Helix Clinic blog

It’s common to experience sweet cravings during pregnancy, and it’s easier than you think to manage the cravings in a healthy way. Our nutritionist Anneliese has a recipe for delicious muffins that combine lots of wonderful ingredients to support your nutritional needs, as well as satisfying that need for sweet, chocolatey things!

You will need:

Unrefined rapeseed oil, for greasing the muffin tray
40g flaxseed
270g unbleached plain flour
100g Xylitol (sugar alternative, available from health food shops)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 medium eggs
220ml soya milk
225g dark chocolate chips
200g dried cranberries

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas 4, and then lightly grease a muffin tray with rapeseed oil.

Grind the flaxseed using a processor until they look like flour, then add to a mixing bowl.

Sift in the flour, add the Xylitol, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt until combined.

Whisk the eggs and the soya milk together and add to the dry ingredients, and gently fold the ingredients together until you have formed a batter. Stir in the chocolate chips and the dried cranberries.

Divide between the muffin tins and bake for 18 minutes or until golden.  Allow to cool before turning out. Enjoy!!

Tags: chocolate, muffins, pregnancy, sweet cravings

Ever wondered what it would be like if lemons tasted sweet instead of sour? Well, in 1725 an explorer called Des Marchais found a plant in West Africa that was named Synsepalum Dulcificum, but more commonly known now as the Miracle Fruit plant.

It produces berries that contain an active glycoprotein molecule caled miraculin. When eaten, the molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds and temporarily changes our sense of taste for up to two hours, causing bitter and sour foods to taste sweet!

This is amazing in itself, but potentially there is also a very useful medical application for this fruit. Chemotherapy patients often experience a nasty side effect of their treatment that causes them to develop a metallic taste in their mouth so that normal food tastes awful. Some cancer patients have found that this effect is temporarily helped by eating some miracle fruit, allowing them to enjoy normal tasting food once more.

You can find out more information, order berries or even buy seedlings so you can grow your own plant at the Miracle Fruit website.

Tags: cancer, chemotherapy, miracle fruit

If fertility consultants had a way to check collected eggs for chromosome abnormalities, they would be able to reduce the chances of miscarriage or birth defects after implantation. Recently, in Nottingham, doctors collected 9 eggs from a woman undergoing treatment and were successful in using a new screening technique to help identify the best eggs with intact chromosomes. The 41 year old woman had previously had 2 miscarriages and 13 subsequent unsuccessful courses of IVF, but fell pregnant after the cycle that used the new screening process.

The process could also potentially be helpful to doctors wanting to reduce the number of twins and triplets as a result of IVF, as it could improve the chances of selecting the most promising embryo and reducing the need to implant 2 or more in any given cycle.

The technique has not yet been subject to full rigorous trials so will probably not be widely available for some time yet, but seems a promising development in fertility medicine.

Tags: chromosome abnormalities, egg screening, infertility, IVF, miscarriage

The Cochrane Collaboration regularly publishes respected reviews on the effectiveness of different medical treatments, and recently published a review that confirmed the beneficial effect of acupuncture for headache. They analysed 33 separate studies that involved nearly 7000 patients once they had collated the results.

Researchers reviewed trials of acupuncture for tension headaches (usually affecting both sides of the head) as well as migraines, and in both cases found that many patients experienced fewer headaches or migraines after having acupuncture. After an 8 week course of treatment, patients who had acupuncture with no painkillers tended to suffer with less headaches compared to those who were given only painkillers.

The results also indicated that positive effects were observed even if the needles were placed incorrectly according to traditional texts. This raises the often mentioned possibility of non-specific needle effects and/or placebo effects. We do not see a problem with placebo effects, as our primary concern is for the well-being of the patient. If a patient can get better thanks to a combination of acupuncture and the power of the mind, that has to be better than staying hooked on a long-term course of powerful painkilling drugs and all their associated side effects.

It is extremely likely that placebo effects have a part to play in the overall experience of acupuncture, but it is very unlikely to be the whole story. There have been a number of recent fMRI studies that point to definite physiological effects due to specific needling. In addition, anectodal evidence suggests acupuncture is effective on animals as well as humans, which is much harder to explain by recourse to the placebo effect. The overall findings of this Cochrane study are interesting and as usual, point to a need for further research.

Tags: Cochrane review, headaches, migraines

It’s fairly obvious that if someone is working long hours, staying out late, drinking more than the recommended government guidelines, not exercising and recovering from a recent relationship breakup, then they are more likely to be suffering with stress symptoms than someone who is doing a job they love, is in a stable relationship, exercises regularly and eats well. But apart from this very general sense of how lifestyle factors seem to affect stress levels, we thought it would be interesting to find out a little more about the relationship between the two.

To this end, we have created a couple of surveys that we invite you to try. The first one asks a few basic lifestyle questions and the second asks if you are experiencing any of the classic symptoms of stress. Once you have completed the questionnaires, you can view a short summary of your results, and can return at any time to repeat it if you think that your symptoms or circumstances have changed.

Once enough people have filled in the questionnaire, we will create some figures showing how different lifestyle choices can lead to the typical symptoms of stress.

Tags: lifestyle, stress, survey