Dietary Laws, Restrictions, and Overall Disasters

The above is an excerpt from an email I recently received. I told this friend of mine that I would answer her in a post because Si and I have been thinking about food and diet for a while, and discussing it from a more philosophical angle than a health angle.

The fact is, unless a family is going to remove themselves to the countryside and run their own self-sustaining community {a.k.a. “farm”}, then that family has to make daily food choices. And like all choices, choosing one thing inevitably means not choosing another thing.

Let’s take the milk issue. We have gone over and over the milk issue around here. Generally speaking, pasteurized/homogenized milk is bad for you. Pasteurization of milk “destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, alters vitamin B12, and vitamin B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.” Click on pasteurization if you really want to know more about that! Meanwhile, homogenization is “is a mechanical process that breaks down butterfat globules so they do not rise to the top.” “According to some studies, the process makes the milkfat particles small enough that they pass, undigested, into the bloodstream, leading to heart disease. Interestingly, consumption of dairy fats has actually decreased since the 1930s and the advent of homogenization, while heart disease and heart attack deaths have increased dramatically” {source}.

When the Promised Land was described as flowing with milk and honey, I can guarantee the milk being referred to was unpasteurized, non homogenized, organic milk. And it might have been from a goat. {And the honey was raw, but I digress.}

But perhaps my child is intolerant/allergic to dairy. We head to soy, only to learn that soy is an estrogen and, for instance, a child on soy formula might have as much as 22,000 times the normal amount of estrogen in his/her blood when compared with a normal, breastfed baby.

Eventually, we try goat’s milk. But raw goat’s milk is illegal to sell in California. So we drink it powdered, bought as cheaply as possible on Amazon.com, and we quit worrying. We are doing the best we can with the options we have.

Do you see how complicated it gets? As my friend says, the blessings of our post-Industrial culture are also its curse. And as a parent wading through these matters, it can feel like a huge burden to carry. My goal over the next few days {or however long it takes} is to try to wade through the issue of food from a distance and gain a few principles to ease the decision-making process. This is written as much for myself as it is for anyone else.