food

I love the Internet. It really makes this whole organic mom thing a lot easier. We get a lot of questions through this blog that are more tips than questions, queries that give us greater understanding of what other trying-to-be organic moms are coming up against. Some of this information from the front lines is news to us. One such email came in recently. I have edited lightly:

Hi,

I am wondering if you are aware of a reformulation of Earth's Best Dairy Formula. I just bought three of the 25 oz cans (I used to buy the 13 oz) and I noticed the first ingredients listed are no longer Organic Lactose, Organic Nonfat Milk. The ingredients are as follows: Organic Reduced Minerals Whey, Organic Vegetable Oils (palm or palm olein, high oleic (safflower or sunflower), coconut, soy,) Organic Nonfat Milk, Organic Lactose, etc. Does this mean that the formula is now predominately whey and oils rather than milk? I am a bit disturbed by the reformulation without any noticeable change in packaging. Could this be some attempt for Hain Celestial to save money while producing an inferior product? I am a little concerned about the quality of this formula now.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,
Stephani E. in the San Francisco Bay Area

I suggested Stephani contact them herself, and said that I'd also get in touch with them and see what I could find out. In the meantime, regarding the nutrition concern, I said she could look into Baby's Only, which is marketed as a toddler formula (mainly because the company is trying to encourage breastfeeding for younger tots) but contains what any formula should contain. Showing an ingredient list to your pediatrician before offering a formula to your child is always a good idea.

Before I had a chance to call Earth's Best, Stephani had already written me again. She had spoken to a customer service rep who said she didn't know of any reformulation. When Stephani read her the label ingredients, the rep confirmed that there was a change made in June. Odd. ...

 

I just … began my search for the healthier prenatal choice. I've read up a lot on the perfect prenatal by new chapter organics. Do you have any opinions on this? I noticed it contains lavender, which I've read can cause some female hormones to appear in male babies? Any other opinions on products for me?
 


Thanks, Staci

 

A perfect prenatal is a tall order! Overall -- organic or not -- you want to make sure you’re getting the maximum daily recommended dose of folic acid (important for helping prevent neural tube defects and spina bifida). Some “natural” (that’s in quotes because the claim natural is unregulated) brands also contain additional herbs and nutrients considered beneficial for pregnancy. These claims aren't exactly regulated either, so it's a good idea to go over the ingredient list of any vitamin you're taking with your OB/GYN or midwife.

Here’s a list from The Complete Organic Pregnancy of the vitamins and minerals your pre-natal should contain and the appropriate levels for an expecting mother:

 

 

• 4,000 and 5,000 IU (international units) of vitamin A
  
• 800 and 1,000 mcg (1 mg) of folic acid
  
• 400 IU of vitamin D
  
• 200 to 300 mg of calcium
  
• 70 mg of vitamin C
  
• 1.5 mg of thiamine
  
• 1.6 mg of riboflavin

  
• 2.6 mg of pyridoxine
  
• 17 mg of niacinamide
  
• 2.2 mcg of vitamin B-12
  
• 10 mg of vitamin E
  
• 15 mg of zinc
  
• 30 mg of iron
  

 

 

Unfortunately I found (and many, many other moms have found) most of them made me nauseated when I took them, which was tough at a time when I was already nauseated. I wound up trying many different kinds, and also only took them right before bed so I was either less nauseated or I slept through it.

The main difference between an organic and a conventional vitamin is ...

 

A critical hurdle was just cleared in California where the threat of raw milk becoming illegal (as it already is in many states) was looming. The Assembly Health Committee voted unanimously for SB 201, the Fresh Raw Milk Act of 2008. They are also close to passing legislation that will codify making it safe and legal, hopefully to be used as a template in other states.

I was giving an eco-parenting talk last week when a pregnant-with-her-second-child mom asked me if it were true that all chicken is bathed in chlorine as part of its slaughterhouse processing. I was grossed out, appalled, and stumped. I wasn’t, however, surprised. Conventional meat is about as grim and questionable as it gets. The slaughterhouses must have some serious gunk in need of disinfecting, especially as it is done in (potentially cross contaminating) bulk. I haven’t personally used chlorine bleach in years and years and clearly would not want the food I feed my family to be dunked in it.

When I got home, I immediately started researching her query. I personally get chicken from three places: my local farmers market, a pastured meat and poultry CSA I belong to, and a butcher shop near my parents’ place in upstate New York called Fleisher's. I have never smelled anything even remotely chlorine-y about any of these birds. But apparently a lot of people have smelled the chemical on theirs.

My first mode of action was to email my CSA contact to find out what they do to “clean” poultry, and to see if they could help get me up to date on what USDA organic regulations are when it comes to chlorine (I highly doubted they permit such a caustic chemical). Then I started reading everything I could about chlorinated chickens. I had given the mom who asked my email address and she forwarded me some links. One article she sent from Britain’s Daily Mail lamenting a possible lift of a ban against US chicken pointed out that it “would have to be labeled as 'treated with antimicrobial substances' or 'decontaminated by chemicals'.” Would that we had such labels here! ...

One of my best friends recently told me to read The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid (#13,355 on Amazon) and see if I could get my hands on some raw milk. She’s the only person in the world who drinks and loves whole milk as much as I do (pretty much our favorite part of college was the all-you-can-drink milk spigot in the dining hall), so I got the book and starting looking looking for some milk to taste. She lives in California where it’s legal to buy and sell, but I live in Brooklyn (where it’s not) so I drove to the closest place to legally get it (Walter Stewart’s Market in New Canaan, Connecticut) and bought two half gallons. They both cost around five dollars – one from Deerfield Farm, and the other from Sankow's Beaver Brook Farm.

I’ve always wondered why I like milk so much and lately my brother mentioned a theory that people crave what their bodies are allergic to. This made some sense to me because I have psoriasis, but to give up milk (which all psoriasis diets demand) is unfathomable. Milk makes me feel full and satisfied the way nothing else can. I’ve also heard anecdotal stories, like the lead of this Salon story about raw milk, about how it can solve skin issues and jump start your immune system into working the way it was meant to.

There’s a chapter in Schmid’s book (he’s a naturopathic physician) about something called "the milk cure" which uses raw milk medicinally, and about how what pasteurized milk exacerbates, raw milk heals. There was a big fuss at the turn of the 20th century over the pasteurized versus raw milk debate. Physicians who prescribed milk therapeutically were horrified at the idea of raw milk not being available anymore and so they formed an organization of doctors who pushed for what they called "Certified Milk." But ultimately because big business was behind pasteurization, they lost. For the best explanation of the traditional versus industrialized milk story read this essay by Lori Lipinski. The bottom line is that pasteurization (a process of heat treating milk to kill bacteria developed by Louis Pasteur for preserving beer and wine, not milk) not only kills friendly bacteria but also destroys the nutrient content of the milk. From Lipinski: “Pasteurized milk has up to a 66 percent loss of vitamins A, D and E. Vitamin C loss usually exceeds 50 percent. Heat affects water soluble vitamins and can make them 38 percent to 80 percent less effective. Vitamins B6 and B12 are completely destroyed during pasteurization. Pasteurization also destroys beneficial enzymes, antibodies and hormones. Pasteurization destroys lipase (an enzyme that breaks down fat), which impairs fat metabolism and the ability to properly absorb fat soluble vitamins A and D. (The dairy industry is aware of the diminished vitamin D content in commercial milk, so they fortify it with a form of this vitamin.”)

So, how does it taste? ...

A friend of mind just called to tell me that she happily, but unexpectedly, just found out she’s nearly three months pregnant. She wanted advice on how to get organic immediately because even if she hasn’t been all that organic up until now, she’d prefer to hedge the bets of her unborn child. In this column we talk about lots of specific organic parenting ideas, but I told her that the following eight things will cover the big picture and if she does them she’ll be able to catch up quick.

1. Food

Start eating whole foods (as close to how it came out of the earth as possible), paying attention to which items are more and less toxic. Meat is high on the food chain and therefore more toxic; vegetables are lower. For information on joining a community supported farm check out Local Harvest. Avoid packaged foods and try to eat a varied diet that includes plenty of protein, calcium, whole grains and folic acid. (Take a daily vitamin with folic acid as well to be sure you’re meeting the requirement.)

2. Water

Test the tap water at home for contaminants and deal with it – a Brita-style carbon carafe pitcher will take care of most issues. Stop drinking bottled water and carry your beverages in something safer like glass or stainless steel – there are great water bottles at SIGGand Klean Kanteen – to avoid chemical-leaching plastic, as well as help save some earth.

3. Air

You can’t always control what you’re breathing – the carpet at the bank or toxic bathroom cleaners at work – but wherever possible (in the car, at work, at home) open the windows and keep your environment as well-ventilated as possible. ...

 

I’m not a morning person. Never have been. My daughter is a terrible/odd sleeper but the upshot to her late nights is that she wakes up late (for a kid), too. If I had to do morning duty, her schedule makes it possible even for me. But I’m actually not "on" in the mornings as I tend to do most of my writing late at night or in the morning before her father goes to work. All of this preamble is getting to a story, I swear. I happened to wake up with her one morning over the long weekend so her father could have a much deserved sleep-in. I do like the opportunity to be in charge of her breakfast and we have fun things we make together just-us-two on these rare mornings. We especially like to make buckwheat pancakes that I load with all sorts of goodies (flaxseed oil, wheat germ, organic eggs, blueberries etc.) and make them even more special by dotting the resulting misshapen things with (the most miniscule amount of) maple syrup that comes from someone near our CSA farm.

Lately, the kid wakes up most mornings requesting yogurt before she even says good morning. This is what she asked me for. She has always been on the tiny side – weight and otherwise – for her age so long ago when we were a bit concerned about this, we gave her packaged baby yogurt. I went back and forth on the decision to do this for a while – I’m not someone who willingly gives the kid sugar and baby yogurts are oddly loaded with the stuff. But she wasn’t eating plain whole fat yogurt, even with organic fruit preserves stirred into it, so I gave in. I wanted her to have the extra calories and fat. Sadly these things are a bit addictive and we’ve never been able to wean her off of them. So I’ve accepted them in our life, especially as I'm not doing breakfast and don't have to witness her devouring them daily. I'm rarely an out-of-sight-out-of-mind mom, so this is a big concession. 

So, on this morning, I gave her her yogurt, which she ate in 3 seconds flat. Then she requested another one. I declined, distracted her with some fresh-from-the-farmers-market (unsprayed!) strawberries and went into the kitchen to start the pancake process. I rinsed out the yogurt cup and absent-mindedly looked at the bottom of it before tossing it into the recycling bin.

To my shock and horror there was a number 6 on the bottom of it!!!!!!!!!! Aaaaaaack! 

For those of you who don’t follow plastic numbers, 6 is polystyrene. Styrene is a possible endocrine distrupter/carcinogen. (For information about what each of those recycling code numbers means, see this decoder from The Daily Green.) It’s a plastic we tell readers to avoid entirely in The Complete Organic Pregnancy. It’s something I go out of my way to avoid. I had never looked at the bottom of the babe’s yogurt cups because it never occurred to me that Stonyfield, the environmentally-concerned company that makes her organic baby yogurt, a company so concerned with recycling that they give their old cups to another company to turn into toothbrushes, razors and the like (Recycline.com), would ever in a zillion years use plastic No. 6. Needless to say I was seriously pissed off.  ...

Of course I happened to make this snack on the first truly gorgeous day of spring and we were late to the playground where our friends were waiting for us to romp. I needed to take this snack with me, and I needed to do it quickly. This is the part in the story where almost every other mom in America reaches for their trusty kazillion quart Ziploc bag, stuffs it, and heads easily out the door. As much as I envy these ladies their Ziploc (so simple! so large! so easy!), it should come as no surprise to you, my dear readers, that I have almost no plastic bags in my house. ...

I think bad habits often begin as a way to avoid misery, so as relieved as I was to see her brighten up, I sensed a looming battle with pasta. There’s nothing wrong with pasta, but it’s refined and processed and not packed with nutrition. I investigated what’s out there in organic and whole wheat, and found there a number of alternatives that stick to her gut the way she clearly craves.

They include ...

Every so often my husband and I play this game where we choose which of two foods we’d rather live without – ice cream or potatoes, bread or butter, onions or carrots, etc. The most recent debate was melted cheese or lettuce, and at a friend’s kind of boring dinner party over the holidays he put it to the group. Not exactly the Algonquin round table, but it filled a silence and even prompted one guy who hadn’t said a word all night to tell us: "Every meal I eat has melted cheese in it."

But I noticed something interesting about everyone else’s response and that was that they were divided almost entirely according to gender – the men would give up lettuce, the women cheese. ...

We’ve been getting some thought-provoking e-mails lately. Sometimes we pick the questions to turn them into posts, and sometimes we just write back and forth with our readers. I recently got the following e-mail about traveling with kids while still trying to maintain an organic diet. I immediately responded. When I got an e-mail back, I felt this was definitely a topic to open up to a broader audience. ...

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Studies in Britain justify the extra pennies spent for organic milk.