CHECKUP EAT RIGHT - AND WELL - WHEN YOU'RE PREGNANT.

Byline: - Staff and Wire Services

The 40 recipes in ``Healthy Eating for Pregnancy'' (Mitchell Beazley; $14.95) look and sound great even if you're not expecting. Try a mango and melon smoothie to meet your vitamin C and folic acid requirements.

Sample the spiced lentils with cooked shrimp for a protein punch. Top off your meal with a slice of banana, fig and honey cake, containing potassium and fiber.

Author Amanda Grant makes a case for eating organic, but it's hardly the focus. She also covers pregnancy nutrition and food safety issues in this beautifully designed and photographed book.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE ...: New research from Finland suggests that people who live or work around tobacco smoke may be two to five times more likely to suffer from asthma. But experts caution the findings don't necessarily mean that otherwise healthy people will develop asthma because they hang around smokers.

The research ``doesn't say that tobacco smoke would cause asthma in someone who had no other high risk,'' says Dr. William E. Berger, a California allergist and author of the book ``Allergies & Asthma for Dummies.''

An estimated 17 million Americans - including almost 5 million children - have asthma, a condition that causes inflammation in the lung's airways, leading to wheezing and coughing.

In the Finnish study, researchers looked at 521 people, ages 21 to 63, who developed asthma over a 2 1/2-year period. They compared them to 932 healthy people. People who were regularly exposed to tobacco smoke at work were 2.2 times more likely to develop asthma, while those exposed at home were 4.8 times more likely to become ill.

The findings appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

ESTROGEN NO FRIEND OF STRESS: Estrogen may make women more sensitive to the effects of stress, says a study in the December issue of Molecular Psychiatry.

In experiments with rats, the researchers examined the effects of stress on the function of a brain area called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, which governs cognitive abilities such as short-term memory and concentration.

Female and male rats were exposed to different levels of stress and then tested on a short-term memory task. When they were stress-free, both the male and female rats performed equally well on the task. Both the male and female rats made major memory errors after being exposed to high levels of stress.

However, after exposure to moderate levels of stress, the female rats showed impaired ability on the memory task while the male rats did not. That suggests the female rats are more sensitive to the PFC-impairing effects of stress.

The researchers monitored the female rats' estrus cycles and found they showed this sensitivity to moderate stress only when they were in a high-estrogen phase. The researchers concluded that high levels of estrogen act to enhance the stress response, resulting in greater stress-related cognitive impairments.

A better understanding of this process may shed light on why women are more susceptible to stress-related disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. That could help in the development of improved treatments for those disorders.