer patients’ pain levels, mood, and certain vital signs such as blood pressure. This may lead the way to an addition to standard treatment practices and a complement to medication doses alone.

Joke Bradt, Ph.D., an associate professor of creative arts therapies at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania led the study. Bradt and her colleagues went back and reviewed 30 studies that included 1,891 adults and children with cancer. In 17 of the studies, the people listened to prerecorded music. The participants in the remaining studies took part in various guided music therapies, which in some cases included singing, playing the piano or creating rhythms alongside a therapist. Measured via targeted questionnaires, both the sessions with music therapists and the prerecorded music reduced patients’ anxiety levels and improved quality of life, better than the standard treatments. Music therapy also improved pain and mood, as well as blood pressure, heart and respiratory rate.

Bradt stated:

“I strongly believe that the beauty of music can bring renewed hope for patients and their loved ones and can energize them.”

For decades and generations, researchers have studied music-based therapies as a treatment for a wide range of chronic, painful, and emotionally distressing diseases, including cancer.

Well that’s great, but does reggae work better than classical music for example? Bradt says there isn’t enough evidence to determine what type of music intervention was most effective, but therapies involving music are likely to be most successful when they are tailored for people according to their musical tastes and their ability to participate in actually music making.

Patients were given a choice between several different genres (new age, classical, rock, country). What works for one person, Bradt says, may depend on his or her taste and background.

Robert Zatorre, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal continues:

“It’s been known for a very long time that music can influence mood. That’s why lullabies exist to calm down babies who won’t sleep.”

There has been a fair amount of interest recently in the fact that children are, from birth, ‘wired for sound’ – or, more specifically wired for music. There are specific neural connections which are made when a child listens to music of any kind, instrumental or vocal. These connections are, apparently, not made in any other way and can only be made in the early years. Once made, some researchers believe this neural ‘wiring’ may be used to support some other sense, such as visual or verbal. The more connections that are made, the more capacity in the brain is opened up for use. The conclusion has been drawn that the earlier music is introduced, the greater the potential for learning.

Zatorre adds:

“The cost involved with music is very small compared to other kinds of interventions. How well it works say, compared to drugs is another question, but the side effects are very minimal as well. The worst thing that can happen [when] someone doesn’t like music is that they can turn it off.”

However, because the outcomes measured in these studies are so subjective, additional research will be needed to confirm that factors besides the music aren’t influencing the results.

A study reported that American teenagers are becoming casual smokers, instead of heavy/regularly smokers. Heavy smoking was defined by enjoying more than 11 cigarettes per day. Moderate smoking was defined as enjoying between six to 10 cigarettes per day. Light smoking was defined by having one to five cigarettes per day.

Between 1991 and 2009, heavy smoking among teenagers has decreased by 10 percent, down to 8 percent. During this time, casual smoking has increased from 67 percent to 79 percent. No significant changes in smoking trends for African American teenagers was observed, but for Hispanic teenagers, the heavy smoking rate increased from 3.1 percent to 6.4 percent.

Smoking has different risks for people who smoke at all. By smoking, people have an increased risk for heart disease, heart attack, lung cancer, and other types of cancer. An estimated 90% of all lung cancer in males are caused by smoking. An estimated 80% of lung cancer in females is caused by smoking.

According to the CDC, smoking cigarettes has contributed to an estimated 443,000 deaths annually. Nearly one of every five deaths in the U.S. are related to smoking. Tobacco causes more deaths per year than Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.

This study was reported in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.