Friday, February 25, 2011

and now for the Baby Gaga...

On a recent Lifestyle program I watched a renowned Sydney pâtissier create his signature macarons with a hamburger flavour. Not my cup of tea since I certainly don’t associate my macaron treats with meat, but then there’s no accounting for some folks’ tastes. These days in the world of celebrity chefs, the weirder the better as anyone who has followed the rise and rise of Ferran Adria’s Barcelona restaurant elBulli or Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in the UK will attest.

But if Blumenthal set new standards in a country formerly undistinguished in the culinary stakes I reckon the latest from the Icrecreamists restaurant in London’s Covent Garden, would take the cake (pardon the pun)!

Their new pièce de résistance is breast milk ice cream! At a whopping £14 ($22) a serving, consumers are being encouraged to think of the “Baby Gaga” as an organic, free-range treat! Donated breast milk, Madagascan vanilla pods and lemon zest go into the churn for this little number! 

If the breast milk doesn’t go through the pasteurization process, said ice-cream might even deliver some health benefits as well as being a certified taste sensation.  Those benefits, now available to a curious public are something that the screened, pasteurized, frozen and stored breastmilk, destined for very premie babies and the subject of my last blog, would be unlikely to deliver!


Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Melbourne has a breastmilk bank!

So now Melbourne has a milk bank! The powers-that-be have recognised that there’s nothing better than mother’s milk for premie babies (or for that matter, for babies of any age!). While I’m all for sharing Nature’s bounty and Mums who are in good health and successfully breastfeeding their own offspring will have no issues donating to this important and long-overdue resource, but there are questions I can’t help but ask? 

Where is the milk from the mothers of these tiny babies (only those premies under 32 weeks gestation and weighing less than 1500g will qualify for access to stored milk)? After all, the milk from a Mum who has given birth prematurely differs in composition from the breastmilk of a woman who has given birth at term! Surprise, surprise that milk is ideally suited to her premie baby! Why aren’t those women the primary donors of milk for their own babies? 

And why oh why do we have to undo any benefits with our obsession with sterility and high tech treatments. “Mothers of babies under the age of six months will be able to donate surplus milk, which will be screened, pasteurised and stored for up to three months before being thawed for its recipients.” Anyone wonder how the human race survived wet-nursing and Mums in extended families offering a breast to somebody else’s Bub? What vitamins, co-factors, enzymes, antibodies and hormones are destroyed in the screening, pasteurizing, freezing and storing processes? It’s exactly the same damage that the dairy industry inflicts on raw milk when they convert it to the poor substitute that masquerades in cardboard cartons under the name of milk. 

Next thing we’ll have some mis-guided study telling us that the premies getting human milk from the milk bank do no better than the bottle fed infants. 

Monday, February 21, 2011

Can those insect sprays!


For more than thirty years ago, Foresight has been warning about the dangers of exposing prospective parents and pregnant and breastfeeding women to the chemical cocktail that comes from the vast range of commonly available household and personal care products. Supermarket shelves are lined with the offenders and kitchen, bathroom and laundry cupboards are filled with them. They’ve become so much a part of modern life that educating consumers about simpler alternatives which are less potentially toxic to eggs, sperm, foetus and infants is an uphill battle. But Dr. Joan Spyker, an eminent toxicologist says it simply ... “Nearly every chemical to which the pregnant woman is exposed, will ultimately reach the foetus.” It’s a simple equation, the developing embryo and foetus lack   the mature detoxification mechanisms that deal with toxic chemicals. I’d add that every chemical to which the prospective parent is exposed has the potential to damage the germ cells.

Now, Paediatrics reports that commonly used insect sprays for home use, even the ones that purportedly are ‘safer’ can affect the development and learning abilities of young children. In utero or early infancy exposure through regular use of domestic insect sprays has been linked to delayed mental development at age of three. 

I simply ask ‘where have the researchers been all this time?’ and ‘where is the legislation that requires these products to be listed as dangerous until proven safe rather than the reverse!’

Thursday, February 17, 2011

The rise and rise of super bugs ...


So now we’re threatened with near-extinction and a return to pre life-saving chemotherapy and organ transplants. How’s that then? The rise of the super-resistant microorganism that resists every antibiotic that modern medicine can throw at it!


Good grief, how will we ever manage? 


Well maybe, just maybe, we might see the sense in making sure our immune systems are able to respond to bacterial assault without the help of antibiotics. What would that look like? Well let’s try preconception care for both prospective parents, a stress-free and optimally nourished pregnancy, birth away from the hospital environment, prolonged breast feeding and then a childhood and lifetime diet of healthy food grown on healthy soil together with a reduced load of environmental and lifestyle toxins.  Oh and robust nutritional supplementation! Works a treat, have had 63 antibiotic-free years myself, my kids have had 20 and 25 respectively. Given our track record we might even reach a ripe old age without needing life-saving chemotherapy or an organ transplant!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Mum was right - vegies are good for kids!



Would you believe it? Doctors have now shown that kids who eat a healthy diet with lots of fruit and vegetables have higher IQ levels. Kids who eat lots of processed and sugar-laden foods do much more poorly in the intelligence stakes. And the earlier that kids (and they studied 14,000) start on a healthy diet the better, with more pronounced effects during the first three years! Talk about reinventing the wheel! Weston Price’s seminal work “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” published back in the 1930s demonstrated this pretty clearly, but logic should tell us that what Nature put on the earth for our sustenance would surpass the man-made junk that today masquerades as food. Of course I’d take that early start on healthy food back a couple of notches to include preconception for both parents and for Mum during her pregnancy! Not only guaranteed to deliver healthier eggs and sperm and foetus, but best way to ensure kids will eat those living greens, yellows, reds, oranges and purples without complaint! 

Sunday, February 6, 2011

and the vaccine debate rages on...

Another book and vilification of anyone crazy enough to question the orthodox vaccination dogma...BUT Dr Julie Leask, a senior research fellow and manager of social research at the University of Sydney's National Centre for Immunisation Research & Surveillance emerges as a moderate voice in the over-heated vaccination debate. ''We know the vaccine issue is grey. It's not a simple case of vaccines are perfect,'' Leask said and continues...''again and again we hear parents say, 'I want balanced information.’”


Indeed - parents must be able to make up their own minds rather than feel bludgeoned by health, education or other officials. Those who decide, as my mother did (a brave woman almost sixty years ago when polio was still around), as I did, as many others are doing, not to vaccinate, then that should be our choice and harassment, guilt, fear, ostracism and blame should never enter the equation. This decision should be ours to make, just as we have the right to opt for any other orthodox medical procedure or not!

Life is uncertain, but I and many like me prefer to put trust in our own health promotion efforts. And I reckon I’m doing better than anything vaccination (or orthodox medicine) can offer! As a kid I had chicken pox, mumps, measles and whooping cough! But at 63 I’ve never had a serious illness, never been in hospital (not even for babies), couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a doctor. My boys, now 20 and 25, in their combined 45 years on this planet, have together seen a GP just six times (the average number of visits for a newborn in his first YEAR of life). Because of the work I do, I hear similar positive stories from healthy, un-vaccinated families! So what does responsibility for a competent immune system look like? Best place to start is with both parents before conception, but those benefits will last a lifetime! If you’re looking for true preventive healthcare - here it is! 

Friday, February 4, 2011

Popeye the sailor man ...


eats all his spinach ... and lives to fight another day. He scoffs a canful of the green stuff, his muscles bulge and he’s off and running. Yeah, yeah, I know, he’s a cartoon character, but poetic license notwithstanding, I bet you’ve heard spinach touted as a super food - thanks to its high IRON content? You have? We all have! 


But guess what ... it ain’t the iron that fortifies old Popeye. It’s the nitrates! Bacteria in the mouth convert the nitrates to nitric oxide and voila! Nitric oxide is a molecule which opens up blood vessels, lowers blood pressure and improves circulation. New research shows that nitrates make mitochondria less "leaky". This has the effect of increasing their efficiency as biological machines. So says Prof Eddie Weitzberg from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. His findings are published today in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Only one catch - you need those healthy bacteria! So get the whole package, Progurt is the only Probiotic with the multiple human strains that will populate your gut from the mouth to the other end.