Walking with dogs is a relatively painless way to exercise and burn calories. One estimate is that a 150-pound person can burn 204 calories in an hour walking the dog, more if you're going uphill, the dog pulls you, or makes you walk faster. However, there may be an unfortunate benefit of dog ownership for babies who are years away from walking on their pets.

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Pets

• The study of animal behavior is a cornerstone of experimental psychology, shedding light on how animals interact with each other and with their environments, and why they behave the way they do. By studying animal behavior, humans can learn more about their own behavior.

• Animal behavior research is particularly relevant to the study of human behavior when it comes to preservation of a species, or how an animal’s behavior helps it survive. For example, the behavior of animals in stressful or aggressive situations can be studied to help find solutions for humans in similar circumstances. Animal behavior research also contributes to the study of genetics by helping to resolve questions of nature vs. nurture, or which behaviors genes control and which behaviors the environment controls.

• In recent years scientists have been researching the effects of microbes that we have on our intestines (see Psychology blog post Today "Do bugs in your gut make you gain weight?"). Humans have more than a hundred trillion small insects in the gut and they play an important role in digestion and weight gain. There is evidence that some of these microbes can contribute to obesity while others can lose weight. Researchers have been studying microbes in the hope that it is possible to fight obesity by improving the good microbes that may make obesity less likely. Perhaps the baby may be "inoculated" against obesity with early exposure to help microbes. New research shows that puppies can be one way to radiate these beneficial microbes to newborns.

Obesity

• Obesity, an epidemic in the U.S., is characterized by excess body weight. Being obese significantly increases one's risk of death from hypertension, stroke, heart disease, and other conditions.

• Obesity is a condition of having excess body weight. Adults with a body mass index (BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) greater than 25 kg/m2 but less than 30 kg/m2 are considered overweight. Adults with a BMI greater than 30 kg/m2 are considered obese. An adult who is more than 100 pounds overweight or has a BMI greater than 40 kg/m2 is considered morbidly obese.
  
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• Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada found that furry pets can expose babies to two types of bacteria that can then be found in the baby's intestines. These bacteria, ruminococcus and oscillospira, have been linked to the possibility of allergies and lower obesity. The researchers analyzed stool samples from 746 infants and found that when there were dogs or cats at home during pregnancy and newborns were twice as likely to have high levels of both types of intestinal bacteria. Although research does not prove that dogs or cats are responsible for beneficial changes in intestinal microbes, it is likely that pets can transfer beneficial microbes during infants near animals or get pet microbes present in furniture, floors, or household dust.

All About Pregnancy

• About four million women will give birth in the U.S. this year. Pregnancy and its attendant hormonal changes have varying effects on moms-to-be and their mental health. And a wave of research on the importance of the fetal environment shows its long term impact on physical and psychological development.

• While no one suggests that parents put puppies in their cribs, being around furry creatures may be protective of future developments of obesity and allergies.

All About Parenting

• From talking and reading to infants to making values clear (best done in conversations around the dinner table), parents exert enormous influence over their children's development. They are, however, not the only influences, especially after children enter school. It is especially important that parents give children a good start, but it's also important for parents to recognize that kids come into the world with their own temperaments, and it is the parents' job to provide an interface with the world that eventually prepares a child for complete independence. In a rapidly changing world, parenting seems subject to fads and changing styles, and parenting in some ways has become a competitive sport.

• But the needs of child development as delineated by science remain relatively stable. There is such a thing as overparenting, and aiming for perfection in parenting might be a fool's mission. Too much parenting cripples children as they move into adulthood and renders them unable to cope with the merest setbacks. There is also such a thing as too-little parenting, and research establishes that lack of parental engagement often leads to poor behavioral outcomes in children, in part because it encourages the young to be too reliant on peer culture. Ironically, harsh or authoritarian styles of parenting can have the same effect.

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