Death By Supermarket (13 page)

Although breast milk is real, living food for babies, today only about 60 percent of American mothers breastfeed their babies, and most stop breastfeeding by the time their babies are two months old. Breastfeeding, however, is a crucial step in your baby’s ability to achieve his or her genetic gifts, and it is also the most important preventative measure for breast cancer for both mother and baby. Studies show that a woman’s risk of breast cancer decreases by 7 percent for every birth she experiences, another 3 percent for each year under twenty-eight years old she is when that child is born, another 4.3 percent for every twelve months of her life that she breastfeeds, and yet another 23 percent if she was breastfed by her mother.
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(Note that breast cancer is rising today in men.)

Other benefits of breastfeeding range from boosting your infant’s immune system to boosting his or her IQ. No matter how much the baby formula companies try to paint a benevolent picture of vibrant health, they just do not have the goods.
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Mother’s first milk contains protein and mineral-rich colostrum that is vital for your baby’s immune system. From then on, breast milk delivers good bacteria, immunoglobulins (a type of antibody), digestive enzymes, growth factors, hormones, and nonessential
fatty acids—about 100 elements that are not contained in baby bottle formula—nutrients that are vital for the full development of your baby’s brain.
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The composition of breast milk changes over time. The ratio of nutrients on day one is very different from what it is eight to twelve months later. Baby bottle formula ratios are stagnant.

Chapter 2
reviewed the importance of developing a healthy brain, and brain development explodes in the first three months of life. This explosion is dependant on nutrition. Breast milk contains brain-healthy essential fatty acids (EFAs), which are crucial for neurotransmitter production and brain and nervous system development. Soy formulas either do not contain any EFAs or only trace amounts.
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Breast milk also contains cholesterol, imperative for a baby’s growing brain and nervous system. Soy formula contains no cholesterol. According to Dr. Enig, “Infants who don’t get enough cholesterol in their diets during the first years when their brains are developing risk a loss of cognitive function.
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Breast milk also contains lactose, which is used for, among other things, brain development. “In reality, very few infants are lactose intolerant,” Dr. Daniel writes, “although many are allergic to the processed proteins and other ingredients in milk-based formula.”
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In breast milk the balance of lactose and fats creates a healthy, happy baby with balanced brain neurotransmitters.

Soy formula, which incidentally is not “milk” but rather heat- and chemical-processed juice from a legume, possesses a number of problems: Soy formula is not as digestible as breast milk and may cause loose stools and gas. Soy estrogens from soy formula have been linked to rising rates of ADD/ADHD and learning disabilities. Soy formula contains high amounts of manganese, which can cause brain damage resulting in learning disorders, ADD/ADHD, and even violent behavior.
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It may also contribute to the development of cancer
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and thyroid damage.
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As soy formula delivers to your baby the equivalent amount of estrogen of three to five birth control pills each day, it may contribute to precocious puberty in girls and delayed puberty or feminization in boys; and soy formula may contribute to the development of type 1 diabetes.
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A January 2006 study demonstrated that the isoflavone genistein can disrupt the development of the ovaries of newborn female mice, causing reproductive problems and infertility.
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Soy formula contains a natural protein called phytic acid that blocks the absorption of calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, and zinc. These minerals are important for brain health. Depletion of magnesium and calcium is associated with neurological malfunctions such as depression, anger, and learning disabilities, to name a few problems.

While American parents may find it confidence-inspiring to hear assurances from the soy industry that Asian babies have been raised on soy milk for centuries, as it turns out, this claim is false. Soy milk is a very recent aberration in Asia that was first promoted by well-meaning Seventh Day Adventist missionaries and subsequently by American soy industries attempting to infiltrate new markets. If you think questioning the potential health hazards of soy formula as nothing more than Internet paranoia, you have to ask yourself whether any scientists are ringing alarm bells about the health risks of breast milk? If not, then you have to ask yourself, is breast milk the very best food for my baby?

Real, living food for babies is breast milk. If you can’t breastfeed, you can find recipes for healthy infant formula in Sally Fallon’s cookbook,
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
.

Vegetarian or vegan women often rely on soy foods as an alternative to animal proteins during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and so finding out that soy is not a good alternative might be deflating. The logical next option would be rice and beans, which together form a complete protein. A complete protein contains an adequate proportion of all of the twenty essential amino acids. Although rice and beans together do make a complete protein, one cup of brown rice contains 5 grams of protein but also 46 grams of carbohydrate, and one cup of kidney beans contains 15 grams of protein but also 40 grams of carbohydrate. So eating two cups of the rice-and-bean combo provides a mere 20 grams of protein but packs 86 grams of carbohydrate. Unless you are an extreme athlete like some of the vegan
Ashtanga yogis I know or engage in comparable vigorous activity every day, 86 grams of carbohydrate is too much sugar entering the system at one meal. Equally important, rice and beans do not contain cholesterol, B
₁₂
, or ideal ratios of essential fatty acids.

Women who eat a vegetarian or vegan diet may want to consider making concessions during pregnancy and breastfeeding for the sake of their baby’s optimal health and brain development. Drinking vitamin-, mineral-, enzyme-, and protein-rich natural, raw milk and eating organically produced eggs and cod liver oil as well as small fish such as herring, sardines, and anchovies for complete amino acids, cholesterol, and essential fatty acids will guarantee that your baby’s brain is getting the nutrients it needs for proper formation and development. (Small fish feed on even smaller fish and so have not consumed as much mercury as, say, tuna or salmon.) As a baby’s brain explodes in development in the first three months of life, I can’t really see any alternatives to giving your body—and thus your baby’s body—these essentially fatty acids for brain development.

There are many FDA scientists who don’t believe that soy is healthy and who were against the FDA allowing factory-food producers to use soyhealthy claims on their packaging. In fact, in January 2006 the American Heart Association, after concluding a review of a decade of studies, announced that there was no evidence that soy affords us any of the purported miraculous health benefits, essentially debunking the FDA-approved cholesterol-lowering claim. From 1939 to 2010 there have been numerous unbiased studies demonstrating the deleterious health effects of soy.
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The fact that soy, soy, soy has permeated our factory-food chain should be enough to give anyone pause. We are no longer talking about thousands of factory-food products that scream SOY! on their labels. We’re talking about virtually every factory food on the market today. Today it’s nearly impossible to find a loaf of supermarket bread, a can of tuna, or any other supermarket product that doesn’t contain a refined soy ingredient. Is it just me, or is the wholesale takeover of livestock feed, the infant formula
market, and the factory-food supply not just a little bodysnatcherish? Over the past fifty years, Americans have been force-fed factory foods made out of bizarrely refined substances, and now the medical establishment mentality of isolating active ingredients from their whole plant form has resulted in our factory-food supply becoming permeated with bizarrely refined additives.

I’ve devoted a lot of space to soy because it’s important for us to understand how virtually any substance can be slipped under our noses beneath the banner of “healthy” while we are busy living our lives. Industrially processed soy is not the first unhealthy substance to be foisted on Americans, and with billions invested in food technology it definitely will not be the last.

Consider that there are three types of phytoestrogens: isoflavones found in soy, coumestans found in clover and alfalfa sprouts, and lignans mainly found in flaxseeds. Flax contains the lignan phytoestrogens that, like isoflavone phytoestrogens, can dampen thyroid function. In addition, flax is highly prone to rancidity (caused by oxygen, light, and heat), which creates free radicals. Putting flax in products that are cooked or otherwise heated and that sit on the shelf is counterproductive to health. But if corporations get a news flash that Americans want flax—or anything else—they will begin to hammer us with every imaginable form of flax food product. Right now we already see things like flax milk, flax cheese, flax margarine, flax shortening, flax salad dressing, flax power bars, flax cereal, flax crackers, flax baked goods, and flax dog and cat kibble. If it were cheap enough, fast-food restaurants would undoubtably be frying French fries in flaxseed oil.

Going back in time to the inception of the food industry provides an understanding of the logical progression of the development of the factory-food, diet, and drug industries, and how Americans fell under their spell. It began early in the twentieth century when doctors, researchers, and our government recognized that we had an epidemic rise in heart disease.

PART FIVE
The Fat Fiasco

THE LARD CRISIS HIT
Britain hard in the Christmas season of 2004. The supply of pork fat, traditionally used to bake the flakiest of holiday piecrusts, had run low due to a snafu with European Union production regulations. Prices for lard climbed 20 percent, and eBay bids were up to $18 per container. British Lard Marketing Board founder Tim Allen was quoted in
Newsweek
, “If you launched [lard] as a product now, no one would touch it because it’s not healthy.”
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Such is the enduring sentiment of most of the developed world: Fat kills.

This belief began fifty years ago with the wholesale embrace of the so-called lipid hypothesis by the medical community: the belief that elevated blood cholesterol levels are a risk factor for heart disease and that blood cholesterol levels are elevated by eating cholesterol-laden foods and saturated fat. The lipid hypothesis vilified historically consumed saturated fats, promoted the consumption of processed polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and instigated the low fat diet. These three factors worked in concert to prime the marketplace to be receptive to the introduction of thousands of factory products into our food supply that dramatically increased the incidence of disease and obesity in our country.

Meanwhile, the French never stopped gorging on butter, cheese, and cream, which led researchers to coin the term “the French paradox.” To researchers, it’s a mystery why the French can consume so much dietary fat and be so thin and have lower heart-disease rates. The only solution they could come up with is that it must be all the red wine that the French drink.

But today not all Americans shudder at the thought of lard (pork fat, which is made up of 50 percent monounsaturated fat, 40 percent saturated fat, and 10 percent polyunsaturated fat). A growing faction of renegade researchers, clinical nutritionists, M.D.s, and naturopathic physicians would return Americans to the same diet—rich in organic saturated fats and cholesterol-laden foods—that we ate prior to the year 1900, when heart disease was virtually nonexistent in the U.S. Many of these rebels are followers of the obscure research of a little-known dentist named Weston A. Price.

Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1870, Price earned a degree in dentistry and immigrated to the United States in 1893, settling in Cleveland, Ohio. In his practice, he was continually taken aback by the crowded, crooked, rotten teeth of the children of the relatively well to do. Concluding that nutrition was most likely the problem, Price and his intrepidly sturdy wife, Florence, set out in 1931 on a difficult expedition to study the effects of nutrition on human health and disease by examining the indigenous diets of fourteen savage groups of people: Swiss alpine villagers, Gaelics in Scotland, Eskimos in Alaska, North American Indians, Peruvian Indians, the Melanesians and Polynesians in the South Pacific, African tribes, Australian aborigines, and the Malay tribe and the Maori of New Zealand. Whenever possible, Price also studied members of the primitive tribes who had been in contact with modernized white races.
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The results of his ten-year study were published in his meticulously documented tome (with photographs, thank goodness) entitled
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
(1939).