Health News

Teens often lack calcium and nutrients such as vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E and so on. You would be forgiven for thinking that cutting back on fat and sugar is enough to keep your teenager healthy, for we also need to make sure our diet provides teens with enough vitamins and minerals.

Vitamins, minerals and nutrients are essential for keeping teens healthy and protecting them against illnesses. For example, milk products are needed to build bones and keep bones and teeth strong. Tofu or soy milk with added calcium is useful for teens that don't like or are allergic to cheese and milk. Remember, fresh fruit and vegetable are important for providing vitamins and minerals which convert amino acids into the crucial neurotransmitters, while antioxidant vitamins C and E can help tackle harmful free-radical molecules (particles which are thought to accelerate cellular degeneration in the body) and are vital for promoting and preserving memory.

Talk to your teen and inform them that as you get older, you stop being able to build bones. So think of your bones as a savings account into which you deposit calcium from the food you eat and drink. Your bones store up the calcium to build your bones now and to keep them strong when you get older.

All fruit and vegetables are good for the teen body, but some are even better than others. How much should a teenager consume a day? Aim for at least five portions of fruit and veggies a day:

• Blueberries contain up to five times as many antioxidants as apples or carrots, and when neuroscientists fed blueberries to lab rats, it slowed down age-related loss of mental capacity.



• Red peppers contain 20 per cent more vitamin C than green peppers, and have 15 times more of the antioxidant beta-carotene.



• Kidney beans and haricot beans are a good vegetarian source of protein, which provides amino acids for the brain, and are also high in minerals and carbohydrates.



• Green leafy vegetables such as spinach provide folic acid, which is vital for proper mental functioning (research has shown that children with behavioral difficulties such as Attention Deficit Disorder have lower levels of folic acid).

Furthermore, studying for exams is often the main focus for teenagers, which means exercising is far down the list of priorities. So look for ways to incorporate activity into everything you do, such as taking the stairs instead of the lift, or getting off the bus one stop earlier and walking the rest of the way. Do this with a friend to make exercising as fun as possible. Remind you teen that Breakfast means "breaking the fast" and is the most important meal of the day. After 8-10 hours without food, the body needs to replace its blood sugar. Breakfast prepares teens for learning and studies show that students who regularly eat breakfast score higher on tests at school.

As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.

As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)

We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google's platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.

Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a "502 Error" or "503 Error" when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.

To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.

The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we've been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

If you've been knocking about within FeedBurner using your Google Account, you may have noticed that the original "french fry" chart from the Analyze tab of the original feedburner.com is no more. This venerable bar chart, with its green picket fence of subscriber trend results, has been the first stop for many publishers when checking their feed analytics for years. In its place is new green-ness (and blue-ness) that communicates three times as much information in the same space, and sets the stage for more interesting reporting in the future. Here's a snapshot:



This 30-day view now offers the following information:

• Daily subscriber totals (in green)


• Daily reach totals (in blue)


• The relationship between these two numbers over time

You can move the mouse over any day in the chart and see that day's specific totals for subscribers and reach, too. (Note that reach and subscribers are plotted with different y-axes: subscribers on left, reach on right).

The relationship between these numbers is the kicker:

• Understanding that reach means people taking action by viewing or clicking on items in your feed helps you understand how engaged your audience is.
  
  
• The more often you post (especially with full text), the more often people are likely to view your current (and previous) updates, and even click-through to your site for related information.


• Note the blue spikes in reach above; these are centered around new posts. Steady subscriber growth occurred as this site promoted and redirected 100% of its original feed traffic to its feed.

Don't forget to click the "See more about your subscribers" link below the main chart to view a detailed breakdown of your subscriber traffic:



Comparing this chart, day by day, can help you spot where subscribers are coming from (and from what source they have gone missing, should there be a sudden drop).

While we're on the topic: make sure you can actually get the reach statistic — meaning, make sure you turn on item-level stats for your feed! They're used to help calculate reach. Visit the Analyze tab, look for the "Configure Stats" option, and make sure the boxes shown below are checked:



(You can, of course, check "downloads," too, if you're a podcaster). As a reminder: to view all feed stats' reports and options, either click the "View Feed Stats" next to your feed's ad unit listing in the AdSense Manage Ads section, or sign into feedburner.google.com and click on your feed's title on My Feeds.

— Jessie Chavez, Software Engineer, and Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for feeds

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