Teen idols do the same stupid things other adolescents do, but they have much better excuses. Last week Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber got a ticket for driving his Fisker Karma electric supercar at excessive speeds on a Los Angeles freeway. Personally, if I could afford a Fisker I would drive at excessive speeds in my driveway, but that’s not the point.

Bieber claimed he was speeding and weaving in and out of traffic in order to avoid six to seven carloads of paparazzi who were chasing him. This whole thing makes me realize that not only can pop stars afford faster cars than mine; people who take picture of pop stars can afford cars that can keep up with those cars! I swear I’d change careers if only I didn’t so enjoy baby poop.

Get your kids a big hairy pet, folks; a new study shows that children who live with dogs turn out to be much healthier.

What can parents do to keep their babies healthy? The answers are obvious: don’t smoke, breastfeed when possible, immunize fully and on time, and get a dog, the filthier the better. That, at least, appears to be the upshot of a new study by researchers at Kuopio University Hospital in Finland, who found that children who lived with dogs were healthier, suffered fewer ear infections, and required less antibiotics than kids with cats or those who constantly begged their parents for pets only to be sent to bed in tears.

The more time dogs spent outdoors, the healthier kids seemed to be, which researchers felt supported the “dirt is good” theory of immune function that has grown increasingly popular with infectious disease specialists and my 7-year-old son. While further research remains to be done in this field, for now when parents ask me what kind of expensive purebred dog they should buy for their baby I am suggesting a pot-bellied pig.

The latest news on vitamins is making me wish there were a vitamin F (for “fail” of course). Ever since the new guidelines on Vitamin D supplementation came out a few years ago, I’ve been patting myself on the back for discussing them at every wellness exam for every patient, including albino surfers. Now I hear from a research team at the Office Of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes Of Health that more than a third of kids on vitamins still failed to get enough calcium and vitamin D! If that were not galling enough, it turns out that many supplement users are getting too much iron, vitamin A, zinc, and folate.

Researchers suggested that perhaps the current formulations of children’s multivitamins in the US are no longer well-matched to kids’ actual diets. Lead author Dr. Regan Bailey was reluctant to specify exactly what changes vitamin manufacturers should make, but I have a plan. Nutritionists just need to figure out what micronutrients are abundant in potato chips and Mountain Dew and then make vitamins that contain everything but that stuff. While they’re at it, they can find new characters for the shapes of chewable vitamins. Face it, the only people who still recognize those cartoon cavemen should be taking Geritol.

Just when we thought we’d heard the last word on teens and sexting, here comes a larger, more definitive study that tells us more teens are doing it than we thought. Researchers followed nearly 1000 high school students in south Texas for three years, and they learned that 57% of kids had been asked to send a naked picture of themselves by electronic media with 28% having actually done so. Sexting correlated with engaging in sexual intercourse and high-risk sexual behaviors, surprising no one.

What was surprising, however, was how many teens reported being “bothered” at least some by the request. Almost all the girls and at least half the boys were annoyed when asked to send nude photos, which to me suggests a means to discourage the practice.

Instead of bringing criminal charges against teens who sext, we should teach them that when someone asks them to send a picture of themselves naked they should instead message a photo of their facial expression the moment they read the request. I can imagine a public service announcement featuring Justin Bieber: “When someone asks for your picture, just do what I do; speed away in your sports car at over 100 miles per hour.” Okay, it may need a little work, but you know the message would resonate with its target audience.

David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society.

Never Say Never