Rational Nursery: I Go Through The Babies'R'Us Must Haves Item By Item, part 2

As a rational person, you have no intention of turning out a future moron so it's important (and fun and fascinating) to spend a little time questioning why our nurseries are the way they are and whether or not they should be that way.

I am going to start with the "nursery must haves" listed by Babies'R'Us:

CRIBS

Unsafe! Approximately 50 infants each year are killed and another 9,000 are injured in crib-related accidents in the U.S. alone. Why do we use this piece of furniture?!

Once upon a time cribs served the purpose of keeping babies off the cold, damp, dirty ground... but the floors of our bedrooms are no longer cold, damp or dirty. Once upon a time cribs also served the purpose of keeping babies confined to a baby-proof area so their parents could work. Houses were much smaller then and a few square feet was all parents could offer their baby. Cribs were the size they are for practical reasons. Parents didn't sit down and decide that it was ideal to confine their baby to a tiny box.

Today, parents still need a safe place to keep their babies while they get work done, but they have a lot more space to offer. Many babies even have their own rooms! Yet parents continue to confine their babies to a tiny cage. Why is this? Babies don't need to be so tightly confined and it is actually detrimental to their development.

For the first few months, your baby won't be able to move from wherever you place him. There is no need to confine him. No wild animal will get him. You can place him on your bed, on a bathmat, on the living room carpet, on a towel on the kitchen floor--he can't go anywhere. All he can do is look around and putting him in a crib will inhibit that. 

For the next few months, until your baby is more than half a year old, he will spend his entire day just trying to move a foot or two. At that point the crib will be a frustrating, restrictive prison, preventing him from moving to the fullest extent of his ability. 

As soon as your baby can crawl and stand, the crib will be a dangerous place where your baby can trap his arms in an effort to get free or flip himself out and become one of the statistics mentioned above. At what point is a crib a good idea in this day and age?

As someone who is constantly expanding my vision of what is possible, I immediately rejected people's comments that "it just wouldn't be a nursery without a crib."  I refused to continue an irrational practice, especially a practice that inhibits freedom, so that I could fit in with an irrational society churning out adults who behave like children and think like slaves. I looked for a better way to keep my baby safe and simultaneously provide him with more freedom in which to move, learn and explore.

I found a brilliant solution written about by Maria Montessori. A hundred years ago, she started advising parents to put a mattress on the floor, childproof the baby's entire room and put a gate at the door. She advocated an entirely new kind of nursery--a child-centric one. Instead of having a few feet in which to be safe, the child can have an entire room. Instead of finding things to do in a tiny pen for a little while, he could find things to do in a large pen for a long while. Babies with longer attention spans are happier--and so are their parents. Montessori had a lot more ideas about nurseries, and we will get to those ideas soon, but for now on the subject of cribs--

A note on my personal experience of not having a crib: I LOVE IT; I love the simplicity of not having bumpers and crib sheets (such a nightmare to change); I love how much my son loves just laying there and looking around his room--he has such a great view from the floor and with nothing obstructing his view, he can see everything; I love that he has no bars to break his arms and would have to scoot across his entire room to cram his head into something, and even then it wouldn't be dangerous; I love that I don't have to "transition" him to a "big boy" bed in a few years since he will always have been in one; I love it because my favorite way to nurse is laying down and my baby's twin mattress is the perfect size for us to cuddle up and nurse; I love it because I can fall asleep there with him if I want to; I love it because I can lay with him in bed and we can make "ahhhh" sounds at each other before he goes to sleep.

I wonder if I would have even discovered the joys of nursing while laying down if I had had a crib. People with cribs usually nurse in chairs and they are so uncomfortable there is a whole pillow/chair/stool industry out there trying to make it more comfortable. But why nurse in a chair, putting strain on your shoulders and arms, when you can lay down and rest?

I found laying down to nurse so much easier on my body and so pleasant. It was also convenient at the times when I missed the window and my baby was overtired and I wanted to nurse him to sleep. All I had to do once he was asleep was slip my nipple out of his mouth. I didn't have to move him or lay him down and risk him waking up. I also loved, as he got older and squirmy, just laying there with my breast out and making it his job to get his food. He would roll over and find my breast on his own, feeling so capable and proud. 

CRIB MATTRESSES

Toxic! All mattresses (and clothes and many other things) are soaked in formaldehyde. In Australia, mothers wrap the crib mattresses in plastic to prevent the babies from being exposed to those chemicals which they blame for SIDS. Whether or not baby mattresses are the cause of SIDS, your baby will spend around 2/3 of his life in bed. If there is one off-gassing poisonous menace to be super anal about--it's this one.

Companies will tell you that the formaldehyde prevents death by fire. This is inaccurate. In the best cases, formaldehyde-soaked homes take an extra five seconds to burst into flames. You will pay for that extra five seconds with cancer and other horrible health problems. Mattresses are really soaked in formaldehyde because it acts as a preservative and bug repellent during shipping and someone in government made it illegal for them not to be. Large doses of deadly chemicals for eighteen hours a day makes perfect sense if you are raising a future Epsilon but if you're reading this blog, I don't think that's your goal.

There are two types of chemical free mattresses that I found--organic futons and latex or wool ones that are naturally fire-retardent. The futons run around $400 and you need a doctor's PERMISSION to obtain one and even then they sprinkle something else (borax maybe?) on it. Natural wool or latex crib mattresses run around $800. Twin sized ones are over $1000.

What I decided to do: I bought a chemical and dye free oversized yoga mat from Gaiam.com with measurements almost identical to a twin mattress. It cost around $80. I love it because my baby can roll off his bed onto the floor and there is no 6 to 10" drop like there would have been with a mattress. I love that the mat is nice and firm like baby mattresses are supposed to be yet comfortable enough for me to sleep on. I love the way it smells--like woven grass (this might not be for everyone). I love that I can roll it up and take it with me on trips. When my son is potty-trained I will spring for that expensive wool or latex mattress, but for now I am very happy with my organic cotton mat.

BEDDING SETS (QUILT, FITTED CRIB SHEETS, DUST RUFFLE, BUMPERS)

Possibly toxic! Whatever you use to keep your baby warm at night, remember that most bedding has been soaked in toxic chemicals. Look for wool, organic cotton and silk. Many things from Europe and Japan are formaldehyde free as well.

What I decided to do: by opting out of the crib I opted out of all of these things. A bedding set at Babies'R'Us runs around $200. I bought two covers for my yoga mat for around $40 and use a twin sized quilt that will fit the twin sized bed my son will have when he is older. Since the quilt cannot tuck into anything and be tight or constrictive and since it is so large, it would be quite a feat for him to tangle himself in it (though I will continue to reassess this as he gets older and more mobile). Because blankets are such a safety concern I want to make a few more things clear: the quilt is made of 100% cotton so it breathes; I spend a great deal of time observing my son and he is a very still sleeper; I have also watched how he plays with his quilt when he is awake and it has never appeared dangerous and he has great control over it; if this ever changes I will immediately switch to a cotton or wool sleep sack; in the mean time, I will trust my common sense over the "expert" advice that usually encourages nothing but paranoia and spending money.

WATERPROOF MATTRESS PADS & SHEET SAVERS

Toxic! These are always made of toxic things and since they don't breathe well they can make your baby hot and sweaty while he sleeps--which means in addition to an unnecessary dose of chemicals, he might not sleep well.

My solution: I did not purchase this item.

WATERPROOF MULTI USE PADS OR PORTABLE CHANGING PADS

Toxic for the same reasons mentioned above.

My solution: I bought three plastic, portable changing pads that can be folded up and taken with me wherever I go. I place one under my baby's butt at night in case his diaper leaks in lieu of an entire sheet that would off-gas near his head.

CRIB MOBILES

Philosophical issue 1: "Active toys make passive babies. Passive toys make active babies," wrote Magda Gerber in Dear Parents: Caring for Infants With Respect. Most crib mobiles move and play music making your a baby passive viewer watching an active toy. This is great preparation for a life of being passively entertained if being a good little consumer-slave isn't the future you dream for your baby, perhaps this is not the best way to start out.

Philosophical issue 2: Is it disrespectful to put something right in someone's face before he has the power to look away if he wants to? If you hope to practice as little aggression as possible against your baby, this is a good place to start.

Philosophical issue 3: But don't you have to hang a mobile in your kid's face for educational reasons? This argument can only be made if your baby is stuck in a crib with nothing else to look at. If your baby has an entire room to look at... there is no need for a mobile in the first place.

Philosophical issue 4: Even pop culture baby-advisor Tracy Hogg, author of The Baby Whisperer, will tell you that one of the most common mistakes parents make is overstimulating their baby. Overstimulated babies are fussy, unhappy babies and unhappy babies make unhappy parents. Your baby's brain is such that the entire world looks amazing--like a crazy foreign country--all the time. Picture the overwhelming newness of a country that you have never been to (for me, I picture India). Colors, sights, smells, and sounds everywhere! There is plenty of The World for your baby to look at, he does not need an overstimulating toy.

A note on my personal experience: I did not buy a mobile. I bought a lovely palm plant that bends gracefully over my son's bed but does not hang in his face. The fronds move when the window is open and are still great things to stare at when the window is closed. Palms also improve the air quality of whatever room they are in. They are also part of the the natural world, the world I wish to expose my son to. As a newborn my son spent many hours staring at his palm tree. He also enjoyed staring at the post-it notes I made for him (with stripes and patterns) and posted to the wall near his bed. Thus, I gave him fascinating, passive things to look at that were not overstimulating and I always put them in places that gave him the choice to look at them or not.

To see the rest of the rational nursery picture, proceed to the next post!

Rational Nursery: The Outer World We Inhabit Creates Our Inner World (part 1)

The outer world you create for yourself is a reflection of your inner world.

If your home is a chaotic mess, your life and thinking are probably similar. If your home is an energy sapping vortex of unfinished projects and broken things... your life and thinking are probably similar.

An objective look at the space-you-call-yours will reveal how clear you are on your values and priorities, what you think you are doing with your life (time), what are you really doing and whether or not you are trying to do more than you possibly can. 

The outer world you inhabit also helps to create your inner world.

The way you set up your home influences your actions. For example, giant homes with tons of storage space will encourage you to buy more stuff, putting a television in every room will encourage more television watching, etc..

If you design your home consciously so that your very space encourages and requires the behaviors you want, your home will become an aide in the accomplishment of your goals. "An ordered home means an ordered mind," wrote Karen Kingston in Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. "Whatever your personal situation, it is important to get organized so that the mundane level of your life supports you."

This is even more true of the space you create for your baby. Shall his room be a place to do work or to be entertained--will it encourage him to do things or sit and watch? Will his room be sized for your convenience or his--will his space encourage dependence or independence?

Modern nurseries, whether intentionally or not, create dependence, short attention spans and passive, entertainment-focused people. Stuffed with cribs, chairs, bookshelves, massive changing stations and swings, the room isn't designed for a baby at all. It's designed for an adult to do things to a baby: get the baby up, change the baby's diaper, feed the baby, read to the baby, play games with the baby, etc. When Mom is tired of keeping the baby happy, she hands him over to a machine-mom: things that light up, make noises, rock, talk, have heart beats, etc. At no point is the baby deciding for himself what to do, entertaining himself or taking pleasure in using his mind. Since he is not permitted to do for himself what he is capable of doing, he never learns that he can. He only learns to be entertained.

The mom in this scenario has devoted herself to keeping her baby entertained and when she can't take it anymore and desperately wants her bundle of joy to leave her alone, she feels immense guilt. She thinks something is wrong with her rather than what she has been told parenting should be. Maybe she will conclude what most people conclude: that any job is more fun than the job of raising children. She will look forward to the day she can hand her kid over to a government school and escape the torture she doesn't want to admit she is experiencing. Perhaps she will start thinking that the government should provide "free daycare" (government-parenting) starting at the age of two....

Rational Nurseries, on the other hand, create an entirely different way of life.

Imagine an empty room. There is a window with sunlight streaming in and trees blowing in the wind outside. The room has a virgin wool carpet on which the baby can practice rolling and then scooting and crawling. In one corner, it has an organic cotton mat, only an inch thick, where the baby can sleep. The only toys in the room are things like handkerchiefs and wooden spoons, toys that are inactive until a baby brings them to life. There is a gate at the door--the room is a giant playpen. This is a room designed for a baby.

In this kind of room, when your baby is first born he will lay around staring out the window for long periods of time. He will also stare at the wall, anything you hang on the wall and the handkerchiefs that you have "stood up" within an arms reach of him. When he is tired, he will zone out at the ceiling.

After a few months and a lot of concentration, he will be able to reach for the handkerchief and eventually grab it. He will make that square piece of cloth fly through the air. He will touch it, feel it on his face, taste it and cuddle with it. "You will be amazed at how many different ways and for how long even a very young baby can manipulate such a scarf," said Magda Gerber in Dear Parent: Caring for Infants With Respect.

After a few more months your baby will spend his days working on turning over and then scooting and crawling. He will have ample space to do this work and plenty of baby-safe toys all around the room that he can get on his own.

Your baby doesn't need your help to learn how to reach and grab, scoot, crawl or walk. He doesn't need you to "motivate" him. He doesn't need toys that dance or sing to distract him from the work that he will want to do if left to his on devices. He will create his own goals and work to accomplish them--like that wall across the room that he absolutely must check out. Because you have never distracted him by moving him from here to there, from this toy that vibrates to this toy that sings, he will be comfortable in his own skin, in his own mind, with his own self. He will be quite the scientist! Whether manipulating a toy or staring at a shadow, he will be on the brink of a great discovery and you will respect him enough to not interrupt.  Alison Gopnik, who wrote the The Scientist in the Crib says to imagine you are an American traveling in India for the very first time--the sights, smells, sounds, everything you touch and taste--it's all new to you. You don't need any entertainment or "stimulation". The world is stimulating enough.

During all this time your baby is working, you will have hours to yourself. Because his room is so safe (the light sockets are covered, there are no cords to pull, nothing that can fall on him, no shelves or drawers to pull out, climb on and fall from, no pointy furniture to roll into and get stuck under, no toys with dangerous parts, nothing to choke on) your baby can be in this room alone. You will always want to be within hearing distance, of course, and when the two of you want to hang out you certainly can but otherwise he is in his room, a place that is totally safe for him to roam and explore, a room where he gets to do whatever he wants and there are no "no's".

Your Rational Nursery will help create the self-calmed, focused, self-entertained, independent baby that no one believes exists except by luck. You will be that mom whose baby is welcome at parties. People will comment, "I don't like babies... but yours makes me want one!"

You will have enough time to bathe, check your email, read, write angry blogs, etc. You will not be harried and exhausted all the time. You will not be sick of your baby. You will think parenting is fun.

And it all started with how you designed your nursery.

Develop your nursery philosophy:

Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui: Pregnancy is a great time to get rid of the old and make way for the new

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: will help you create systems that work and enable you to stay on top of your To Do list, even when you have a baby

The Child in the Family: Maria Montessori specialized in 3-6 year olds, so her ideas about babies are not perfect, but they are still brilliant, worth reading and some of the best ideas out there

Dear Parent: Caring for Infants with Respect: is the most important book about babies you will read

Raising Children is an Act of Philosophy

Most parenting books tell you how to get your kid to do this or that but never question why you should get your kid to do those things. Most parenting books focus on how you can raise a child who studies hard and obeys you. They teach you that to be a good parent, you must sacrifice your life to being a taxi and tutor for the never ending list of "musts" that will maximize your child's potential. You'll know it was all worth it when you get that second mortgage so your child can attend a top university where, hopefully, your brilliant (good at memorizing), athletic (ready to sacrifice his body for the team), well-mannered (obeys unquestioned social norms) child will become a doctor or a lawyer where he will use his talents to make and spend lots of money and be so busy, distracted and important that he never questions the current establishment.

If he ends up pursuing an intellectual life at a university, the chances that he encounters any rational thought are slim to none. Most of today's intellectual elite mirror the intellectual mystics written about in Atlas Shrugged--they mumble a lot of intelligent-sounding meaningless garbage that does wonders to keep the masses believing that they live in the land of the free and should just enjoy themselves and leave the thinking to the experts. To really horrify yourself, watch the famous intro to political science course taught at Harvard ("Justice with Michael Sandel" downloadable for free at iTunes University). A non-Libertarian who listens to the entire lecture series will leave with great confidence that his government is "doing the best it can" with the "very difficult and complicated problem" of "governing" large numbers of people. A Libertarian will think something more along the lines of, "Wow, finding a way to justify government is a pretty difficult and complicated problem." 

If you don't raise an achiever, if instead you give your child a "normal" childhood, by default he will be raised by the television and the public school system: from Sesame Street's socialist propaganda to the Disney Channel's idea of a good life as pizza and burgers, shopping and aspiring to remain as childlike as possible, your child will most likely turn into an Epsilon. Epsilons are the Most Desired Citizen Type. They describe themselves as fat and lazy--as if it were a good thing, as if being fat and lazy were cool and fun. Epsilons are the government's dream--they never think about why they do what they do or why they like what they like. The main thing they learn in school is that they don't know and their teacher does. They usually follow that up with some church where they get the same message: they don't  know and God/Moses/Jesus/Their Priest/Their Pastor/Their Rabbi/Santa Claus does. If they ever have the nerve to start a business or try to build on their own land, they would accept easily what they were taught all along--they never grew up; they have to get permission--after all, they don't know what's best for them, the government does.

The way a society raises its children serves to prepare those children for life in that society. What kind of life are your children being prepared for? What kind of life do you want to prepare them for? 

Consider this: a child who is raised with violence is more likely to be violent himself as an adult. It's easy to say, "Hitting children is wrong! Never hit your child!" but a child who is never hit will be at a disadvantage if the society in which he lives is one where physical violence is commonplace--a violent childhood would have served to desensitize him and prepare him for real life. Similarly, a child who is hit and believes a fist fight is an appropriate way to deal with conflict will be at a disadvantage were he to move to my house, also called Galt's Gulch, where nonaggression is taken very seriously. 

Or consider the current fad in our society of "attachment parenting" in which parents carry their child with them everywhere they go. ParentingWithPresence.net lists endless examples of baby-wearing that take place in third world countries today and in countries like our own in the past, "During the 19th Century in Europe, poor and uneducated people carried their children and were physically close with them, whereas the upper classes created a distance between adult and child, with the widespread view of not spoiling them." 

I would guess that the poor carried their children around not as a conscious effort to be closer to them but as a matter of necessity--there was work to be done and no one to look after the baby and living conditions were largely unsanitary and it was unsafe to put the baby down. 

But regardless of why they were carried or not carried, the rich and poor children of 19th Century Europe were raised in appropriate ways to prepare them for the life they would lead. The poor children never spent a moment alone--and they probably wouldn't spend much time alone during their entire lives so getting used to no personal space as "normal" from infancy was perfect. The upper class children, on the other hand, lived in homes with plenty of space, would likely have their own rooms for most of their adult lives and would spend plenty of time alone. Being introduced to that "normal" from infancy was also perfect.

Fast forward to our society today: baby-wearing is philosophically silly. It is not a necessity and it is normal for us (and wonderful) to spend time alone. The chances of our children having their own rooms in childhood is high and the chances of them having their own apartments as adults is also high. Babies who are not smotherd, who are given alone-time from day one, are very comfortable, happy and secure when alone.

What possible justification could there be--philosophically--for baby-wearing in America today? Do baby-wearing advocates think being alone sucks and want to raise kids who never leave them alone? Are they trying to change the culture? What kind of culture would be encouraged by babies (and then children and then adults) who consider togetherness normal and separateness something to be feared--perhaps a culture that values dependence over independence? Perhaps a culture in which someone's loving eye is always on you?

Most likely, baby-wearing advocates have never really thought about it. Neither have the parents who hit their children.

Parenting is an act of philosophy but very few parents are aware of the philosophy they practice, they don't sit down and analyze why they are raising their children the way they are or the kind of society those children will foster. Most will describe the experience of having children as exhausting, boring, hard, lonely, marriage killing, self-sacrificing and bank-breaking and they will never have time to reflect on what their goals are since they will be flying by the seat of their pants in permanent "emergency management" mode.

Hence the purpose of this blog:  I live in a society full of controls, manipulations and "norms" that are not philosophically sound, a society that breeds slave-thinking and slave-citizens. I intend to question everything I am told/encouraged by experts/legally required to do so that I can 1) raise my son in a rational (Libertarian) way with philosophical intention and 2) experience parenthood as meaningful and fun.

Good places to start developing your parenting philosophy:

Brave New World: Aldus Huxley, on his deathbed, said the fictional society written about in this book was exactly what the power elite were trying to create

The Romantic Manifesto: explains why we like the things we like and how everything we do shows our philosophy

The Three Martini Playdate: a fun book that asks an important question--shouldn't parenting be fun? Very wrong on most parenting issues though so I recommend stopping by a bookstore and just reading the first chapter or two.

Hilarious and Chewed Up, stand up comedy by Louis CK: funny with a dash of good philosophy

Home Birth vs Hospital: An Objectivist Is Horrified to Find Out the Hippies Were Right About Something

If you have your baby at home with a midwife, instead of in the hospital with an OB:

• you are twice as likely to survive giving birth
• your baby is three times more likely to survive his birth
• your baby is six times more likely to survive his first year

Therefore, the rational woman, seeking to maximize her and her baby's chances of survival, will choose to give birth at home. 

Hospital births cost around $10,000 ($20,000 if you have a c-section). Home births cost around $3000. Yet only .65% of American women choose to give birth at home. Despite their high price tag, most insurance companies only cover hospital births. Home birth is illegal in 23 states. Someone doesn't want you having your baby at home. 

In addition to the above, anyone who watches television has been programmed to think hospitals are the only place one should have her baby and only freaks and hippies have their babies elsewhere.

So maybe it's not so much that people who have their babies at home don't need the establishment. It's not so much that they think for themselves that is the problem, no, it's Machiavelli 101--it's the babies. The establishment wants to parent our babies; they want to establish whose babies they are. A hospital birth serves to recruit your baby into the medical industry. Toss in an intensive regime of pediatric visits throughout the first year and your baby has been indoctrinated from birth into a lifelong dependence on medical intervention. Seeing the doctor is normal. Trusting your body is not. Doing what you are told is normal. Thinking for yourself is not.

A personal note on how my research changed my pregnancy (and my life):

The above was not what I was expecting to find out when I began my research. If you had talked to me when I was twelve weeks along, I would have said that I was "going with a midwife for now" and that I was still looking into where I wanted to have my baby--as in, I wanted to tour at least three different hospitals in the Los Angeles area and pick my favorite. I was absolutely against giving birth at home.

Then I did my always-over-the-top research and told my husband that we should probably have the baby at home. "Only .65% of Americans have their babies at home," I said. "We're rational," he said, "If less than one percent of Americans agree with us, that sounds about right."

So how did it all work out? I went into labor at 2am on a Thursday. My baby was born 3 hours later. Unmedicated birth was fine. Doing it at home was WONDERFUL! After the baby was born I took a shower and got into bed with my newborn and my husband. The midwives cleaned everything up.

I didn't have to travel anywhere while I was in labor. I got to wear what I wanted (or didn't want). I didn't have to have an IV in my arm. I wasn't attached to any monitors. I moved when I wanted to where I wanted. I ate and drank what and when I wanted. I had one vaginal exam by someone I knew well. I had as much privacy as I wanted. I got to push in the position I wanted. There was no pressure, no timeline.

If you read the books I recommended in my previous posts, you already know that the key to having a quick, easy labor is feeling safe. My lower, primal brain felt very safe in the comfort of my own home. It's not just the drugs at the hospital that prolong labor--it's the strangers, the noises, the lights, the fact that no matter how much your higher brain insists this is a safe place, your lower brain instinctually knows it's not.

If you only read two of the books I have recommended, read Baby Catcher and How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor.

*Update on this post: A huge backlash has come out against homebirths since I wrote this post. Fascinating that before homebirths started gaining popularity, the mortality rates I could find showed homebirths to be safer. Those same reports that I read have disappeared. Now all I can find is (A LOT OF) zealous reports about how dangerous homebirth is. I imagine if homeschooling gets too popular the same thing will happen there too. We've got to get the population incensed so we can regulate birth and force those crazy homebirth women to have their babies how we say! Go government propaganda machine go!

Midwife vs Medical Establishment: An Objectivist Is Horrified to Find Out a Midwife Is the Rational Choice

As a rational person you have done your research and you know you want to give birth without drugs. You also know that women can give birth naturally with a doctor, it's just much less likely they will be successful at it. 30-50% of women who want to give birth naturally will fail if they choose a doctor for delivery compared to 5% of women who will fail with a midwife. If you are a rational woman, it's a very simple decision: the goal is to succeed at having an unmedicated birth and using a midwife maximizes your chances of success.

Due to the philosophical differences between how midwives and the medical establishment view pregnancy and labor, the choice to use a midwife will hugely impact, not just your birthing day, but your entire 40-week experience of being pregnant.

To summarize the philosophical differences:

• Midwives encourage women to stay in tune with their bodies and think for themselves throughout the entire pregnancy. Doctors encourage women to do as they are told.
• Midwives schedule 90 minutes for every prenatal appointment. Doctors schedule 15.
• Midwives believe birth is a normal physiological process. Doctors believe birth is unpredictable, unreliable and often unsafe.
• Midwives seeks to let the woman be in charge of her birth. Doctors seek to control the woman's birth.
• Midwives believe giving birth without medication is an emotionally empowering and transformative experience leading the woman to feel that she can conquer the world. Midwives believe medical intervention is undesirable. Doctors believe medical interventions improve labor

A personal note on how these philosophical differences played out in my pregnancy:

When I found out I was pregnant, my OBGYN recommended I go on progesterone to ensure that I didn't miscarry. There was no medical reason for her to make that recommendation. She recommend it purely based on my age--29. I told her that I was a very healthy person who hadn't even had a cold since 2004 and she told me that was irrelevant. I was 29 and I should not trust my body to make enough progesterone to keep the baby.

Of course my emotional brain acquiesced to her controlling mentality but my rational brain knew better: if the tiny bunch of cells in my uterus wasn't genetically healthy and my body wanted to get rid of it--why would I want to prevent that?

After a quick Google search I learned that taking progesterone came (of course) with side effects: bloating, breast tenderness, diarrhea, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, fluid retention, headache, heartburn, irritability, muscle pain, nausea, stomach pain, stomach cramping, tiredness, vomiting, bleeding or spotting, amenorrhea, edema, weigh changes, cervical erosion, cervical secretions, cholestatic jaundice, skin reactions including a rash or acne, mental depression, pyrexia, insomnia and somnolence.

I said "no" to the progesterone. My doctor, with the air of an all-knowing mystic, said she didn't approve but that I could take that risk if I wanted to.

Then she told me that I was not allowed to eat alcohol, caffeine, sushi, raw dairy or take hot baths. I had heard those things before so I asked what was on my mind:
"Don't pregnant Japanese women eat sushi?"
"Pastuerized dairy has only been popular for 80 years--doesn't that mean pregnant women have been consuming raw dairy for thousands of years?"
"How does a hot bath hurt my baby and not my internal organs? What about women who live in hot climates--are they hurting their babies every time they go outside?"

My doctor practically growled at me and repeated her recommendations with a dramatic flurry that included the phrase "hot baths will cook your baby". Then my fifteen minutes were up and the appointment was over.

It was time to check out the other route, the route only 5% of women choose. I went to a presentation called "meet the midwives" at The Birth Sanctuary, a birthing center in Los Angeles. The presentation was held in their "birthing suite", a large, elegantly-decorated apartment with a bathroom and full kitchen.

The midwives were sweet, emotional types and neither their personalities nor the way they tried to sell a midwife birth did anything for me. I hadn't chosen a natural birth for emotional reasons (though that video of the drugged newborn trying to nurse and failing does haunt me a little).

The business manager sold the idea of a midwife birth to me a little better. She was from New York; she thought fast, spoke fast and didn't sugar coat anything. She talked numbers; she said things like, "Only 5% of midwife assisted births require medical intervention, unlike 30-50% of OBGYN/hospital births." Unfortunately, she didn't deliver babies.

But whether or not the birthing center was a little too touchy-feely for my taste, I loved their philosophy on prenatal care: first prenatal appointments should be somewhere around twelve weeks--unless you are feeling anxious, then you could come in earlier. It was a different world from my OBGYN who had demanded to see me immediately, like it was an emergency, when I was only six weeks along. The midwives trusted me and my body to be pregnant for the entire first trimester without their input. Oh to be treated like I have a brain!

At my first prenatal at the birthing center (at twelve weeks), I asked the same questions I had asked my OBGYN. On raw dairy and sushi, I was told to use my common sense and not eat things that smelled or looked funky. Getting really bad food poisoning while pregnant could cause a miscarriage--but more food poisoning is caused from lettuce these days than raw dairy. If the milk and sushi I had been eating for the last thirty years hadn't given me food poisoning yet, there was no reason to assume it would give me food poisoning now. On hot baths, I was told to use my common sense and that if I felt dizzy or woozy, I should get out of the tub. If it felt good, however, it was probably helping me relax which would benefit me and my baby.

And what about an occasional glass of wine? The facts on the no-drinking rule are: a full-on alcoholic will only have a 4% chance of giving her baby fetal-alcohol syndrome if she eats healthily. An alcoholic who doesn't eat healthily will have an 80% chance of harming her fetus. It's not the alcohol that harms the baby but the nutritional deficiencies related to drinking too much that harm the baby. A healthy eater who has a glass or two of wine every day is unlikely to harm her baby. Women used to be encouraged (by doctors) to drink throughout pregnancy for relaxation and then get raging drunk for labor.

So why does the medical establishment give pregnant women so many rules? Because just like in elementary school, rules are made for the lowest common denominator. There are women who will eat some pretty funky stuff, stay in hot tubs until they pass out and not know that a handle of vodka every day is drinking too much. It's easier (and faster) to just give women a blanket list of "don'ts" than to explain to them what's going on and then trust them to use their common sense and self-control.

The one downside (or so I thought) to having a midwife instead of an OBGYN is that midwives don't usually offer ultrasounds. This made me sad as I longed to see my little fetus! Then I read Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born. Here is the paragraph that made me glad my midwives weren't into ultrasounds: "Frenchman Paul Langevin discovered that high intensity ultrasound could destroy schools of fish in the ocean, and when a person put a hand in a tank of water that had ultrasound waves running through it, they experienced pain, a discovery that led doctors to use the technology to destroy tissue, such as a brain tumor." That's high-intensity ultrasounds. On modern prenatal ultrasounds Susan McCutcheon says, "We do know that in the short term cells behave abnormally after just one diagnostic ultrasound exposure. The shape of cells so radiated changes temporarily and their movement becomes frenetic."

An ultrasound would make my little blueberry a frenetic glob of cells? I was happy to skip them. (I did get one, at 20-weeks, to find out the gender of my baby though, figuring since my little one was no longer a glob of cells it would be safer.)

I have to say that this was not a hard philosophical decision for me--did I think pregnancy was a natural process and I could trust my body and evolution to do it right or did I think pregnancy was a disaster waiting to happen? Did I want someone who would take my questions about baths and food seriously or someone who would bark rules at me? Did I want to maximize my chances of succeeding at natural birth?

I chose the midwife route.

Numbing Out vs Natural Birth: Where Objectivists and Hippies Can Find Common Ground

What you will hear from the pop culture herd: giving birth is a personal experience and the best path for you--natural or drugs--only you can determine.

If you don't subscribe to the cult of moral grayness that denies objective reality, there is only one choice and the thinking about it goes like this:
-Is it rational to not want to experience the pain of childbirth? Yes.
-Is it rational to sign up for an epidural unconsciously, without looking into the costs? No, unconsciousness is unacceptable.

Therefore, inform yourself by reading the following:

When you sign up for an epidural, you also sign up for an IV and a bag of fluids, a urinary catheter, a blood pressure cuff to tighten on your arm every 15 minutes or less and continuous fetal monitoring.

The forced fluids in the IV may cause your perineum to become engorged and not able to stretch so you will be at a higher risk for needing an episiotomy. The urinary catheters will put you at a higher risk of getting a UTI. The epidural itself will likely cause hypotention, a sudden drop in your blood pressure--hence the blood pressure cuff monitoring you. Your baby will also have to be monitored as a drop in your blood pressure decreases the amount of blood (and therefore oxygen) going to him/her which can lead to fetal distress.

Epidurals eliminate the normal hormone process of labor which will make your labor take three times longer than a natural birth. The epidural will slow down or stall your contractions. That is why most women who get an epidural will also require Pitocin. Common side effects of Pitocin include: nausea, vomiting, and much more painful contractions. Less common side effects include: rash, hives, itching, difficulty breathing, tightness in the chest, swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue, blood clotting problems, changes in heart rate, cardiac arrhythmia, pooling of blood in the pelvis, postpartum hemorrhage and a ruptured uterus. Side effects for your baby include: bleeding in the eye, irregular or slow heartbeat, seizures, jaundice and low Apgar scores. Less common side effects for your baby include: brain damage, neonatal retinal hemorrhage and death.

Epidurals make pushing more difficult and increase the likelihood of forceps or vacuum delivery by 20-75%. Common side effects for the mother of a forceps delivery include: cuts and heavy bleeding. Common side effects for the baby include: heavy bruising. Less common side effects for the mother include: permanent loss of urinary and bowel control. Less common side effects for the baby include: broken bones, brain damage and death. Vacuum assisted deliveries are less risky for the mother but have common side effects for the baby that include: abrasions on the scalp, cephalohematoma (a collection of blood under the fibrous covering of the skull bone), jaundice and eye hemorrhage. Less common side-effects for the baby include: retinal hemorrhage, subgaleal hematoma(a collection of blood just under the scalp, injuring the underlying veins), intracranial hemorrhage and brain damage.

Epidurals increase the risk of a C-section by 25-50%. Some common C-section risks for the mother include: infection, heavy blood loss, blood clots in the legs or lungs, nausea, vomiting, severe headache, bowel problems, a recovery that takes three times longer than a vaginal birth and complications in later pregnancies (uterine rupture and placenta problems that cause severe bleeding after birth which may require a hysterectomy). C-section risks for the baby include: injury during the delivery, need for special care in the neonatal intensive care unit and immature lungs and breathing problems if the due date has been miscalculated.

If you just get the epidural (and manage to give birth without Pitocin, forceps, a vacuum assisted delivery a or a C-section) common side effects include: feeling like you are not able to breathe, uncontrollable shivering, ringing in your ears, itching around your face, neck and throat, nausea and vomiting. Epidurals also double your risk of hemorrhage.

Less common side effects of epidurals include: allergic shock, convulsions, respiratory paralysis, loss of bladder control for months, severe headache caused by leakage of spinal fluid that lasts for weeks and requires bed rest and a blood patch, epidural fever (which will result in your baby being sent to the neonatal intensive care unit), permanent nerve damage, brain damage, cardiac arrest and death.

Common side effects for your baby when you get an epidural include: respiratory depression, fetal malpositioning and an increased risk of jaundice. Your baby will be born drowsy and will exhibit the same drug toxicity symptoms as a baby born to a woman taking cocaine and opium.

The epidural-experience doesn't end with birth. For hours afterward the lower half of your body will be numb. You won't be able to walk and you might not be allowed to hold your baby. Later you might get tingling, shaky and numb sensations in your legs, a severe backache, soreness where the needle was inserted and urinary or fecal incontinence. You will heal more slowly than a woman who had an unmedicated birth.

Because the epidural prevented your body from releasing labor hormones, you may have trouble bonding with your newborn. You will have an increased risk of breast milk production problems and you will be at a greater risk for postpartum depression.

Because the epidural prevented your body from releasing labor hormones, your baby may have trouble latching on (which can lead to breastfeeding difficulties). Your baby may also have trouble bonding with you.

For up to six weeks after birth, a baby that was drugged (because you aren't just drugging yourself) will exhibit neurbobehavioral effects such as irritability, inconsolability and decreased ability to track an object visually or to shut out noises and light i.e. epidurals will make you are much more likely to have a crabby, difficult newborn.

To conclude, getting an epidural carries many serious health risks to you and your baby. It prevents you from experiencing a couple hours of intense pain in exchange for extra weeks of recovery (i.e. pain...) and over a month of caring for a miserable infant.

95% of unmedicated births have no scary side-effects. Less women tear. Tears are less bad. Babies are born wide awake. The wide awake babies nurse right away. Moms get hormone rushes that make them fall in love with their babies and prevent postpartum depression and hemorrhage. The babies get the hormone rushes and fall in love with their moms. Moms get hormones that make their milk come in. Moms heal faster... the list goes on. The 5% of natural births that have complications end up as vacuum/forceps/C-section births with all the risks listed above.

The medical establishment makes a lot of noise about breech babies but breech babies can be born naturally and easily--this is not a complication. Neither is the cord around the baby's neck--the baby is getting his air through that cord and does not need to breathe through his mouth until that cord is cut. Big babies are not a complication either.

For your entire life you have watched women pretend to give birth on television--they scream and it's horrible and doctors have to save the baby and then the mother. This is nothing like reality. The reality is: your baby is three to four times more likely to die if you give birth with a doctor at a hospital than with a midwife at home. Birth isn't a medical emergency. It's a natural process. Your body was made to do this. Your body evolved to be successful at this--that is why your genes were passed on.

Moreover, it is not rational to compromise the health and well-being of your body or your baby to avoid some perfectly natural pain. The average unmedicated birth is around five hours. What is five hours over the course of a lifetime?

A personal note: when I started researching this I was desperately hoping to find evidence that would free me from facing an unmedicated birth. I thought, "I'm so healthy! A little drugs every now and then aren't so bad, right?" Instead, I found no way to escape the reality that the best thing for the health and well-being of my body, my baby and our relationship was to take the pain.

When I decided that I was going to give birth with no medication, I cried. I was so afraid of how much it would hurt. Then someone said to me: "Why be so afraid of something you have never experienced? You know the fear of pain is always worse than the pain."

They were right. I had a natural birth, no drugs whatsoever. It took three hours. There were no tears or other complications. It hurt, but it was a fascinating life experience that I wouldn't give up.

The side effects of my natural birth have been:
-A certain fearlessness that comes with knowing pain is just pain. It isn't that scary after all.
-Intense admiration in my husband's eyes when we tell people about the birth of our son.
-A baby that was born wide awake and healthy with a perfect Apgar score, a baby that settled into life easily and comfortably, a baby that was never poked, prodded, stuck with needles or taken away from me and his dad, a baby that never got jaundice, baby acne or cradle cap, a baby that doesn't spit up. My baby is now five months old and has yet to catch a cold. He is that healthy, happy, glowing, beautiful example of life-thriving that every mother dreams of having. Everywhere I go people comment on how healthy, conscious and beautiful he is when they see him. My reward for all the hard work I put into the choices I make is that everyone tells me how "lucky" I am. Only the very few know it's not luck.

To be more informed about what kind of birth you think is rational:

The Business of Being Born: why the medical establishment wants you to have a medicated birth.

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born: how the medical establishment took over birth. On a side note, the author totally neglects doing thorough research into current birth practices (like epidurals) but the rest of the book is awesome.

Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife: an enjoyable and enlightening read. This book taught me how to think about birth and was instrumental for me when I went into labor i.e. it's possible my labor was only three hours long because of what I learned from this book.

How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor: This book won't just help you keep your kids healthy, it will teach you how to keep yourself healthy.

http://www.homebirth.net.au/2008/06/homebirth-vs-hospital-statistics-to-die.html: See for yourself some mother and baby survival statistics when midwife births are compared to hospital births.

Sources I used in this post series (Trimester 1):
webmd.com
mayoclinic.com
drugs.com
natural-pregnancy-mentor.com
homebirth.net.au
Weighing the Pros and Cons of the Epidural by Penny Simkin

Prenatals: Why I Only Take Whole Food Vitamins + Cod Liver Oil

I am not a huge fan of supplements. I prefer to eat my vitamins in the form my body was designed to get them--from food. In addition, women have had healthy babies for thousands of years without prenatal vitamins.

When I read Twinkie Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats all of my suspicions were confirmed. Almost all vitamins are made in chemistry labs, they are usually by-products of something else--like corn or film-making. Vitamins were just as creepy as I had always thought they were.

Then I read The Hundred Year Lie and learned that I had been exactly right--we have no business trying to get our vitamins anywhere but from food: "Although we have been led to believe that ascorbic acid, a synthesized form of vitamin C, is really vitamin C, it is not. Alpha tocopherol is not vitamin E. Retinoic acid is not vitamin A. And so on through the other vitamins.... The truth is that vitamins are not individual compounds. Vitamins are biological complexes. In addition to ascorbic acid, real vitamin C must include bioflavonoids [the natural pigments in fruits and vegetables] like hesperiden, rutin, quercetin, tannins, along with other naturally occuribng compounds. Mineral cofactors must be available in proper amounts. If any of these parts are missing, there is no vitamin activity."

Fortunately, since I wanted to take a prenatal every other day (in case our soils are depleted and I can't get all my nutrients from food like my ancestors did) I found a type of vitamins I can agree with--whole food vitamins. "Supplement maker New Chapter, for example, takes isolated nutrients and cultures them in a medium (soy, for example) with probiotic organisms. The end result, says naturopathic physician Taryn Forrelli, the company's director of medical education, is the transformation of individual nutrients into 'the kind of complex compounds you'd find in food.' The idea, she says, is that those compounds are more easily recognized and absorbed by the body" (US News).

There are not very many whole food prenatal vitamins to choose from. I went with New Chapter's Perfect Prenatal as I found rave reviews of it many different chat rooms. They worked well for me--no aftertaste, not nausea, I could take them on an empty stomach. I was even more pleased with them when I was given samples of the synthetic pre-natals offered by Expecting Fitness and found that they made me sick.

Update: Six month after my son was born I read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price. This book, and especially the many pictures, makes an extremely convincing case that crooked teeth are not genetic but rather a nutrition deficiency that the mother suffered from while pregnant. Weston A Price noted that many native women (and sometimes me) were placed on special diets prior to marriage (and conception of a child). This diet included the most nutritionally dense foods around--eggs, fish eggs, organ meets and if available, high vitamin butter (the butter from cows grazing on the green grass of June).

My husband and I now take the Butter Oil Cod Liver Oil blend sold at RadiantLifeCatalog.com. Anyone thinking of having a baby should start taking this supplement one year before conception.

After Studying Nutrition for Seven Years: Why I Concluded that the Weston A Price Diet Is the Best One

Eat the way your body evolved to eat, foods made by nature, not man: this is only the beginning of true health.

The next step is: how did our ancestors eat those things? This is crucial because. for example: various peoples have eaten whole grains for thousands of years, even hunters and gatherers ate grains, but no one ever ate whole grains that had not been sprouted or fermented. None of our ancestors before 100 years ago ate grains the way we do now. None of our ancestors before 100 years ago ate dairy the way we do now, they usually drank their milk sour, fermented or as curds and whey. They also didn't have pesticides on their fruits and vegetables or industrially raised meats. They also ate the whole animal. We think we are so evolved because we don't eat livers, feet and eyeballs anymore but the truth is: these are some of the most nutritious and important foods in existence. They are better for you than vegetables. Yay.

Though our ancestors had shorter lives due to infectious diseases and the hardships of life, they did not suffer from the things that kill us now--degenerative diseases, heart disease, diabetes, allergies, our bodies just starting to suck, etc.

The most astounding book on this subject is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. It's 700 pages long but reading it is hardly necessary because of all the photographs. Just borrow it from the library and look at the pictures and the captions. Go here to see a few of them: http://www.westonaprice.org/nutrition-greats/weston-price

Weston A. Price was a dentist who thought that crooked teeth (and cleft palates) were not caused by genes. He thought they were nutrition deficiencies. He didn't think that the road to perfect health began with studying sick people and finding cures for their ailments. He thought the road to health began by finding the healthiest people in the world and noting what they did to be so healthy. He set out to answer the question: what health is possible for the human being?

He spent a decade (in the 1930's) traveling the world looking for the healthiest people. He judged this by their teeth, he was a dentist after all. He found tribes of native peoples living everywhere from the Andes to the Swiss Alps to tropical islands who had perfectly straight, white teeth and no cavities (or 1 cavity out of every 500-1000 teeth).  None of these people ever brushed their teeth.

He noted noted that when any natives started eating a Western diet (natives of a similar race to the one he had just studied but who lived closer to Western civilization and whose diet had changed accordingly), they would retain their straight teeth but get cavities. The children born to parents on this diet would have both crooked teeth and cavities. Crooked teeth were caused by a malformed dental arch due to the diet of the parents, not by genes as he shows in photograph after photograph.

Children with crooked teeth showed marked behavioral differences as well as other health problems like narrowed hips (making child rearing more difficult) and decreased fertility.

If you are like me and you love to read things yourself (as opposed to reading a blog about what someone else read and thought), read his book! It's fantastic. But it is not as important as the 700 page book written by Sally Fallon, the woman who runs the Weston A. Price foundation, Nourishing Traditions. This book has all the same information along with all the most current and up-to-date info and recipes!

The Weston A. Price diet is very impressive as they do a ton of research and are always expanding their knowledge. They also involve people in their research. I have received emails asking what I feed my baby and how his health is and if I would like to participate in a study that would require me to eat pork and get my blood tested four times a day. Unlike most studies that are funded by the people selling the product (studies on wine are usually funded by people who sell wine, studies on chocolate are funded by people who sell chocolate, and everything else is funded by Monsanto and Coca Cola), this group is purely people passionate about health who just want to know what they should be eating and how they should be eating it.

The WAPF the magazine publishes many letters from readers. Most are personal stories attesting to how the WAPF diet changed their lives. Here is mine:

I grew up on a farm eating all whole grains, organic fresh produce and home grown meats. My parents, siblings and myself rarely got sick though I did suffer from acne and insomnia.

In college, I took a course in nutrition. I learned that most health problems are caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies which left me wondering: could nutrition cure my acne and my insomnia?

I started keeping track of my vitamin and mineral intake. I recorded everything I ate for six months, making sure that I got 100% of everything every day. It was pretty high maintenance but it was also a homework assignment. I started inventing "nutritionally perfect meals", meals that provided 100% of the vitamins and minerals the government said I should be getting every day.

Unfortunately, the nutrition I learned at Wesleyan was from a USDA/FDA approved textbook, meaning it was a Monsanto/Coca Cola/McDonalds approved textbook. I learned things like: Aspartame only gives cancer to rats and MSG rarely hurts anyone, so though my meals were providing me with good nutrition according to my nutrition database, I was eating more processed food than I ever had in my life. I was eating very typical "healthy" American diet high in vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins like deli meat, nonfat dairy and since I was told that fruit was barely better for me than a candy bar, candy bars for treats. I also drank diet sodas.

This time period was the sickest I have been in my life. In fact, the only cold I have ever had was during this time. I remember it acutely as I finally understood those cold medicine commercials that I had never understood previously--runny nose, pounding head, etc.

I quickly returned to the diet on which I had been raised--a diet very similar to the WAPF diet--and though I continued to have B+/A- skin and terrible insomnia, I never got sick.

When I learned of Price's work my diet changed in the following ways: I eat something fermented with every meal, I consume most of my dairy raw and cultured, I drink a large quantity of homemade tonic-beers, similar to kombucha which I also drink but made with fermented ginger, and I eat liver and fish eggs. 

My skin is now glowing movie-star quality skin and my insomnia has disappeared. Other interesting changes include disappearance of sugar cravings which I use to have all the time. After about a month into the WAPF diet I was upset one day and thought, "Ah man, I really need a kombucha." I laughed. "Chocolate, I meant chocolate," I thought. Only the truth was... what I wanted to comfort me in that moment was kombucha. I used to enjoy a glass of wine at the end of the day but now I would rather have a home made ginger tonic. I have always had good energy but I have so much more now it's shocking. I am also happier.

My husband's story:

My husband grew up eating the standard unhealthy American diet. He got sick all the time before he met me and was often sick when we first began dating. We made a lot of jokes at that time about me being a "carrier". I worked with children and would carry those germs straight from the kids to him.

My husband changed his eating habits when we began living together (he started eating like I did) and has only gotten a cold--if you can call it that since it only lasted a day--once. But he continued to suffer from dandruff, eczema and hair loss. We cured his dandruff a year ago by experimenting with eliminating different foods (we found that he cannot tolerate any dairy, even raw, unless it has been cultured).

Since we began eating the WAPF diet he has ceased losing hair but he still has eczema. I will update this post if this changes because I bet that the eczema is on its way out and will just take a little longer. Or perhaps the fermented foods cured his hair loss but he will have to join me in eating liver and fish eggs to cure his eczema. It is also possible that he is just highly sensitive to the chlorine in our water.

On the taste of foods: if you study the science of taste, you will find that any food you can't stand, if you force yourself to eat it once a month for a year, you will come to like and even crave it. Taste is just habit. I don't like liver yet, but I plan to.

I feel it is important for me to note that in order to not drive myself insane, I follow the WAPF diet 80% of the time. The rest of the time I am a delightful dinner guest.

Health, Pregnancy, and My Results

Four reasons why rational, Libertarian couples will have incredible health (and if not, why they will spend at least a year getting healthy) before they conceive:

1. Because they know the healthier they are, the better genes they will pass on

"We can inherit harm," says Randall Fitzgerald, author of The Hundred Year Lie. "Toxic synthetic chemicals can negatively alter our DNA to program us and our descendants to experience illness and disease."

Not long ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who works in genetics at SFSU on this subject. What I learned is that we used to think DNA was something that didn't change but we are now finding that we might be able to alter what we pass on. I don't want to extrapolate too much but: what if you are more likely to have a child predisposed to health and happiness if you are healthy and happy before you conceive? What if your children will be more or less likely to get acne depending on whether or not you have cured yours before you conceive? What if you children will be more or less likely to get cancer depending on how healthy you are when you have them? 

2. Because they know the healthier mom is, the healthier the baby will be

-Exposure to toxic chemicals cause about 28 percent of all developmental defects. (National Research Council Commission on Life Sciences study, 2000).

-Women who are overweight but not obese have a 15% increased risk of delivering a baby with certain heart defects. The incidence of some defects is twice as high among children of obese mothers.

-A 50% increase in the level of persistent genetic abnormalities in newborns was detected in those whose mothers had high air pollution exposure. (Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention Reports, 2005.)

-The fastest-growing rate of cancer for any age group over the past two decades has been among children. (The Hundred Year Lie)

-Exact percentages change depending on the study you are reading but as an average--if one parent is overweight or obese there is a 66% chance the children will be. If both parents are overweight or obese there is a 90% chance the children will be.

3. Because they know the healthier habits they have, the healthier habits their offspring will have

I was raised on a farm. I didn't have sugar for the first time until I was seven. I didn't have fast food until grade school and couldn't eat it without throwing up until high school. Making healthy eating choices is effortless for me because those foods are normal. I never ate Doritos as a kid so when I see them at parties, it doesn't register in my brain that that is food. (And the truth is, they're not.) My parents never fed me fake food so when I taste it, it tastes like fake food to me. I find the chemically flavor of Kraft mac'n'cheese repulsive. My body doesn't know what it is and doesn't like it.... I am insanely grateful to my parents for this gift.

My husband is the opposite. There is a whole array of pretend food that he was raised on and loves--fast food, pizza and pudding snacks. He is a very rational man though, so when he started learning about nutrition, his desires instantly changed. He has no desire to poison his body with chemicals. But there is a huge difference between us--he still likes those foods. When he tastes them, they taste good to him. Whereas I naturally like and crave real food, he has to eat real food with his brain. He has to constantly override his habits.

4. Because they know the healthier mom is, the easier her pregnancy will be on her (and therefore on their marriage)

Pregnancy is different for everyone, but let me tell you a little about mine: I had a healthy pregnancy that resulted in a 9 pound 6 ounce baby boy born ten days early after a three hour labor with no tearing.

I took very good care of myself in the following ways:

-I cut down on my hours at work a month before my husband and I started trying.
-I further cut down my work hours to part time so that I could focus on taking the best care of myself that I could.
-I stopped working entirely when I was 36 weeks. Women who stop working at this point are more likely to have their babies come early than women who work up until 40 weeks (they are likely to have their babies come late).
-I ate healthily, regulated my blood sugar with many small high-protein meals, didn't indulge in fake food.
-I walked, hiked and biked until I was too big and then I did prenatal yoga and swam.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I didn't just get lucky and the following is related to what good care I took of myself:
-We got pregnant on our first try.
-My blood sugar, urine protein, blood pressure, baby movements, baby position--everything at every appointment was exactly as it should be.
-My baby came 10 days early and was over 9 pounds even though I only gained 35.
-I never had a single craving.
-I only threw up twice (and both were my fault--I let myself get too hungry).
-My baby had baby acne for about five hours total and never had cradle cap or any of the other classic issues.
-My baby spit-up maybe twice in his first six months (though I think that had to with my healthy post-pregnancy eating habits).

All that being said, I am still shocked at how uncomfortable pregnancy was and how traumatizing those first few weeks of recovery are.

Things to help you on your quest to becoming physically heroic:

Real Food: What to Eat and Why or Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two and Baby's First Foods

The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health: Here is a great quote from the book: "Most large grocery chains these days post a sign in at least one section of their stores describing it as a 'health food' section, which has prompted some of us to wonder whether the rest of the supermarket should have signs identifying aisles as filled with 'illness food,' or :'unhealthy food,' or even 'death food.'"

Nourishing Traditions: The cookbook for the informed.

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives: Not well-written or even a great book but some good information if you are thinking of getting pregnant

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_eisen_meet_your_microbes.html?source=email#.UAOCYqBwQZc.email

90% of Americans Have Vitamin Deficiencies - Vitamin Deficiencies Cause Health Problems that Kill You Slowly

How you feel every day, your body's ability to fight its ailments and your emotional state are all directly connected to what is and is not going into your body.

On what is not going into your body:

Your body requires a certain amount of nutrients each day to perform every function it needs to do. Some examples include: repairing damage to your skin, growing hair and nails, breathing, pumping blood and fighting off the viruses that are attacking you every minute of every hour of every day. If you don't eat enough nutrients you will develop a deficiency.

A deficiency of vitamin A can cause dry skin and hair, slowed healing of wounds, impaired immune function, night blindness and growth retardation. A deficiency of the B vitamins has been linked to hair loss, headaches, fatigue, depression, indigestion, insomnia, PMS, cataracts, carpal tunnel, atherosclerosis, heart disease and cancer. 

Those are just the first two vitamins. 

Almost all Americans, 90% according to the USDA, suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. A malady caused by the deficiencies is usually so slow to take hold that it goes unnoticed until the malady is severe. At that point the malady is treated but the underlying cause is not. For example: see a dermatologist about pimples and you will go home with creams and a prescription for antibiotics. The malady is being treated but the underlying cause—the nutritional deficiencies you aren’t even aware you are suffering from—is not.

Most deficiencies won’t kill you immediately. They will simply cause problems that, over the course of months and years, get worse. You will become accustomed to them and you will blame the way you feel on your genes, bad luck, your age, an old injury... but you will be wrong. If you give your body the tools it needs, it will fix its ailments.

Not to be too dramatic but… your body is life or death. Are you giving your body the tools it needs to accomplish its goals as quickly and efficiently as possible? Are you eating large quantities of organic, tree or vine-ripened, mostly raw fruits and vegetables with every meal? Are you eating foods as similar to what your body evolved to eat as possible--as in, as unrefined as possible?

On vitamin supplementation, from The Hundred Year Lie: "Synthetic vitamin C is really just ascorbic acid, comparable to the outer skin of an orange; 90 percent of the ascorbic acid in the United States is manufactured at a facility in Nutley, New Jersey, owned by Hoffman-LaRoche. In this plant the ascorbic acid is derived from cornstarch, corn sugar, and volatile acids mixed in a fermentation process. Most US vitamin companies purchase this ascorbic acid, bottle it, and attach their own labels before selling it as vitamin C. Even less well known, most synthetic vitamin E comes from an Eastman Kodak plant, where it is a by-product of an emulsification process used to manufacture film. After purification it is sold to the supplements industry. At the level of moelecules seen under a microscope, syntheitc and natural vitamins may look similar to some chemists, but they don't assimilate the same way in the humanbody. Studies of both vitamin C and vitamin E show that the naturally occurring forms [in food] are more absorbable by the body and more biologically active than synthetics... The truth is that vitamins are not individual compounds. Vitamins are biological complexes. In addition to ascorbic acid, real vitamin C must include bioflavinoids [the natural pigments in fruits and vegetables] like hesperidin, rutin, quercetin, tannins, along with other naturally occurring compounds. Mineral cofactors must be available in proper amounts. If any of these parts are missing, there is no vitamin activity." 

On what you is going into your body:

If you are an average American, you don't eat very much food i.e. Doritos, Oreos, McDonalds. You eat an array of chemicals that impersonate food. 99% of these chemicals have never been studied so we have no idea how the human body will tolerate them. The other 1% have been studied and have been shown to be toxic to the human body but only in "large doses" so we continue to eat them. If you are an average American, you wholeheartedly trust the government to define "large doses."

If you are an average American, those foods that you eat that are actually food (wheat flour or sugar cane) have been processed to the point that... they are no longer food i.e. white flour and white sugar.

If you are an average American, those whole, unprocessed foods you eat (like spinach and potatoes) are contaminated with a half-dozen deadly pesticides that vigorous scrubbing cannot remove. You cook the vegetables in pots coated with Teflon (more deadly chemicals) and then then you boil those vegetables in tap water containing chlorine, fluoride, perchlorate, trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids (which have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems and birth defects). All those chemicals combine together in the pot to form who-knows-what.

If you are an average American, you are a guini pig.

Here are some numbers for you to consider (From The Hundred Year Lie):

1. Cancer. In the year 1900 Cancer was responsible for 3% of all deaths in the US. Today it is responsible for 20%. From 1950 to 2001 the incidence for all types of cancer in the United States increased by 85%, and that was the age-adjusted rate, which means the increase has nothing to do with people living longer. The fastest-growing rate of cancer for any age group over the past two decades has been among children.

2. Diabetes. In the year 1900 Diabetes affected less than .1% of the US population. Today it affects 20%. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts twelve years from your life.

3. In the year 1900 the following health problems were virtually nonexistent: asthma, breast cancer, heart attacks as a result of coronary artery disease and autism.

4. In the year 1900, the average American consumed 10 pounds of sugar, most in the form of molasses. This year the average American will consume 147 pounds of sugar, almost all of which is highly refined. 

5. In 1940 the US produced one billion pounds of new synthetic chemicals. In 1950 the US produced fifty billion pounds. By the 1980's the US produced 500 billion pounds.

6. Average male sperm counts have dropped 50% since 1940.

7. Learning disabilities have increased 200% in the last 40 years.

8. 106,000 people die each year in American hospitals from side effects of their prescription medications. Adverse drug reactions are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.

9. Half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug every day. Many of them consume three or more every day. "Traditional systems of medicine from India and China have both developed over four thousand years of knowledge based on trial-and-error testing of untold millions of people in the longest and most widespread clinical trial tests of plant-based healing in human history. Both systems place more emphasis on illness and disease prevention--especially using food and diet--than does Western-based medicine.... Neither of these traditional systems believe it's appropriate or effective to isolate specific compounds or to synthesize moelecules from a traditional plant." Much like vitamins.

10. Obesity. Within a year of arriving in the United States, 16% of new immigrants become obese for the first time in their lives.

11. Common diseases rarely found in native populations (such as Peruvian Indians, Australian Aborigines and Swiss mountaineers): heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertensions, stroke, appendicitis, diverticulitis, malformed dental arches, tooth decay, varicose veins, ulcers, hemorrhoids.

12. In 1900 gold was money and the federal reserve didn't exist.

Other big things that affect your health include whether or not you are getting enough sleep, the quality of your sleep (light pollution has been linked to cancer), where you work, body parts you overuse or misuse, and medications.

When you give your body the tools it needs to repair its ailments, you will be able to sit back and watch in awe as it does. When you stop doing things that prevent your body from functioning well, it will go back to normal. Health is normal.

To find why it is even more essential for you to make your health a priority if you plan to have kids, continue to part 4!