Apple juice has faced some controversy in the past few months.

A while back Dr. Oz brought up the fact that apple juice contains unacceptable levels of arsenic, however, nutritionists say that arsenic aside, it is the high levels of sugar which are most disconcerting.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says juice can be part of a healthy diet, but its policy is blunt: “Fruit juice offers no nutritional benefit for infants younger than 6 months” and no benefits over whole fruit for older kids.

Kids under 12 consume 28 percent of all juice and juice drinks, according to the academy. Nationwide, apple juice is second only to orange juice in popularity. Americans slurp 267 ounces of apple juice on average each year, according to the Food Institute’s Almanac of Juice Products and the Juice Products Association, a trade group. Lots more is consumed as an ingredient in juice drinks and various foods.

Fighting childhood obesity is a family business!

Isolating a child with a weight problem is neither practical nor possible.

Family eating habits are ubiquitous and often times an obese child is the progeny of an obese parent.

Sometime it is necessary for a third party to become involved and retrain the whole family’s ideas about food.

With more and more children in the U.S. becoming overweight, many parents are wondering how to talk to their children about weight. The Packard Pediatric Weight Control Program for families is remarkably straightforward and successful.

After a long day of school or work, a group of families gathers in a Stanford Hospital classroom in Menlo Park, Calif. The children are all in the highest percentile for body mass index, or BMI. They’ve signed up with their parents, often at the urging of a pediatrician, for a six-month healthy eating and exercise boot camp.

Autism may begin in the womb.

This theory may offer some relief to parents who believe vaccines are the cause of autism.

The new science suggests that an overgrowth of brain cells in early embryonic development is responsible for the symptoms of autism.

“In autism something is going terribly wrong with mechanisms that control the number of neurons beginning in prenatal life and may extend to perinatal and early post-natal life,” says lead author Eric Courchesne, Ph.D. When there are too many brain cells, the brain can’t wire itself up correctly. If there’s too much wiring in the prefrontal cortex, it could help explain why children with autism have poor social skills, difficulty communicating and why some may never learn to speak at all.