MyHealth Beijing

Wow, that wasn’t very fun, was it? We just finished a miserable six days of AQI over 300. But it certainly was the perfect backdrop to my new campaign to test air pollution masks, and I’ve been busy all week [...]

Are you bewildered and overwhelmed by all of the choices for air pollution masks? Don’t you wish you could look at independent test results which compared all of them? Soon you can — because I’m getting these tests myself. Totobobo, [...]

Who do you think are healthier: people born and raised in China, or in the USA? I used to generalize that the average person in China was healthier, mostly from observing Beijing’s lively street life, especially at night.  On every [...]

My son Alex is almost one year old now, and he loves to put everything in his mouth, especially his bathtub toys. As he happily munches away on a day-glo orange crab with big Bambi eyes, I’m always a bit [...]

The Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission (上海市消费者权益保护委员会) has hit another home run! Last year,  they published a fantastic report of their independent testing of two dozen air purifiers, which I translated and blogged here. Now they have turned their focus on [...]

Did you know that only ten percent of teenage girls in the USA get enough calcium? Even here in China, the average calcium intake is less than half the recommended amounts. Most infants now have no problems with their calcium, thanks [...]

What’s the hottest gift this Chinese new year? Perhaps instead of moon cakes and red envelopes, you could give “the gift that keeps on giving”: an indoor air purifier. They certainly are all the rage in China since last year, with [...]

I’ve blogged a lot about testing my air purifiers at home, a quartet of machines (three IQAirs and one Blueair) working in symphonic harmony to create indoor air 80% cleaner than the outside air pollution — 24 hours a day, every day. I find [...]

It’s cold and flu season yet again, and time to review the simple steps can we all take to avoid these inevitable illnesses. This year’s flu season is a bit more newsworthy than usual as H7N9 bird flu continues to [...]

Have many of my readers tried the new pollution masks for your kids? I’d love to hear your stories! The big news over the last couple months was the new collection from Vogmask, which has (as far as I know) [...]

How much screen time is too much for a child? I’m not worried so much about movie time as I am about the total amount of hours kids spend on TV shows, iPads, laptops and the rest. Most of us [...]

We parents worry about our children getting enough exercise — but what about ourselves? Are we all leading by example and also getting enough exercise? Surveys show that most adults both here in China and in countries like the USA [...]

What’s the best milk source for your baby after 12 months? Breast milk is still the preferred choices, and whole milk the next option — but many people in China prefer toddler formula. While milk safety in China is a legitimate [...]

What’s the best treatment if you or your child have a stomach infection and get  slightly dehydrated from a couple days of diarrhea and poor eating? I see a lot of such gastroenteritis in the summertime, mostly due to more [...]

We humans have survived tens of thousands of years without toddler formula as well as cow’s milk, so I think we should have a healthy skepticism of the entire toddler formula industry, which didn’t even exist 25 years ago (read [...]

Did you know only 10% of teen girls in the USA get enough calcium? That’s an astonishingly depressing stat from the American Academy of Pediatric’s fascinating position paper on calcium (available here for free). Let’s show that graph right now: [...]

Which have you used for your toddlers here in China: milk or formula? During my research for my New York Times article I asked this question to the invaluable group of Beijing moms and dads on the Yahoo group Beijingmamas. [...]

After six and a half years here in Beijing, I can comfortably say that I have joined the ranks of the long term expats. What’s our secret?

Every toddler at some stage becomes a picky eater. When I was that age, my twin brother preferred to stash his unwanted food behind the refrigerator, and my mother would threaten to call our monster neighbors to come over and [...]

I recently experienced a wonderful thing — my first Father’s Day as a father. It was a glorious test of real fatherhood, from a 4 am feeding to a doctor’s visit to us all taking a long afternoon siesta, his [...]

My adorable son is now four months old, still a tiny bundle of joy. I look forward to us venturing outside for summer fun, but what if the pollution is bad that day? I desperately hope we don’t have another January-ish “airpocalypse” [...]

There’s a clever English language play on words, “assuming makes an ass out of you and me.” As an American expat straddling two cultures, I confess that it’s all too easy to make sweeping generalizations about differences, usually defaulting to [...]

What’s the best air pollution mask for China? Here’s yet another question I am constantly asked. My previous articles have discussed the pros and cons of models such as 3M, Totobobo and Vogmask. But there are quite a few other brands [...]

Summer can be a wonderfully enriching and memorable experience; I still fondly remember my summertime weeks at Boy Scout camp. While most kids will have a wonderful time, parents should be aware of the potential health issues at camp, which [...]