TargetWoman Women Blog

The University of California Davis Health System conducted a study with autistic kids born in the 1990s and noticed that they tended to suffer gastrointestinal problems such as constipation, diarrhea, food allergy, vomiting and the like. It is felt that persons suffering PDD (pervasive developmental disorders) and autism may have problems digesting gluten and casein as these substances form peptides that act much like opiates within the body.

It is not an allergy or sensitivity to these foods. It is largely due to their inability to properly break down certain proteins. This results in altered behavior, perception and responses. These findings have recently been confirmed by researchers at Johnson & Johnson’s Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. In fact research done in the US and Europe reports that in a significant number of autistic children, their urine was noticed to contain peptides.

When children with autism are given a diet free of gluten and casein, they are likely to show reduced symptoms and improved social and cognitive behaviors and speech. Eliminating gluten and casein from the diets of autistic children has shown improvement, ranging from mild to tremendous. But there is a lot of skepticism about whether a gluten and casein free diet (GFCF diet) can help at all since clinical trials have not been conclusive. While there are reports of parents having reported improved eye contact and better behavior, others have noticed minor or no difference at all.

Gluten is found in wheat and most grains, starches, malt etc. Casein is found in milk and milk based products like cheese, butter, ice cream, yogurt and whey. It is indeed a hard task to work on a diet that is completely free of gluten and casein. Check for products that are gluten free targeted at those who suffer gluten intolerance as in Celiac Disease. These days the products also come in casein-free options.

Consult your physician before you embark on a GFCF diet. Ensure that the child gets sufficient fiber, vitamins and minerals. Foods that come within a GFCF diet include eggs, meat, poultry, fish, nuts, rice, quinoa, potato, soy, fruits, vegetables, oil and corn, among others.

Search Engine Giant Google has recently indicated that it may consider the speed of your website as one of the ranking factors in future. As a Webmaster, you know this all along - a faster loading page added to the positive feel. Ironically most designers create elaborate visually appealing eye candies to enhance the user appeal without realizing that the extra loading time actually detracts from the positive note.

This blog will take a look at the techniques and best practices recommended by Google through its Page Speed http://code.google.com/speed/ and Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website - http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

If you check out these recommendations, you will realize that some of the best practices are primarily intended for the corporate websites. As usual we try to distill the collective wisdom into a condensed format useful for the average Joe Webmaster. The tips you will find here could be used to speed up the access time of your pages without having to break your bank or the need to hire a Rocket Scientist to re code.

The summary of optimizing your pages and reducing the page load time:

1. Reduce file size:

1a. Start with your images: Optimize your images:

Do you know that our TargetWoman - which is primarily a content rich site still accounts for just a little over 54 % of its bandwidth consumption to image traffic ?

Simple approach - the larger your file is - whether it is a flash file or an eye candy high resolution image or a HTML/CSS/Javascript file, the longer it takes for the visitor’s browser to access. If it is an image, ask your designer to selectively manipulate or compress the image. A carefully optimized image can often bring down the file size to half its former size.

For static content optimize browser/proxy caching by setting longer expiration time. If you are in an Apache server the following snippet of code in your .htaccess can help caching your image files:

< FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$" >
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=2592000, public”
< /FilesMatch >

The max-age figure allows caching upto 30 days. If you check your server’s header information, it will return the following (example):


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:17:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:44:26 GMT
ETag: "1a5a0f1-67ec-479316b377e80"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 26604
Cache-Control: max-age=2592000, public
Connection: close
Content-Type: image/jpeg


Declare your image’s width and height value in HTML to help the browser to render the image faster.

1b: Optimizing Code:

When it comes to CSS optimization, avoid CSS expressions and combine many files into one. Remove redundant directives and minify the file. Same way combine several Javascripts into one external file and minify it. Make references to CSS and Javascript in the header of the HTML file. If you use Google Page Speed, you can use closure compiler which can minify Javascript - available from here.
On the other you can use YUI compressor from here to minify too.

Another feature of Google Page Speed is its ability to compress images (if you reference to a page with images) and save them to a configurable directory locally. You might find this a time saver. This alone is a reason to download the Page Speed for your Firefox browser. Head to this link for using Page Speed .

You would need Firebug Addon to your Firefox browser before you can use Page Speed.

If your ASCII content (Javascript and HTML) runs to more than a few tens of kbytes, you should consider Gzipping these components. Saves on bandwidth costs as well as on loading time.

2. Server Side Tweaks to reduce the page load time:

Reduce HTTP requests by combining several components into one. We had mentioned in the previous paragraph how you should combine many Javascript files into one. We also offered a tip to use a longer expiry time for cacheable images in Apache servers.

Avoid redirections as they add to the repeat traffic between the server and a browser.

Weed out 404 errors from your pages. If you use a clever 404 error trapping script to deliver an intuitive alternative to the visitor like this site, it is all the more reason to be wary of 404 errors. A careless reference to a non-existent image can fire up the engine which services the error trapping call whilst the browser waits for the continuation of other components.

Reduce DNS lookups - every time a browser encounters a new domain name, it can take up to 20-120 milliseconds to look up the IP address. This latency can be minimized if you use the IP address directly. Split components across domains to enhance parallel download.

Cookies: Serve static contents from a cookie less domain. Domains which serve cookies take up additional back and forth traffic which is not required for serving static contents. Whilst at this, reduce the size of the cookie set by your server.

Use consistency in referencing resources: It is quite a mouthful to just say it. You can save quite a bit of time by adopting consistency in your references. For example, you have a Carousal which needs a longish Javascript, you must make references to it like so: www.domain.com/carousal.js for all pages residing anywhere in your domain or subdomains. Absolute URLs to a consistent reference point shaves off time perceptibly.

Menarche heralds the reproductive phase in a woman’s life. Menstruation brings with it a host of issues and problems that might dog a woman at some stage or other in her life. Regularity of the menstrual cycle is a primary source of concern. From vaginal discharge and sporadic periods to dysmenorrhea and bleeding after menopause, menstrual problems can be inconvenient, painful and often be indicative of a more serious condition.

A woman must track her periods as this is helpful not only for determining pregnancy but is crucial in evaluation other conditions that concern reproductive health. Stress is noticed to be a major factor in the regularity or otherwise in a woman’s menstrual cycle. Medications and other inherent conditions are other causes.

Menstrual cramps are a common complaint with most women. The dull throbbing pain in the abdomen or lower back is usually due to cervical contractions but in some cases the pain is caused by fibroids, ovarian cysts or endometriosis. Many resort to the usage of over-the-counter pain killers to reduce the severity of the cramps by inhibiting the release of prostaglandins. Some women experience mittelschmerz – cramping during ovulation. This typically happens in the middle of a cycle.

With menstruation come a few embarrassing issues such as menstrual odor and bloating. Feminine menstrual odor can be tackled with hygienic practices and right diet. If you notice foul odor that persists, do seek medical guidance. Do not use harsh cleaning products that might affect the delicate female system.

Bloating during and largely before the menstrual cycle is commonly noticed by many women. Reduce sodium intake that leads to water retention. Consumption of natural diuretics such as green tea or cranberry juice helps reduce bloating. Do not reduce your intake of water as it is crucial to the flushing of toxins.

Many of these menstrual problems have been discussed at length in our articles.

Vaginal Bleeding After Menopause

Breakthrough Bleeding

Menstrual Regulation

Menopause Symptom