Celebrity Home Birth

What if the news was full of celebrity home birth stories instead of schedule C-section after scheduled C-section...

Celebrity Home Birth

I wonder how it would effect the young women of this country. Where are the empowered young mother role models? I've had enough of Britney and Juno.

Oh, go see Ricki Lake's new film The Business of Being Born, it's fantastic. You get to see Ricki Lake give birth!

just a quick thought...

Check out this article in the health section of the New York Times: A Stable Doctor for a Scattered Life. I love reading the "Cases" column; it's often very personal and includes fascinating details about the experience of having and treating a disease. Unfortunately this week's column does not live up to my expectations. It is written by a psychiatrist who is seeing a severely mentally ill man. He tells her that he needs an absurdly large dose of Haldol, an anti-psychotic. It is the only thing that works he says. So what does she do? She writes him a prescription for it! Pathetic! P A T H E T I C!!! Who cares what drug the crazy person swears they need, she's the doctor, supposedly uncrazy. Anyway, dude has a terrible reaction to the drug and ends up in the hospital. I can't believe that this woman's ego is so big that she can write about a flagrant medical error and not take any serious responsibility for it.

What I'm Reading This Week Month: Poisonous Plastics and Cruel Dentists

Well, the once a week plan has failed so I'm going to make it a once a month series instead.

I've been doing most of my reading in my horrible textbook "Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition." I'm hoping to get it together to do a "best of" blog post where I can detail the most atrocious things I've found in that book.

My reading suggestions are a bit meager this month, but here they are:

I've been following this for awhile now but it seems to be gathering some momentum. Check out USA Today's story on Bisphenol A and pthalates: 'Everywhere Chemicals' in Plastics Alarm Parents.

You devoted readers (hi mom! sup betsy?) might remember my trip to the dentist with my girl:

After calling every pediatric dentist within an hour from my home, I discovered that every practice was a total mixed bag in terms of x-rays, amalgam, fluoride, etc., and that they all looked down on breastfeeding. Knowing that, I made my decision on where to take her based on how soon I could get an appointment. I knew we were not going to use the practice that I ended up taking her to. They have a policy of not allowing parents to be present if their child needs any treatment more extensive than a simple cleaning. This is unacceptable to me; I would not allow any stranger to take my child into a room by herself and do things to her, even if he or she has graduated from medical school. My job as her parent is to protect her and advocate for her, which I cannot do if I am sitting in a waiting room. When my daughter needed a blood test to check her lead levels our family doctor did not ask us to leave the room, in fact, there was an implicit understanding that my partner and I would need to be present in order to hold and soothe our daughter during the procedure. There is absolutely no reason why this would not be possible for a dental treatment. What are they trying to hide?

This is what they were trying to hide: Profit Over Patient? Dentists Accused of Child Abuse. Please take note of how thoroughly unapologetic the dentist is.

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So I am now actually reading Gary Taubes' new book "Good Calories, Bad Calories." The library here has several copies. Silly me, I thought they would all fly out the door and I would have to wait in line. As it turns out Buncombe county is not quite as excited about this book as I am. Now that I'm reading it, I can see why. It is dryyyyyyyyyyyyyy and, even for a nerd like me, a teensy bit boring at times, although it's picking up a bit in the second part of the book. It's definitely a scientific book, but it's as much about the history of ideas about nutrition as it is about the science of nutrition. The book is written very carefully with a lot of detail, which is a wonderful contribution to those of us trying to battle the conventional nutrition giants, but it doesn't make for a catchy read for the lay person. Still, I'm thrilled to be reading it and I think that anyone who does take the time to read even parts of it will reap significant benefits if they alter their diets based on the information in this book. Luckily there are the Sally Fallon's and Nina Plank's out there to translate all this information for the masses.

Oh but wait a second, Sally Fallon and Nina Plank's work came out well before Good Calories, Bad Calories. I think Gary Taubes work is an incredible addition to the field of nutrition, but I am intensely irritated by the lack of recognition given to the myriads of nutrition writers that have come before Taubes. I doubt that there will ever be recognition of their phenomenal work. I was bored by the first few chapters of Taubes' book because I had learned virtually everything he was writing about from attending a Sally Fallon seminar last winter. She even used several of the same graphs to demonstrate how data had been misinterpreted. It's going to take a lot of people to say the same thing for this dogma to topple...but come on, credit where credit is due!

Additionally, Weston A. Price is notably absent from the discussion in Taubes' book. I'm really confused as to why he isn't mentioned because his work is achingly relevant to the topics. Is Weston Price price more of a pariah than I am aware of? Even so, I am confused why Taubes' would not include his work because it supports his hypothesis. He mentions many other doctors and researchers who were coming to the same conclusions that Price did except that they were making these observations in the 40's and 50's, whereas Price's seminal work was first published in 1939 and his research was being conducted throughout the thirties. I'm glad to learn of the other researchers who were also coming to the obvious conclusions that the refined carbohydrates of the modern diet had disastrous health consequences, but why this notable absence?

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Here's a fun little fact I gleaned from Taubes's book: The word homeostasis was coined by a physiologist named Walter Cannon (although he was not first person to recognize the concept) but even he described it as "the wisdom of the body." I find this notable because so frequently I hear alternative healers and midwives refer to our bodies as wise and implore us to leave well enough alone. I guess, on some level, Science agrees.

What I'm Reading This Week: Gary Taubes

I'm initiating a weekly (I hope) blog post about what I'm reading. I find all sorts of interesting things and I figure I'll pass them along.

I'm really excited about Gary Taubes new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. I'm tired of being relegated to the lunatic fringe or into the diet fads category. The food that I eat is more normal than the Standard American Diet. It looks like the wave that it is going to wash out low-fat dogma is building more and more.

Gary Taubes just had a feature article in the NYT Magazine that is worth checking out: Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? It is very eye opening about the unreliability of epidemiological studies. Additionally, he has responded to readers questions about his article and there is some great information there. Be sure to pay attention to the Q and A about relative risk vs. absolute risk. It is a commonly used statistical distortion and we should all be questioning medical recommendations that are based on relative risk.

If you're enjoying that go ahead and check out his 2001 article: What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?

Can't get enough Gary? Here ya go:

Interview with Gary Taubes

The Soft Science of Dietary Fat -This was originally published in the journal Science.

Cognitive Dissonance

This is old but for some reason I forgot to post it.


The more thoroughly I embrace my new view on nutrition, the more I am able to recognize the wide spread cognitive dissonance about diet. As a nation, we are so committed to the lipid hypothesis that we apply it even when it goes completely contrary to logic. Here is a great example from the New York Times:

But the notion that Americans ever ate well is suspect. In 1966, when Americans were still comparatively thin, more than two billion hamburgers already had been sold in McDonald’s restaurants, noted Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. The recent rise in obesity may have more to do with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles than with the quality of our diets.

“The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” he said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie.... The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories.”

“Nostalgia is going to get us nowhere,” he added. -For the Overweight, Bad Advice by the Spoonful

I forget that whole milk is an epithet. It's funny to see a doctor living in the fat-era calling the diet of pre-fat-era Americans bad, unhealthy, and possibly fattening. It's like saying, "Back when people were thinner, they ate more fattening food." It simply doesn't make sense. Logically, if people were thinner, than their food was less fattening. Now, I'm obviously leaving out the issue of our sedentary lifestyles to make my point clearer, but the funny part is that in the next few paragraphs of the article they assert that exercise has little influence on obesity and weight loss. This just adds to my point about the cognitive dissonance. This doctor says it's not food but lack of exercise, but then the data says that exercise has little effect, so isn't the obvious next step to reexamine the hypothesis about food?

This question is answered in the last paragraphs of the article:

According to several animal studies, conditions during pregnancy, including the mother’s diet, may determine how fat the offspring are as adults. Human studies have shown that women who eat little in pregnancy, surprisingly, more often have children who grow into fat adults. More than a dozen studies have found that children are more likely to be fat if their mothers smoke during pregnancy.

Blame mothers! Even better, blame poor, malnourished mothers! How about blame a government who doesn't offer universal health care for pregnant women? How about blame welfare reform? How about blame shitty WIC programs? They've also linked formula to obesity, so now we can blame those ignorant, selfish, bottle-feeding mothers too! Or should we blame hospitals for allowing Nestle to supply every new mother with a free gift of formula right as she and her baby are trying to learn to breastfeed even though it's disgusting!

Dissing on Local Food

Note: this was written about a few weeks ago but it never got edited and posted.


While I would much rather be reading Harry Potter 7 during my daughter's naptime, I unfortunately (for me, hopefully not for you!) feel the need to respond to this irritating op-ed in the New York Times today.

The gist of the essay is that while it seems intuitive that eating locally would be better for the environment, there have been studies that show that maybe it is not. The author argues that there are parts of the globe that are very efficient at growing food and that instead of trying to grow food in places where it is inefficient that we should just focus on shipping food from places where it is efficient to places that are inefficient. Whew. Here's the most important section of the essay:

It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call “factor inputs and externalities” — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.

Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.

This all makes logical sense, but it does not take into account a very important aspect of the local food movement. Eating locally means eating seasonally and it means eating foods, animal and vegetable, that can be raised naturally in your region. Just because it is possible to grow tomatos in a heated hydroponic greenhouse in the winter doesn't mean we should do it! If Britain doesn't have sufficient pasture to raise lamb, (actually I find this hard to believe, maybe a certain part of Britain doesn't, but I know for sure that the whole country isn't devoid of grass) well then a local foodie should be eating seafood. Or some other creature more adapted to the area.

We humans are incredibly flexible in what sorts of foods we can survive on. We have flourished all over the globe, jungle to desert, without super highways and planes to transport our food. We will have to make sacrifices in order to bring our society back into balance with the earth. We might not get tomatos and strawberries all year round, and we may never see a pineapple (as you can see, the northeast united states is the center of my world). The good news is that we have many new worlds of food to discover. Industrial farming and food shipping, rather than increasing the diversity of food we eat, has a tendency to shrink it. Instead of growing our local, carefully bred, plant varieties and domesticated animals (as well as eating the local wild plants and animals), we have started to eat the same things everywhere. I've done my share of traveling in this country and every time I walk into a supermarket it looks like I could be anywhere. The same apples, same tomatos, same onions, same chicken, same beef. It's very homogenous.

The author is right. If we want to be able to get anything, anywhere, all year around, then yes, it is probably more efficient to put our focus on creating enormous, "super-efficient", industrial food growing operations and shipping food globally. While the idea of being able to get anything I want sure is enticing, (and I have to confess that, while I do buy local a lot, I am not the best seasonal eater) there are a lot of losses to a system like that:

1.) As I have already mentioned, food diversity.
2.) Our local economies lose out when we buy 1,000 mile apples versus 10 mile apples.
3.) Food safety and food security. If we were eating locally we would not be experiencing nationwide food recalls. We would not have to dispose of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pounds of possibly tainted spinach, or beef, or milk. When our food production becomes centralized we become vulnerable to disasters that can result in catastrophic food shortages. When our production is decentralized, we can create local food security through local food production. If one community loses its crops, theres the next one down the road vs. relying on one area (ie California) to produce a marority of the veggies for a whole large country (ie the United States).
4.) Vegetables that travel are less nutritious. Nutrients break down over time so the quicker it gets from the farm to your table the more nutricious the food is. The author of the article plays this off as being about a privileged and unimportant desire for taste, but (assuming it hasn't been adulterated by taste enhancing chemicals) taste tells us something abour our food. We know when we're eating good food and a seasonal local heirloom tomato tastes richer and better than a bland, ethylene spray ripened, California grown (remember folks I'm on the east coast), January tomato, because it is richer and better.
5.) The environment. While I totally agree that it is not efficient to try to produce plants or nurture animals in an environment that they are not suited for, I question whether that study has compared small or medium sized organic farms striving for sustainability with large industrial farms from far away. It makes sense that a large industrial farm could, through size, become more efficient with its machines, more efficient with its chemicals, and more efficient with packing and transporting. But what about small local intensive farms that are using little input because they are being careful and concious about their resources? Now if Whole Foods would just buy directly from those farms instead of making them ship their products hundreds of miles to their processing facilities that ship the food back hundreds of miles to the local Whole Foods...

Toxic Car Seats and a Case for Local Economies

I've been busy! Hopefully I will be able to write more regularly again soon.

For now I wanted to pass along this website: www.healthycar.org

This is for all you parents and parents to be out there. I'm passing this along for two reasons. One, so you can figure out if your car seat is poisonous and/or prevent you from buying a toxic one. Two, more importantly, I want this to serve as a reminder for all of us that, due to the reckless and indiscriminate use of toxic chemicals, we are all at risk of being poisoned. It is up to the individual consumer to minimize exposure from contaminated products. I've been thinking about this a lot in light of what's been happening with food and chemical production in China (the mass dog poisoning, mass human poisoning, and tooth paste contamination). We also have a current US engendered meat contamination going on.

Yet another (big) reason to re-localize our economies. Local food is less likely to be contaminated, and the same is true for locally made products. In the unfortunate case of a contaminated product the poisoning is limited to a smaller group of people rather than a huge and scattered population. Recalls could happen swiftly and easily.

This is pure speculation, but I would guess that local producers of food or goods would be less likely to use toxic chemicals in or on their products for a number of reasons. They would have to literally face the people who are harmed by their indiscretion. A local food producer may not need chemical preservatives because their product spends less time getting to the consumer. Smaller production is less complicated and more personal which allows producers to use higher quality, natural materials. Staying in the good grace of the community insures their survival as a business, why would they jeopardize that with a harmful product?

While we're on the subject of local economies, I just joined the Asheville Local Exchange Trading System (AshevilleLets). It's awesome!