Ann Marie's Blog View: Recent Entries. View: Archive. View: Friends. View: User Info. View: Website (My Website). You're looking at the latest 3 entries.

December 3rd, 2007

Tags: allergies, baby formula, california, eczema, food, immunity, kate, milk is milk, monsanto, nutrition, organic pastures, pasteurization, politics, probiotics, raw milk Subject: Help save raw milk in California! Time: 09:34 am Current Mood: determined

As it stands, there will be no more raw milk allowed in California next month. I'm really upset about this because I drink raw milk every day and use it to make Kate's homemade baby formula. More and more dairies are going by the wayside across the country due to pressure from lobbyists from big money dairy factory farms. We can't let this happen in California, where raw milk has always been legal and available in stores. I've posted before about Monsanto milk and their slimy "Milk is Milk" campaign. This is real, people. Freedoms are not taken away all at once. They are taken away one at a time. Here's what happened... a couple of months ago, they slipped a few sentences into an amendment of the California food code. It was signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger -- even though he probably didn't even know what he was signing. Here's the press release from Organic Pastures Dairy: http://www.organicpastures.com/pdfs/ab1735_press_release.pdf Sally Fallon says, "The legislation is obviously aimed at getting rid of raw milk in California using standards that are unnecessary or impossible to meet." If you live in California and you want the right to buy raw milk and dairy products, please read the following and do what you can to help. Even if you don't currently drink raw milk, please do what you can to fight for these organic dairy farms where the cows are allowed to be on pasture and eat grass all year long. If they get away with this, who knows what they will do next? In fact, it was just announced that the USDA wants to start doing the same thing -- imposing ridiculous unattainable federal regulations on small growers and family farms -- for all leafy greens!!! http://cornucopia.org/index.php/protect-fresh-leafy-greens-and-family-farms/ Pasteurization kills enzymes, folks. Enzymes are the building blocks for the absorption of nutrients. Without enzymes, we can't absorb vitamins and minerals. Furthermore, pasteurization kills probiotics, or good bacteria. We need this bacteria in our digestive tracts in order to build immunity. Why do you think so many kids are allergic to EVERYTHING these days? They've been raised on pasteurized foods, most notably pasteurized milk. The guy that sells us our milk at the Organic Pastures hub store said that his first-born son was sick all the time and had eczema for five years. His eczema cleared up in TWO weeks after they switched to raw milk. Here is the page on what you can do (I am writing a letter to Nicole Parra and sending photos of our family with Kate drinking raw milk): http://www.organicpastures.com/ab_1735_letter4.html Write or fax letters (no emails) to Nicole Parra, Chair of the Agriculture Committee in the Assembly. Make it personal and real by including a picture of you and your family holding raw milk containers. Tell her to introduce new legislation that will let raw milk continue to flow freely in California. Assemblymember Nicole Parra Capitol Office State Capitol P.O. Box 942849 Sacramento, CA 94249-0030 (916) 319 - 2030 (916) 319 - 2130 Fax Also write your assembly members or better yet make an appointment and plead your case directly. Please, please do what you can to help. Write a letter today. Not just for Kate, but for the cows! And for the right to continue to buy healthy food in California. Please forward this post via email or blog. (If you post on your blog, please send me the link so I can send it to Organic Pastures -- they will post it on their site.)

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November 23rd, 2007

Tags: allergies, baby food, biodiesel, fats, food, gm foods, immunity, infant formula, kate, nutrition, soy, vaccines Subject: Post-Thanksgiving exhaustion, vaccines, and soy oil Time: 08:31 pm Current Mood: tired

Kate is down for the night. I'm soaking raw pumpkin seeds (from the pumpkins I used for pumpkin pie) and simmering the turkey carcass to make stock. I'm so exhausted. The past week has been a whirlwind of shopping, menu planning, roasting, basting, measuring, mixing, baking and cleaning. I feel like I need a vacation now. Which of course I'm not getting. I went to bed after 11:30 pm last night (trying to wind down after such a long day) and got up at 6:30 to tend to Kate. And I tended to her all day -- picking her up and kissing her when she bonked her head on the metal coffee table, feeding her ground turkey with chicken liver pate and butternut squash with butter, doing dishes, doing laundry, heating up bottles and changing poopy diapers. She went down at 5 pm, as usual. A 10 and a half hour day -- not so bad. Mothers don't get a day off. My single friends spent the day at the movies. Last night at dinner, they talked about all the movies they'd seen lately. I couldn't really add anything to the conversation. And for much of it, I had no idea what they were talking about. Being a new parent, I haven't seen a movie in the theater since I tried to go see "Oceans 13" when Kate was a couple of months old and she pooped halfway up her backside and we had to leave the theater. Ah, memories... Anyway, I'm not complaining. I have seen enough movies for a lifetime. Okay, not for a lifetime, but I can skip seeing movies for a while is all I'm saying. And Seth gets those "FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION" movies so I guess I could be watching movies if I really wanted to. We just got "Into the Wild" in the mail for example. But instead I am relaxing with a glass of wine, reading about vaccines. The more I read, the more I am convinced that waiting on vaccines -- or refusing them altogether -- is the right thing to do. Read this: Because of the dramatic increase in the number of injuries from childhood vaccines over the past decades, Congress enacted the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, setting up a fund to compensate parents for injured or dead children (as if a parent could ever be "compensated" for the loss of their child due to vaccination). Application to this fund is the first step parents must take when their child has been harmed; thus, the fund serves to shield the pharmaceutical company from all initial liability. To date, the fund has paid out over $1.2 billion to parents with over 12,000 reports made every year. This is a staggering number considering how many reactions occur that medical authorities refuse to attribute to the vaccine. And if David Kessler is correct and 90-99 percent of all injuries are not even reported, the true number of children injured or killed by vaccines would be 1.2 million or more per year. http://www.westonaprice.org/children/vaccinations.html Doesn't that scare you? It scares me. And that's just a taste of what I'm reading. I'm not just reading the crackpot left-wing fringe websites either. I told that pediatrician I would research it and I am. I'm reading everything. Read this, from the CBS News site (not exactly a crackpot left-wing fringe website): http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/06/15/couricandco/entry2934107.shtml Come on, people. One in 160 kids with autism. That is CRAZY. If vaccines are not to blame, something else is. Something is not right. Here's another heinous thing I read -- about the Hepatitis B shot, which is now administered at birth: A flagrant example of the poor science behind vaccination development, the FDA approved the vaccine for use after only 1636 doses of Recombivax HB were administered to only 653 children who were subsequently monitored for only 5 days after each dose.6 Since the vaccine is recommended for the first day of life, Merck was asked for safety data on newborns. They replied, "We have none. Our studies were done on 5- and 10-year-olds."7 Further, Merck admitted in 1996 that no data is "available for the simultaneous administration of Recombivax HB with other vaccines" even though children are routinely given other vaccines along with Recombivax HB vaccine. http://www.westonaprice.org/children/vaccinations.html Good Lord! They test cough medicine more than that. Oh, wait. Maybe not: http://www.newstarget.com/022209.html Do I really want my child to be a guinea pig for the likes of Merck? And Hepatitis B is only transmitted through sex and dirty needles. Hmm -- yeah, I guess Kate was high risk, seeing how there's so much casual sex and intravenous drug usage in the maternity ward. Oh, yes, a mother can infect her baby during birth -- but couldn't they just administer a simple blood test to the mothers instead of giving our newborns a shot? Oh, right, a blood test COSTS them money. The Hep B shot MAKES them money. Anyway, I'll keep reading. I'll keep researching. As I said, when and if I find enough evidence to convince me that vaccines are safe and beneficial, we'll get them for Kate. I have also been thinking a lot about baby food. Since lately Kate is eating 2 (soon to be 3) squares a day. The recommendation from pediatricians is to start babies on rice cereal. Have you read the label on a box of Gerber rice cereal lately? I had bought some for Kate -- it was sitting in the cupboard. Needless to say, after reading the ingredients, I promptly dumped it in the trash. Rice Flour , Soy Oil-Lecithin , Tri- and Dicalcium Phosphate , Tocopherols Vitamin E , Electrolytic Iron , Zinc Sulfate , Niacinamide a B Vitamin , Riboflavin Vitamin B-2 , Pyridoxine Hydrochloride Vitamin B-6 , Thiamin Vitamin B-1 , Folic Acid a B Vitamin , Vitamin B-12 Cyanocobalamin Number 2 ingredient: Soy oil-lecithin. Do you know what that is? First of all, it's a genetically modified food. (http://www.safe-food.org/-consumer/shop.html) Do you know what that means? No? Neither do I exactly. So WHY are we feeding it to our babies? Genetically modified foods are... well, just google it and look: http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/AboutGeneticallyModifiedFoods/index.cfm http://www.organicconsumers.org/gelink.cfm http://www.netlink.de/gen/fagan.html Need I go on? No, I need not. Suffice it to say that CLEARLY it would be better to give a 7-month old baby REAL food instead of "Franken-food" that has zillions of websites chronicling its dangers. OK so we've established that GM foods are sketchy and possibly dangerous and at the very least, should be avoided due to the fact that (a) most people don't know what they are and (b) most people don't know what they do to you. Let's get back to the issue at hand. Soy oil-lecithin. Soybean lecithin comes from sludge left after crude soy oil goes through a "degumming" process. It is a waste product containing solvents and pesticides and has a consistency ranging from a gummy fluid to a plastic solid. Historian William Shurtleff reports that the expansion of the soybean crushing and soy oil refining industries in Europe after 1908 led to a problem disposing the increasing amounts of fermenting, foul-smelling sludge. German companies then decided to vacuum dry the sludge, patent the process and sell it as "soybean lecithin." Scientists hired to find some use for the substance cooked up more than a thousand new uses by 1939.8 Today lecithin is ubiquitous in the processed food supply. It is most commonly used as an emulsifier to keep water and fats from separating in foods such as margarine, peanut butter, chocolate candies, ice cream, coffee creamers and infant formulas. http://www.westonaprice.org/soy/lecithin.html But the fact that soy oil-lecithin is a highly refined genetically modified waste food product is not the only concern at hand... There are a number of potential problems with eating soy: http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/03summary.htm Endocrine disrupter. Reduction of vitamin assimilation. Potentially leads to thyroid cancer. MSG. Aluminum. Aaaagggghhhhh. Great. Let's mess with Kate's endocrine system, reduce her vitamin absorption, and make her susceptible to obesity, diabetes, infertility and cancer. WHY is this the number 2 ingredient in Gerber rice cereal? Why is soy oil-lecithin an ingredient in rice cereal at all? Why is THIS promoted as baby's first food? Why don't they just make rice cereal out of rice? Maybe add a little butter. Oh, right, then it wouldn't have the shelf life it does (nearly indefinite). Why is soy oil the third ingredient listed in Enfamil infant formula? (http://www.epinions.com/content_237968723588) The fifth ingredient in Similac? (http://www.walgreens.com/store/product.jsp?CATID=100367&navAction=jump&navCount=0&id=prod3061) The third ingredient in Nestle Good Start? (http://www.amazon.com/Nestle-Essentials-Infant-Formula-Powder/dp/B000GCL5HO) Doesn't that make you go HMMM? It's in everything -- including baby food -- because it is a cheap industrial-grade product. Soy is cheap to grow and produce. Makes you wonder if this has anything to do with children's declining immunity, allergies to peanuts, increased diabetes, early-onset puberty, etc. A better use for soy oil? Biodiesel! http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/biodiesel.html It can make cars run -- just like gasoline. Is that what we should be putting in our babies' bodies? I leave you with this (a good article on soy): http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/13/CMGJKK1BP31.DTL Note the last quotation from Marion Nestle: "People don't have to eat soy if they don't want to!" Nestle says. Uh, okay, I guess not -- but what if it's in everything we buy?

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November 21st, 2007

Tags: allergies, autism, cancer, health, immunity, lacto-fermentation, medicine, nutrition, probiotics, raw foods, raw milk, vaccines Subject: Termites don't eat healthy trees Time: 11:18 am Current Mood: curious

This is one of the most fascinating blog posts I have ever read: http://yoursacredself.blogspot.com/2007/10/termites-dont-eat-healthy-trees.html "The inner ecosystem of the body is the prime determinant in disease risk." This makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? I love the part about his trip to the Himalayas -- how the more sickly people were bitten by leeches and the healthier, sturdier people were not. I also really like his explanation of cancer. The toxins and waste matter in the body have nowhere else to go. So they try to localize -- into tumors. Gosh, doesn't that make sense to you? It does to me. Allopathic (Western medicine) has never made sense to me. OK, sure, having a C-section was helpful when my baby was breech. I do appreciate Western medicine during those times when surgery is required. It's just that the standard protocol of suppressing and covering up symptoms instead of treating the cause DOES NOT WORK. Which leads one to ask the question -- logically, how would injecting vaccines into nutritionally depleted, sickly kids with weak immune systems and very few helpful bacteria in their guts help make their immune systems stronger? It doesn't make any sense. Many parents with autistic kids have been speaking out about the lack of good bacteria in their kids' digestive tracts. These kids tend to be allergic to dairy and wheat (casein and gluten). Uh, for the most part that's pasteurized dairy and refined flour, by the way. I have read the testimony of some parents who say their autistic children tolerate raw milk just fine. I wonder it all of this relates to the phenomenon of all these kids being allergic to peanuts. I wonder if they had more good bacteria in their gut, they might not be allergic to everything.

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Ann Marie's Blog View: Recent Entries. View: Archive. View: Friends. View: User Info. View: Website (My Website). You're looking at the latest 3 entries.