Earlier this year, Katie Holmes's daughter, Suri Cruise, was photographed sucking on a dummy.

Over the past three years (apart from nine months during pregnancy) my weight has been at its lowest since teenagerdom. The weird thing is that, while I was trying to diet and exercise I languished at a weight two stone heavier than at present.

Yorkshire student and celebrity chef Sam Stern has made money by creating a brand out of himself. He wrote his first book, Get Cooking, an international best seller, at just 14 and so far the teenage chef estimates that with around 600,000 sold in 16 countries it has made him a profit of £30,000. His most recent, Sam Stern's Eat Vegetarian (which followed Cooking Up a Storm; Real Food, Real Fast and Sam Stern's Student Cookbook) was written when he was 19. The politics and sociology student at Edinburgh University is also a regular television guest and writes a monthly newspaper column.

Harry Ingram, 16, from Radlett, started selling stink bombs in the playground at Hertsmere Jewish Primary School, buying them for 50p and selling them for a pound. He also made a huge profit on sweets, buying them for 0.2p and selling them for 60p. He then set up two websites supplying practical joke items like fake parking tickets and whoopee cushions. And a website set up for his travel-themed barmitzvah, under the name of harryairways, proved an unexpected earner - he sold the domain name for £500 to another Harry who was actually setting up an airline.

Edgware teen Adam Eliaz was a finalist in last year's Junior Apprentice. The 18-year-old started making money at 11, buying and selling sporting equipment on eBay. He left school – The London Academy in Edgware – at 16 and started his own official limited company last year. He reports good sales, making a turnover £6,000 to £13,000 per month. Says Adam:

Whether it's Gymboree, Mini Mozart, Baby Yoga or Tumble Tots, as soon as a baby comes into the world these days, there are courses waiting for them.

While the sessions - which normally involve music, singing and playing with apparatus - are no doubt sociable, fun and, let's face it, a good way to fill the sometimes monotonous days spent entertaining a child, are they essential for your baby's development?

It began in 1980 when a group of 70 British Jews who did not have much on over the Christmas period decided they wanted to inject some excitement into the ailing world of Jewish adult education. Thirty years on, Limmud attracts more than 35,000 people per year across 55 communities around the Jewish world.

Last week, a team of surgeons performed the world's first robotically assisted pancreas transplant on a women in Italy who suffers from type one diabetes.

With her new organ, the mother of two is now able to produce the correct amount of insulin - the hormone which regulates the amount of glucose in the body - and this has effectively cured her disease.

Our nation boasts the whole gamut of celebrity chef personalities: the cockney one, the angry one, the luscious lady one, the mumsy one and the experimental one, to name a few.

Enter the laid-back, studenty one. Sam Stern, 19, is currently studying politics and sociology at Edinburgh University and is also author of five brightly coloured recipe books aimed at first-time cooks, full of cheerful photos of Sam happily cooking in his mum’s kitchen.

Cupcakes, shmupcakes. The latest patisserie trend that has piped its way over from the States to our shores comes in the form of two squidgy biscuits stuck together with buttercream and marshmallow fluff.

The whoopie pie (also known as the giant Oreo cookie because of its similarity to the American biscuit) has enjoyed a resurgence in America since Manhattan's Magnolia Bakery began stocking them - in the same way that Carrie Bradshaw and co made cupcakes popular by gorging on the iced delicacies from that same cake shop in TV show Sex and the City.

'How's the sleep?" This is often the first question people ask the parent of a new baby. They know - particularly if they are parents themselves - how stressful tending to the needs of an infant in the middle of the night can be.

Pregnant pop star Dannii Minogue recently posted a picture of her first baby gift - a babygro emblazoned with the slogan "Sleep is for the weak" across its front - on her Twitter page. She is already gearing herself up for the night-time activities she and her newborn will experience after the birth in July.

The elderly do not need as much as the rest of us, adults wish they could get more of it and teenagers don't have any problems doing it all day. We are, of course, talking about sleep.

Go to a typical Jewish wedding and it is the smoked salmon station — not the bar — where the queue normally forms. In other words, Jews are not known for their love of booze.

They may pride themselves on this remarkable restraint (or sheer lack of interest) but it might be that they are actually doing themselves a disservice by avoiding alcohol.

A recent Spanish study — one of the largest of its kind on the subject and commissioned by the Basque Public Health Department — found that the more you drink, the less chance you have of developing heart disease.

Mitch Albom might just be the biggest author you have never heard of. His novels have shifted 30 million copies worldwide, with his latest book, Have A Little Faith, having been a fixture in the top 20 best-seller list in the United States since it was published in September. Previous novels The Five People You Meet In Heaven and For One More Day were instant number ones on the New York Times’s bestsellers list. He is perhaps best known for Tuesdays With Morrie, a memoir about the time the author spent with his old college professor before he died.