"pregnancy" news and stories

Photo: Frazer Harrison, Getty Images

A "Top Chef" host has a little something in the oven -- and it's not a Quickfire dish.

Reps for Padma Lakshmi confirmed to Usmagazine.com that the former model, burger spokeswoman and Emmy winner is pregnant with her first child after a multi-year struggle with endometriosis.

The 39-year-old co-founded the Endometriosis Foundation of America earlier this year in an attempt to raise awareness about the condition in which uterine lining accumulates in other parts of the body, sometimes leading to chronic pain and infertility.

Lakshmi's three-year marriage to novelist Salman Rushdie ended in divorce in 2007 and the identity of the father has not been publicly revealed.

Restaurant menus abound with unhealthy choices. Photo: smoorenburg, flickr

Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the ninth in a series of posts.

Server discretion, like sobriety checks and seat belts, helps prevent deadly car crashes.

Backed by laws that decree certain ruin for restaurants that serve drinks to overly intoxicated patrons, most servers don't hesitate to cut off customers who've had enough. But they're understandably reluctant to police other equally dangerous behaviors observed at the table, raising the question of whether servers ever have an ethical obligation to intercede.

Restaurants are in the business of providing their guests with food and drink, which makes the prospect of withholding either seem counterintuitive at best. But when the requested item would harm the diner, does the "just doing my job" argument falter?

Strawberry and raspberry fool. Photo: kimberlykv/Flickr

• "Fool" isn't always a slight. Sometimes it's a fresh raspberry dessert.
• Rather than "eating for two" when pregnant, eat for health and focus on nutrients. Two Twinkies doesn't equal an apple.
• Regal Springs Tilapia is hosting a recipe contest that could earn you a nice $5,000 prize.
• Dr. Michael Roizen, one of Oprah's go-to docs, raves about the health benefits of walnuts.
  
• Have beans and franks when you're celebrating independence.
• Product spotlight: Flavored sparkling water, extra-virgin olive oil and Disney snacks, plus Edy's Red, White and No More Blues.
• Recipes: Grilled Shrimp with Southeast Asian Dipping Sauce, Butter Beans with Okra

The "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver made dinner fit for 30 kings Wednesday night in London at the G-20 Summit.

Oliver called the meal for a group of 30 world leaders which included President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown "probably the most important meal I've ever cooked in my life."

"I've cooked for some pretty big names in my day but this is so exciting," Oliver wrote on his Web site. "I can't wait to get in there and start cooking!"

Often times, health advice falls into the "What do we make of it?" column. This can be especially true when it involves drugs such as alcohol and caffeine where people have predetermined biases or agendas.

So here's a potentially inflammatory article from the L.A. Times discussing a U.K. study considered to be "the largest and most rigorous...on low levels of alcohol or caffeine" during pregnancy. The first nine words of the title clearly state "Pregnancy has room for a little wine or beer" and goes on to point out that though children of women who drank heavily during pregnancy had the most problems, children of women who were "light drinkers" during pregnancy actually had fewer behavioral or cognitive problems by age three than children of women who abstained. [Important to note: Light drinking was defined as "not more than two drinks (a 4-fluid-ounce glass of wine or 10 fluid ounces of weak beer) on a single occasion and not more than two occasions per week."]