Food Prep and Figuring Out Being a Railroad Wife

Food prep can be a significant time saver when it comes to making meals, and can even save money by getting produce to last longer.

I’ve never been very good at it.

Mostly, I just don’t take the time to do it shortly after grocery shopping. As a result, I have to do everything when it comes time to make the meals, and often waste produce that goes bad too soon.

My husband recently started working for the railroad, which means he’s gone for as much as three days and nights at a time now. Since he’s still training, his schedule is especially busy, since he doesn’t have any days off yet and they’re working him constantly. Apparently, the idea is not only to train him, but to show him what “the worst” is so he knows exactly what he’s in for. By extension, that means me too.

On the road, he’s put up in hotels each night, none of which have a kitchen in the rooms, only a mini fridge and a microwave. That means that even if he has a grocery store within walking distance, and I’m not sure he does as most of the hotels, he’s stuck with precooked or microwaveable food, almost none of which is healthy, more or less Paleo. If I were in his place, I wouldn’t even want to spend my time off the tracks walking to grocery stores and figuring out my food for the next day, I’d much prefer to be utilizing my free time with a book, a laptop, or the hotel gym or pool.

As for me, it’s much harder to bring myself to cook full meals when Steven is gone, because it feels like I’m just cooking for me, and I have a baby who’s still young enough that he rarely can entertain himself long enough for me to cook a full meal. This has resulted in me eating fast food way too much, and in neither my hubby or I eating Paleo very well. Neither of us are as healthy — or as low in body fat –as we’d like.

For me, this means that meal prepping is getting very important. After I chatted with both my husband and with another railroad wife, we got Steven a cooler just big enough to hold a few days’ of meals, and I plan on making a few meals in a single day a couple times a week, probably when he’s heading home or when he’s sleeping right when he’s gotten back after working all night. .He’ll be able to take all or most of his meals — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — in his cooler, which means better quality and healthier meals through his trips and little or no money spent on food while he’s out. He may get teased a bit by the other guys on the road for bringing his cooler, but as the other railroad wife I talked to said, they get jealous when he pulls out a home cooked meal for dinner. For me, it means I have meals ready to go while he’s gone, which means I’ll be able to just heat them up and not have to worry about my son being either entertained or sleeping while I cook, or about cooking for only me every day, so I’ll also spend less and eat healthier. 

Bell peppers, strawberries, blueberries (in the colander), romaine, spinach, and broccoli and cauliflower (in the sink).

Today, I started in on it all. I chose a bunch of meals — more than a weeks’ worth, perhaps as much as two weeks worth depending on leftovers — to go shopping for. I did one big shopping trip for it all. And then I started doing prep.

It’s true that prep takes time, but it’s worth it. It just takes a bit of planning. Do it on a day when you actually have time to do food prep, so you don’t have to worry about it on days that you don’t.

My big goal was to get all the produce washed. Washing produce is helpful for removing dirt and such, but also for making it last longer. Washing it in the (clean) sink in water and a little apple cider vinegar helps kill bacteria that will cause it to go bad faster. I also removed stems from the spinach and broccoli (the cauliflower was already chopped) and separated the leaves on the romaine hearts before washing.

I recently learned of a good way to make greens last longer, so we’ll see how it goes. Wash them well, and then spread them out on a towel or paper towels no more than a couple layers deep so they’ll dry. After they’ve dried fairly well, transfer them onto a dry towel or paper towels, no more than two layers deep, and lay another towel or paper towels over top. Roll it up and rubber band it, and store in the fridge. This will allow moisture (which makes them go bad faster) to wick away, and make it easy to pick out any individual leaves that are going bad. Throwing out produce that is starting to go bad and leaving the produce that is still good preserves produce longer, as the produce that is going bad speeds up the process with produce that is still good.

Next on the list of food prep will be to cook up a few meals and food items in one go. For instance, I have breakfast sausage links to go with breakfast, and I can do multiple meals with ground beef, and then maybe the next set of meals I cook would be with chicken, which makes thawing out meat ahead of time easy to plan for.

 

Do you  prep your food? How do you do it?

Vaccine Safety

I’m on a vaccine kick lately. My son is at that age, after all, so I’ve been doing research, which means it’s on my mind. While I’m okay with delaying or spreading out vaccines a bit, especially where the disease is unlikely to be caught before vaccination can occur, I am very much pro-vax for most vaccines available.

The more research I do, and the more I consider the reasons people give for not vaccinating, the more frustrated I become with the reasons for altogether refusing vaccines.

Let’s look at this one: the safety of vaccines.

First of all, vaccines are pretty dang safe. The majority of adverse effects are minor and pass within a few days. As a trade-off for protection against diseases with serious complications, up to and including permanent damage and death, some fussiness or a bit of a fever is not a big deal. And even with the occasional more serious complications (a chance of one in thousands or even one in millions), the child almost always fully recovers, and we’re still better off than we would be letting these diseases run rampant.

And for those of you who still believe that vaccines cause autism: they don’t. Nope, not even MMR, especially since the ingredient suspected of doing so has been out of the vaccine for years.

To be more specific, a meta-study was done. A meta-study is a study of studies, eventually. Studies on a particular topic are all compiled together, and the ones that meet certain standards are chosen. So only the best, most reliable, most scientific studies are used. The meta-study then looks at the conclusions and data in these multiple studies, and comes to an overall conclusion. This meta-study concluded that, surprise! vaccines, including MMR, are not at all linked to autism.

Here’s the kicker, though. We’re all worried about how these vaccines are effecting our children, but we’re a culture full of prescription drugs, some of which are for far less serious things than diphtheria or the measles.

I mean really, think about it.

If you take birth control pills but refuse vaccines for your child, you’re a hypocrite. People die from the pill. Yet what it’s used for in most cases — preventing pregnancy — has much safer and more natural means of achieving the same goal. And here you are, popping a pill every day, loading your body up with artificial hormones for months at a time, while denying your child protection from deadly diseases.

Vaccines cause so few deaths that it is difficult to even assess the risk.

For instance, out of reports of death reported to VAERS (the vaccine monitoring system) from 1990-1992, one one seems to actually have been legitimately associated with a vaccine. That means that, out of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of children vaccinated over those years, only one perhaps died from it. On the other hand, if we didn’t vaccinate, hundreds would die from diseases every year. That means that vaccines are far more beneficial than they are risky.

Do me a favor. Go look at the insert on a bottle of tylenol or ibuprofen. Or even better, a prescription drug. We have drugs with potential adverse side effects in our medicine cabinet, and many of these are far more likely to have a serious side effect or result in death than vaccines. Some of them protect and save lives. Some of theme just make you feel a bit better. Yet even the ones that aren’t necessary to protect your life, you’ll take. And the ones that can protect and even save your life (antibiotics, for instance), you’ll hardly question. You’d definitely give them to your child as prescribed by a doctor, sometimes just to relieve symptoms because you don’t want your child to suffer. Yet you won’t protect your child from serious diseases with a handful of shots. That is so illogical, it isn’t even funny.

If we could keep vaccination rates up worldwide, these diseases would be eradicated the way we eradicated smallpox, and vaccinations against them wouldn’t be necessary any longer. Until they are declared eradicated, lowering vaccination rates causes outbreaks and allows the diseases to continue to exist. Consider this:

Three countries – Great Britain, Sweden, and Japan – cut back the use of pertussis vaccine because of fear about the vaccine. The effect was dramatic and immediate. In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978. In Japan, around the same time, a drop in vaccination rates from 70% to 20%-40% led to a jump in pertussis from 393 cases and no deaths in 1974 to 13,000 cases and 41 deaths in 1979. In Sweden, the annual incidence rate of pertussis per 100,000 children 0-6 years of age increased from 700 cases in 1981 to 3,200 in 1985. It seems clear from these experiences that not only would diseases not be disappearing without vaccines, but if we were to stop vaccinating, they would come back.

Of more immediate interest is the major epidemic of diphtheria which occurred in the former Soviet Union from 1989 to 1994, where low primary immunization rates for children and the lack of booster vaccinations for adults have resulted in an increase from 839 cases in 1989 to nearly 50,000 cases and 1,700 deaths in 1994. There have already been at least 20 imported cases in Europe and two cases in U.S. citizens working in the former Soviet Union.

So go ahead, take that tylenol or birth control pill. But please, get your child vaccinated, too.

A Bit More on Vaccines

Here’s some information — hard numbers, not questionable anecdotal evidence — on how vaccines have changed the health of our country.

In the 1940’s and 50’s, Polio crippled about 35,000 people per year in the US. By the end of the 70’s, the US was polio-free, and remains so today.

Measles kills about 1-2 out of 1000 who contract it. Worldwide, there are over 150,000 deaths from measles. Before the vaccine, the US experienced about 500 deaths per year and thousands of hospitalizations and serious complications, which can result from ear infections and pneumonia caused by the disease. Now there are less than 200 cases per year in the US, most of them originating outside of the country, and usually occurring in areas with lower vaccination rates.

Mumps can cause problems such as infertility, meningitis, and deafness. Incidence of mumps has decreased 99% in the US since the vaccine was introduced.

Rubella can result in serious complications such as deafness, mental retardation, and liver damage. If a pregnant woman contracts it, there is about a 1 in 5 chance of damage to her baby, including miscarriage, neonatal death, and mental retardation. Incidence of damaged babies has fallen thousands (an epidemic in the 60’s effected over 30,000 pregnant women) to a handful yearly, mostly in foreign-born mothers.

Before treatment was available, diphtheria killed over 15,000 people per year. Up to half of cases result in death without treatment, and about 1 in 10 result in death even with treatment. Now, there are only a handful of cases per year in the US thanks to the vaccine.

Tetanus, or lockjaw, kills as much as 30% of people infected. The US has gone fromover a thousand cases per year to only a handful. Most (about 75%) of recent cases are in those who are unvaccinated or haven’t kept up on boosters. Even with modern medicine, death rates are still over 10% once tetanus manifests.

About half of infants who get pertussis, or whooping cough, will be hospitalized. Of those, 25% will develop pneumonia, half will have convulsions, 66% will have slowed or stopped breathing, and about 1-2% will die. Almost all whooping cough deaths since 2000 were in infants. It is significantly less serious in older children and adults, but still highly unpleasant, and coughing can last for months. Worldwide, whooping cough kills nearly 200,000 per year. Unfortunately, people declining the vaccine is resulting in an increase in cases; in 2012, there was the highest number of cases reported since the 1950’s. People who have had the vaccine but contract the disease usually have a less severe case. One study* showed that countries with reduced vaccination rates have 10-100 times more cases than countries with higher sustained rates.

(*Gangarosa EJ, et al. Impact of anti-vaccine movements on pertussis control: the untold story. Lancet 1998;351:356-61.)

Pre-vaccination era complications of Hib

Haemophilus Influenzae Type b, or Hib, can cause meningitis in about 50% of cases, which can result in hearing loss or brain damage, and blood infections leading to loss of limbs. Both of these complications can also cause death. Rates of the disease have fallen 99% since vaccinations began, from tens of thousands to only dozens per year, and most cases are in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people, and few whose vaccinations had failed.

Pneumococcal infections can result in pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis/bacteremia, and/or severe ear/sinus infections. For those under 5 who get meningitis, about 10% die. For bacteremia, about 4% of children die. About 5% die from pneumonia. Sinus and ear infections rarely cause serious complications, but it can result in repeat infections and the need for ear tubes. Disease rates hav decreased by 85%, but there are still a few thousand deaths still occur each year, and those at highest risk of infection are adults who remain unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.

 

Oh, and do you know why we no longer have smallpox, which kills about 30% of it’s patients, has no cure, and doesn’t really have any effective treatments? We no longer have it because the world eradicated it through widespread vaccinations. Please tell me how getting rid of a deadly disease is worse than vaccinating against it.

 

2 Month Check Up and My Vaccine Philosphy

Riley, my 11-week-old son, had his two month check up today. (It was delayed due to his provider having to leave for a couple of weeks for family stuff.)

The office was great. I was a little worried because it’s such a large office, but there was virtually no wait, and no sick children in close proximity. That may have partly been because I had a 9am appointment.

I loved his provider, who was recommended by my midwife because many of her patients have loved her too. She’s old enough to be a grandma herself, although she’s not (yet), and has worked in a NICU before. She’s a nurse practitioner rather than a pediatrician, but she obviously knows and loves babies. She was so friendly and competent. I didn’t feel rushed through the appointment at all, which was great.

Riley is doing wonderfully. He’s even apparently a bit ahead of schedule in how well he can hold up his head, so she predicted that he’s going to be either ahead or right on schedule with rolling, crawling, and walking. Everything checked out, which is always something a mom wants to hear.

Anyways, on the the controversial part. Vaccines.

I didn’t even know that these were particularly controversial until the last couple of years, when friends started having babies and talking about vaccines. I know a few people that don’t vaccinate, or who are waiting until their children are much older to vaccinate.

To me, vaccinations make sense. I’m fully aware of the consequences of the diseases that these vaccines prevent, and the huge improvement in infant and child mortality rates because of these vaccines. While I completely support natural health through good diet, supplementation, and natural medicine where appropriate, I also know that even strong immune systems can easily be overwhelmed by these diseases, and that infants and young children are particularly susceptible to complications, including death, if they catch them. There are many parts of the world where vaccines aren’t available and children are dying in hundreds and thousands from preventable diseases. The most common side effects of vaccines–soreness, irritability, fever–seem to be a very reasonable trade off for protecting my child’s life. It is frustrating to see that there is a direct correlation between areas with lower vaccination rates and outbreaks of potentially deadly diseases, such as measles and whooping cough, which can put my baby at risk because of other peoples’ choices.

I ran into a few frustrating things when researching vaccines over the last couple of months.

The first is people’s willingness to believe in vaccine side effects that not only haven’t been proven, but have been shown to have no correlation to vaccines. Autism is the glaring and obvious example. The paper that originally blamed vaccines for autism rates has been disproven, and the physician who wrote it lost his medical license. He only wrote it to try to help some parents win a law suit; he had something to gain from the paper that didn’t have anything to do with finding and sharing the truth about vaccines. Further studies have shown no correlation between autism and vaccines, and the ingredient commonly blamed hasn’t even been in the MMR vaccine for years. I also saw things as ridiculous as someone blaming her PCOS on a vaccine that she’d gotten years before she had symptoms.

Its not that vaccines have no side effects, but the worst side effects are extremely rare, and the side effects are almost never as serious as the disease that is being prevented. Its annoying to have people groundlessly blame vaccines for anything and everything.

The second frustration I had was with people so often thinking that correlation means causation. Back to autism: since autism symptoms often show up at about the same time as the MMR vaccine is given, people will assume that the autism is the result of the vaccine, when it is almost certainly coincidence. A correlation does not prove causation.

Third was the problem of people relying far too much on anecdotal evidence. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that you can usually find people with opposite experiences; this vaccinated person was very unhealthy, and that unvaccinated person was very healthy, or vice versa. Some issues have far less variation than others; you almost never hear someone say that they had the experience of working out but not getting in better shape, for instance, because the variables are extremely straightforward. With something like health in relation to vaccines, however, there are a number of variables. Health is effected by a number of things (genes, diet, exercise, lifestyle, environment, medicine, etc), and vaccines are only part of that equation. One of the most frustrating things was how often people said that they vaccinated older children but not younger, and the younger ones were healthier. The problem with that is that, most likely, the parent chose not to vaccinate the younger ones because they got more serious about health and came to the conclusion that vaccines weren’t healthy. But if they’re focusing more on health, then the younger children were also likely eating better or having their immune systems boosted naturally or something along those lines, which would have made a difference in their health regardless of their vaccination status. The parent has no way of knowing if their younger children would still have been healthier if they’d made all the other health changes but vaccinated instead. And again, correlation doesn’t equal causation.

Probably the most infuriating thing I heard was people saying that its better for these diseases to be caught than for people to be vaccinated, because our immune systems are designed to fight these diseases. If we are so capable of handling these diseases, they wouldn’t kill by the hundreds and thousands in areas where vaccines aren’t available. For instance, diphtheria kills about 1 out of 10 people who get it; more in children. About 15,000 died per year in the US from diphtheria before the vaccine. Diphtheria is why we have the Iditarod; look it up. Now, almost none die from it in the US, and serious reactions to the vaccine only occur in about 1 in a million cases. That’s a huge difference. So don’t tell me it’s better for my child to risk getting diphtheria than to get the vaccine.

It seems obvious to me that vaccines have become suspect largely because 1) the anti-vaccination stance became widely publicized, even though some of the people who have championed that stance have been thoroughly discredited, 2) people don’t always find good sources and information to base their decision on, and 3) we in the US are very removed from the times and places when these diseases wiped out frightening percentages of their victims on a regular basis.

So, obviously, I’m for vaccinations (and here’s a link with lots of other good links to help you see why). They make sense, in most cases.

On the other hand, I’m a bit hesitant about how early a few of the vaccines are given in our country. There are other first-world countries with high vaccination rates which start vaccinations later and have to give less boosters because the vaccinations are given when the immune system is more mature and is therefore more effective at creating long-term immunity. A baby’s immune system relies largely on breast milk for the first year of life, since that is the amount of time that a child can be exclusively breastfed. Their immune system isn’t very good at creating its own long term immunity in the first year of life. For this reason, vaccines for things like polio, which is virtually non-existent in our country, seems especially unnecessary in the first few months of life. On the other hand, vaccines against diseases that are more likely in the first months of life make sense.

Some vaccinations being given to children don’t make sense to me. Hep B is one of those. Hep B is an STD, transmitted through things like sex, exposure to the blood of an infected person, needle sharing, and transfusion. Why this is given to infants in low-risk populations and whose family members don’t have it is beyond me. I can perhaps understand it if the infant will be in day care or shortly before entering public school, but even then their chances of contracting it are very low. When something is that unlikely to be contracted, especially before someone becomes sexually active, it seems unnecessary to expose a child to the potential side effects. The risks just don’t outweigh the benefits in this case. We’ve declined this vaccine so far because of this, but it is one of the only ones we are declining.

All that said, this philosophy on vaccines that I’ve developed caused me to choose to do two vaccines for my son today; DTaP and Rotavirus. Riley’s NP advised that these are the diseases he’s most likely to be exposed to at his age, particularly since his grandma works in a public school. The NP happily informed me that the vaccine for Rotavirus (which is responsible for over 400,000 infant deaths worlwide) has drastically reduced the number of infants admitted to hospitals due to severe diarrhea in the US (only a few thousand per year instead of tens of thousands). Those numbers are good enough for me. The next appointment I’ll probably also start the Hib and PCV vaccines. I don’t want to delay so much that he’s at risk or have tons of extra appointments, so we’ll mostly follow the CDC schedule.

Anyways, there you have it. An update on my kiddo and my opinions on a controversy. I hope you learned something, and even more so, I hope you can be respectful of my vaccination decisions.

Book Review: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

The Vegetarian Myth, written by a former vegan of twenty years, is a detailed examination of the fallacies behind the three most common reasons for being a vegetarian. The book is full of references to research and studies. The three main points addressed are moral vegetarianism, political vegetarianism, and nutritional vegetarianism.

The most interesting chapters for me were those on moral and nutritional vegetarianism.

In moral vegetarianism, I was fascinated to learn how it is monocrop agriculture — growing of annual crops, particularly grains — that is truly the morally indefensible choice as far as killing animals. Life requires death. Even plants require the fertilizer of dead animals in order to live. Predators must eat their prey to survive. Ecosystems that have lost their balance of predator and prey result in starving animals and even destroyed habitats. An omnivore, such as we are, eating is meat, is just part of this cycle.

But agriculture, particularly the mass production of monocrops, which is what fuels human life and which is the staple of vegetarian diets, kills off whole ecosystems. Animals have gone extinct for us to eat grains.

In fact, it destroys topsoil, which is required for all life to grow. The great plains of the midwest have gone from measuring topsoil in feet to measuring it in only inches because of agriculture. And what happens when topsoil runs out? Well, the desert that is the Middle East used to be called the Fertile Crescent until it was ruined by agricultural practices. When we run out of topsoil in the world (which is in the foreseeable future), we’ll start starving. It takes dozens, even hundreds, of years to build even an inch of topsoil, more or less a foot. If that’s not enough, modern agriculture requires fossil fuels, both for fertilization and for transportation, and we know that that’s a limited resource.

We want sustainability — and in light of the above, modern agriculture isn’t sustainable.

It’s true that factory farming isn’t moral, or even really sustainable. There is an alternative: pastured animals. They’re fed their natural diet, which is not corn, but is instead things like grass and hay for cows and insects for chickens. They don’t have to be loaded up with antibiotics because their diet isn’t killing them. They’re healthier. They’re healthier for us to eat than factory farmed animals. In fact, they contain pretty much every essential nutrient humans need to be healthy. They’re happier. And guess what? They’re building up topsoil with their manure.

So, if I buy the meat of a whole grass fed cow, it will go a long ways towards feeding me for a whole year, with the essential nutrients I need. One animal dead. If I live off of primarily grain and produce that had to be shipped to me, I’m supporting killing off entire ecosystems. Thousands of dead animals. Polluted rivers. Severely depleted topsoil. So…which is more moral? Obviously, Lierre Keith (and I) would argue that the first is the more moral choice.

As far as nutritional vegetarianism, she surveys much of the information I’ve already learned from books like Good Calories, Bad Calories and The Paleo Solution. Or, if you want an easier way to get a primer on that information, watch Fat Head on Netflix.

Anyways, one of her biggest points is that natural animal fats are really, really good for you and the carbohydrates from a high-carbohydrate diet, which vegetarianism and especially veganism usually are, isn’t nearly as good for you. For instance, saturated fat from animals is the best and, in some cases, only source for some essential vitamins. And even if you get it from other sources, saturated fat is required to absorb the vitamins because they are fat soluble.

She also looks at the fact that hunter-gatherer tribes, which are very healthy in ways that most “civilized” cultures aren’t — diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, cavities, cancer — all eat animals. Often most of their calories come from animals, and they certainly don’t eat refined carbohydrates, or even really grains.

I wish she’d addressed the claims against animal protein, but I think the survey of the health of people who eat a lot of animal products — in some cases, almost exclusively — does a lot to answer that. There is a lot more evidence in favor of eating meat than against it, in my opinion, and she does do a good job at pointing the way in that direction.

Keith also has a scathing examination of soy that made me want to run the other way from any product that has even a hint of soy in it. I can’t imagine giving my baby soy formula. Did you know that having a lot of soy can be pretty much the equivalent of taking the birth control pill? And do you know what sort of processing that stuff has to go through to be edible to people? There’s a reason it was used as an ingredient in paint before it ever was introduced into the American diet. And as far as Asian cultures that we seem to think eat tons of it; they don’t. It’s mostly a condiment. No more than a few grams of soy a day.

Obviously, the Standard American Diet (SAD) isn’t good, but that doesn’t make vegetarianism the solution. Why? Because it’s not meat that’s so bad for us, especially if it’s pastured or wild-caught meat. In fact, that’s great for us. It’s the grains and preservatives and all sorts of other high-sugar, high-carbohydrate crap we eat. It’s the bun on the burger, not the patty.

Oh, and another interesting point; children of vegans can literally get neurological damage and other issues from their parents’ vegan diet. Seriously. How can something that causes damage to children be ideal for humans? The answer is: it’s not.

I did have a hard time with some of the other ideological points the author made. She’s a radical feminist, for instance. I am similarly outraged that women who must cover up from head to toe have literally died from lack of vitamin D, but she went beyond what I think are reasonable bounds in her apparent disgust for masculinity and in its apparent link to agriculture. I also couldn’t fathom how someone who apparently was devastated at the idea of killing the slugs who ate her garden and who cried when she disturbed an ants’ nest could think that women should have access to abortion as a right. Let’s save the slugs, but not the human babies? I also don’t agree with her on her spiritual beliefs, as she looks very negatively at Christianity and it’s Father-God who isn’t a part of nature but instead the creator of it. She looks very negatively at God giving Adam dominion over the earth and animals, interpreting it as a negative thing rather than the loving, harmonious stewardship it should have been and that God meant it to be, until the Fall corrupted mankind and their relationship with nature.

However, I don’t think any of that detracts much from a lot of the information she gave, so I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the problems with vegetarianism and/or with the sustainability and morality of agriculture and factory farming.

Informed Consent in Birth

“I’m just going to go with the flow.” “I don’t want to experience that much pain.” “I’ll just do what the doctors say.”

How often do people think things along these lines when it comes to childbirth? And how often do they actually know all the possible consequences of thinking like this ahead of time?

Many women go into childbirth wanting drugs and not knowing a whole lot about all of the drugs and procedures they’ll potentially be offered in a hospital.

Nor do they realize that they have the right to informed consent. In other words, the woman has the right to be fully informed about everything, including alternatives and whether something is actually necessary, and she may choose to accept or decline anything based on that information.

For instance, it’s pretty standard for women in labor to get an epidural for pain management. Many women don’t fully comprehend the potential risks of an epidural, however. For instance, an epidural, especially if received early on, increases the chances of needing pitocin due to slowed labor, and also increases chances of fetal distress and “failure to progress,” some of the most common reasons for emergency c-sections. An epidural also interferes with the body’s natural production of oxytocin, which is necessary for labor contractions to be effective and for labor to progress (hence failure to progress and need for pitocin), and is also the “love hormone” that aids in bonding with an infant, helping labor be seen as a positive experience, and even getting through the pain of contractions. Further, an epidural can lower blood pressure, sometimes catastrophically, endangering life of mother and baby and even causing brain damage in the baby.

Few hospital staff really explain these potential problems well to women. Even fewer explain that natural pain management can be highly effective, that going through a normal labor without interference of pain medication can be very empowering, that women are innately capable of handling labor, especially when supported by a carefully chosen birth team, and that the elation and bonding after delivery are usually far greater without an epidural.

The lack of information given can also interfere with women making the best decision about when interventions should be used. For example, I went into my labor planning on going without pain medications because I was informed about the risks of having them and the benefits of going without. However, I experienced complications, and after 32 hours of labor, a few of which were on pitocin (also an informed decision done for medically necessary reasons), I finally chose to receive an epidural. I made this choice understanding a number of things. The most significant was that I was exhausted, and I didn’t want to risk not being able to push because of that. Even if I was physically able to push after a few more hours of labor, the high blood pressure and overall exhaustion I was experiencing would make bonding more difficult than the interference of the epidural would; an epidural would allow me to get some rest, and it would bring down my blood pressure. I’d also gotten passed the point where an epidural was most likely to lead to a c-section, because I’d progressed far enough. Knowing all of that, I was able to make an informed decision, after discussion with my birth team, to receive an epidural. I also knew, after waiting for so long to get it, that I’d be able to go without one in an uncomplicated labor. I knew I was strong enough. I was empowered and encouraged by that knowledge.

And guess what? I got rest. My blood pressure became normal for the first time in my labor. I didn’t have a c-section. I was able to bond with my baby. And I don’t dread my next labor, which I hope won’t require a hospital and medical interventions due to complications next time.

Women deserve to be fully informed going into and during labor. And I don’t mean just signing a form. I mean that a woman should be able to ask questions and partner with her care providers in making decisions. She should be able to ask what any given drug, procedure, or intervention can do to her and her baby, what the benefits are, if there are any alternatives and what the risks and benefits of the alternatives are, and what would happen if an intervention wasn’t done.

It’s not that women should never choose interventions, drugs, and other procedures during childbirth, or that a woman who chooses to have them after knowing the potential risks is a bad mother. It’s that she has the right to know all of the risks and alternatives before anything is done during her labor.

Sometimes the interventions are beneficial and even necessary to protect the mother and baby. But all too often, they’re not, and one in three women are facing c-sections, when less than 10% would have been medically necessary had labor been allowed to progress naturally. These many women getting major abdominal surgery face higher risks of complications and death in that and future pregnancies, and so do their babies. If two-thirds of them wouldn’t have actually needed a c-section, then that’s two-thirds too many women and infants who are being put at risk unnecessarily. How many of them, if they’d been fully informed and empowered before and during labor, would have been able to make decisions that would have allowed them to, more than likely, avoid the c-section? Far too many for us to be okay with it.

When so many women are coming out of their births feeling helpless, negative, fearful of future births, depressed, and even traumatized, there’s a problem. Women need to take back their power during birth. Doing so removes a lot of the fear, the risks, the helplessness. We have the right to informed consent, no matter what setting we choose when we give birth, and we need to use that right.

Abortion is Healthcare?

health care

noun

: the prevention or treatment of illness by doctors, dentists, psychologists, etc

: efforts made to maintain or restore health especially by trained and licensed professionals

That is the Merriam-Webster definition of health care.

Now pro-choicers, please explain to me how abortion fits that definition.

I’m guessing you probably can’t. Unless, perhaps, you appeal to the rare cases like ectopic pregnancy.

Let me explain something, though. Those rare cases where saving the life of the mother results in the death of the baby aren’t really considered abortions, even according to. Why? Because the point isn’t killing the baby, it’s saving the mother. In fact, abortion itself is rarely necessary. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop said,

“Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. If toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, the doctor will induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby’s life is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.”

Cancer treatments? Yes, they can and do kill a fetus, so “therapeutic abortion” is sometimes recommended, but its not necessary. In fact, there are cases where the baby is born perfectly healthy, especially if treatments aren’t begun until the second trimester or later, when they’re less likely to cause fetal abnormalities. There are even drugs for cancer treatment that are less likely to cause problems for the baby.

Ectopic pregnancy? The baby is going to die anyways. It’s not a viable pregnancy, and it can kill the mother if the Fallopian tube ruptures before the fetus dies.

The list goes on, but the point is that, when a baby dies from the result of healthcare for the mother, abortion of a viable fetus is not actually the goal in the healthcare given, nor is it necessary to save a mother. Abortion is not healthcare.

Even if abortion of a viable baby was actually necessary in order to save the mother’s life in certain cases, it would be a very, very small dminority of cases. In the rest of abortion cases, it is impossible to call abortion healthcare.

First of all, it is impossible to call an elective, unnecessary, risky procedure “healthcare.” It’s like a breast implant or nose job. It’s not necessary for health; it’s a choice.

It’s a choice with far more consequences than any other elective surgery, though, because it always results in the death of a human. How is killing a viable, living, developing human healthcare? It’s not. It’s a complete violation of the Hippocratic oath. It is a violation of the natural order of things. It is an invasive and dangerous procedure.

Dangerous? Why, yes, it’s dangerous. The coat hanger argument just doesn’t hold water in light of the realities of legal abortion. I’ll borrow some of Matt Walsh’s references on a recent blog to show you just how dangerous abortion is for women. 

As of 2008, a little over 400 women have reportedly died from legal abortions. This doesn’t include all states, and there is no information for recent years available yet.

An evidence-based publication revealed that 31% of post abortive women have health complications from the abortion. 10% have immediate and potentially life-threatening complications. The risk of depression afterwards is 65% higher for abortion than childbirth (which is saying something, considering how many women get “baby blues” after giving birth). 65% suffer from PTSD after. Abortion is 3.5 times riskier than childbirth for the mother (and nearly 100% riskier for the baby). Abortion also increases future risk of miscarriage by 60%.

Suicide is also higher in post-abortive women than women of child-bearing age in general, and especially higher than women who have experienced childbirth. Many post-abortive women  have suicidal thoughts but don’t commit suicide.

Despite the abortion industry’s attempted claims to the contrary, breast cancer risk is also significantly higher after an abortion, and the risks only go up with multiple abortions. On the other hand, giving birth and breastfeeding, especially breastfeeding multiple children, brings the risk down.

Let’s look at that information again.

• Abortion kills a baby almost 100% of the time (and with abortionists like Gosnell, even kills babies born alive).
• Abortion can kill the mother.
• Abortion often causes complications, sometimes life-threatening.
• Abortion can make future “wanted” pregnancies difficult to achieve and carry to term.
• Abortion is psychologically damaging, occasionally to the extent of suicide.
• Abortion raises risks of certain cancers.

And this is considered healthcare for women? How much do we hate women to call something this risky and unnatural healthcare?!

Let’s look at the alternatives to abortion.

• Don’t engage in reproductive behavior until you want to reproduce.
• Protect against reproduction with responsible birth control use, but with the understanding that reproduction can still sometimes happen.
• Only engage in reproductive behavior with someone you would want to reproduce with.
• Birth the baby and put the baby up for adoption if it is conceived but circumstances cause the mother to be unable or unwilling to raise it herself. Childbirth is much safer for the mother than abortion, after all, and then the baby isn’t killed.
• Birth the baby if it is conceived and raise the baby as the blessing it is, taking responsibility and receiving the benefits of childbirth and parenthood.

Of all of those options, the risks to the mother are significantly less, there are even benefits to the mother, and the baby lives. Where healthcare is necessary in these options, such as prenatal care, it actually is healthcare. It works to protect both mother and baby.

So I’ll ask you again, pro-choicers. How is abortion healthcare?

Pregnant Body

Let’s be honest; pregnancy is hard on a woman’s body, even if she’s healthy. And security in a baby body can be hard.

I don’t have it bad so far, and probably won’t. At 33 weeks pregnant, I have no stretch marks on my stomach. My mom never got any on her stomach, so I’m hoping I’ll have none or maybe a couple small discreet ones. I do have them on my breasts, but they’re not in an obvious place and aren’t dark, so they’ll probably be hardly noticeable after the initial craziness of nursing and after some weight loss.

I’ve gained fat where I’m supposed to gain it, but it’s still fat. After a lifetime of never setting higher than about 125 on the scale (and that was when I was out of shape and needing to eat better; I like being 5-10 pounds less than that), seeing the numbers inch up over 140 is hard. I was never less than about 60 pounds lighter than my husband until a couple months ago.

Being genetically prone to dimples on butt and thighs when they get a bit of excess fat doesn’t help the situation. I know I’ve put on fat where I’m supposed to as a woman carrying a child: I have a bit extra in my breasts, stomach, butt, and thighs. But I don’t like how my butt and thighs look. I probably won’t like my post-birth stomach for a while either.

But I, and every other woman who is taking care of herself and still experiencing some less than thrilling baby body changes, just have to remember a few things.

First, stretch marks happen. Taking care of your skin and not gaining excessively can ensure that you don’t get them worse than necessary, but when things grow, stretch marks often happen. Genetics play a role beyond our control. These marks prove we grew a person. They are our battle scars. And why should we feel so bad about them? It’s not as if we failed in something by getting them. Quite the contrary; we made a human. And it’s certainly not as if most other women don’t have them! Unless, of course, they paid for removal. But not all of us are rich models, and we shouldn’t pretend like we have to look like we are without the surgeries and treatments they often have.

Second, the fat gain is not only normal, it’s necessary. Every woman has somewhat different needs for gaining during pregnancy, but virtually every woman should. Fat is the body’s ideal energy source, so the body prepares for the rigors of birth and the need to fuel breastfeeding by storing extra of this during pregnancy for later use. That means that first you lose the weight from baby, placenta, fluids, maybe some fat, etc. at birth and the first couple of days immediately after, but then you start losing fat just by feeding your baby! Add in a healthy diet and, when cleared, some exercise, and its possible to lose all or most of the baby fat within months; certainly in a year. Of course, an unhealthy lifestyle and/or getting pregnant again quickly will probably inhibit fat loss.

Finally, if you’re staying relatively healthy, don’t sweat it so much. Men often find pregnant women attractive, especially if it’s his baby. You know, proof of virility and all that. And a realistic, loving man isn’t going to expect you to look like a porn star or Victoria’s Secret model during or after pregnancy. Face it, you probably didn’t look like that before anyways, and he knows that. And why should you have to look like that? Most women can’t look like that and still be healthy. Value your health over your stretch marks or how quickly you lose baby fat. Frankly, if you focus on your health, not only will you probably have more peace with and appreciation for your body that can create new life, it will probably also end up looking healthy too. And both you — and a worthwhile man — will love a healthy you.

Christians and Yoga

Yoga can be a surprisingly controversial issue among Christians. This can be quite a surprise for people who are new to Christianity or who have never encountered nor considered any possible issues with yoga.

And frankly, why would most Americans see yoga as something dangerous to their Christian faith? The average American who participates in yoga is a woman who is concerned about her fitness or flexibility or combination thereof, probably taking a class in the gym, and it’s really just another workout to her. It’s maybe more calming and mentally peaceful than a session on the treadmill or upping her squat max, but the yoga class isn’t exactly a spiritual encounter.

Some people may not personally enjoy yoga, whereas for others its very enjoyable. And for some it’s simply a great option, such as yoga for pregnancy. Some people may practice it only to help flexibility and mobility, and for others it may be the way they exercise.

Yoga unarguably has health benefits. Yoga improves flexibility and increases range of motion and the body’s ability to support its own weight while going through said motions. It can improve muscle tone, especially if doing something like power yoga, which is more geared towards strength. Even the milder types of yoga will build core strength. It helps improve balance and posture, which can be highly beneficial as one ages. It often improves lung capacity because of the deep breathing done through the poses. The same deep breathing helps relax the body, regardless of the difficulty of the poses performed, which can relieve stress and tension, which is directly related to the improved mood and concentration people often experience with regular yoga practice. Yoga can lower blood pressure and the risk for heart disease. It can also help improves symptoms of asthma and arthritis.

So what, then, is the problem? Why do some Christians have a huge problem with yoga and its practice in light of all these benefits and the relatively non-spiritual nature of most yoga-for-fitness in Westernized yoga?

The problem is one that I can, to an extent, sympathize and agree with. Yoga, in its original form and in Eastern practice, can be a very spiritual thing. Although various sects of Hinduism see it in slightly different ways, it was and still is a religious practice in Hindu culture. The meditation is used for spiritual purposes.

It is certainly true that the practices of a polytheistic religion should make a Christian wary and shouldn’t be engaged in, especially as such. Yoga spiritual practices can easily lead a Christian into something similar to Gnosticism, which held that salvation came through a mystical inner knowledge; not too different from the goals of Eastern yoga meditation. It could lead a Christian away from proper biblical meditation and into unwitting idolatry, especially because of many New Age-type beliefs and practices involving yoga and meditation for enlightenment and spirituality. Meditation is spoken of in the Bible, but certainly not in the context of emptying one’s mind. Meditation is a practice of turning one’s mind to God and to His Word, of “being still and know[ing] [He] is God.” It is not a practice of becoming one with the universe, or of self-realization, but of turning one’s mind to God and to scripture. As far as the spiritual, meditative aspects of yoga go, this is certainly something to be avoided.

On the other hand, most Westernized yoga-for-fitness has so deviated from this spirituality that it has become yoga only in name, and it’s very easy to avoid any yoga that does include such spirituality. Yoga has even been combined with other types of exercise, such as Pilates, creating a fitness approach that is greatly appealing to many people, women in particular. Yoga as it is practiced in most gyms is merely using the very beneficial movements to do a series of exercises that involve stretching and toning. It’s hard to see the idolatry in that. Those who practice the original yoga with a religious focus are often bothered by this purely physical fitness approach to their religious practice, in fact. If they could get the fitness industry to call their non-spiritual fitness yoga by another name, they probably would.

Moreover, it is not difficult for a Christian to be aware of the potential pitfalls of participating in yoga that includes any spiritual activities and consciously avoid it. I have a yoga app on my phone. I deliberately chose one that includes no meditation or any mention of anything spiritual. It is, in fact, often a yoga-Pilates mixture (or yogalates). I really enjoy lifting weights, calisthenics, and even an occasional jog, but I find yoga to be relaxing if I don’t feel up to anything more strenuous, and it’s great for flexibility. It’s so non-spiritual, it’s not even a question.

Still, I also understand that perhaps some people can’t disassociate the spiritual from the physical, even when it comes to the highly Westernized yoga-for-fitness. For those people, avoiding yoga perhaps is the best option.

The issue reminds me a bit of the question of eating meat that was sacrificed to idols that is spoken of in 1 Corinthians. Paul clearly warns the church in Corinth away from idolatry, but he also says some interesting things about eating meat that may have been sacrificed to idols.

^8:4 Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” ⁵ For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— ⁶ yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

⁷ However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. ⁸ Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.

He also said:

^10:25 Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁶ For “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” ²⁷ If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁸ But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience— ²⁹ I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else’s conscience? ³⁰ If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks?

³¹ So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

There were some Christians in Corinth that had no problems eating of meat that may have been sacrificed to idols, because they understood that the idols were worthless and powerless and that they had freedom in Christ. But there were other Christians who could not disassociate the two and therefore avoided meat as a matter of conscience. Both approaches were not wrong, as long as neither harmed the other. The person who felt free to eat should not try to make the person eat who could not eat the meat without seeing it as idolatry. The person who did not eat should not judge the one who partook for their freedom in Christ. But all should avoid idolatry.

I think the practice of yoga is similar. There is an association between yoga and idolatrous religious practices, but Westernized yoga-for-fitness often removes those practices and it is very possible for a person to completely disassociate the two and avoid idolatry while still pursuing a fitness routine that takes many or all of its movements from the Eastern practice. This is freedom in Christ. But a Christian who cannot separate the two, especially in practice, probably should avoid doing yoga of any sort. This is a matter of conscience. No matter what, Christians should always remember what true meditation and spiritual enlightenment is: immersing oneself in scripture, contemplating it and God, and pursuing a Christian life characterized by love and truth.

it is also interesting to note that if we refrained from doing anything that is associated with or even comes from the practices of othfrom religions, there are some things that are not vilified the way yoga is that we would be unable to do. Many martial arts, for example, are rooted in Eastern religions and spirituality. Yet Christians do not usually hold the same stance against martial arts that they might against yoga, and don’t even contemplate the Buddhist monks that developed the martial and still practice it in their monestaries. I think yoga-for-fitness  receives the attention it does mainly because of the New Age philosophies. That is a poor reason indeed for Christians to become unbendingly legalistic over such an issue that, for most Christians who practice it, has no real bearing on spirituality.

Yes, Our Ancestors Ate Meat, and Most of Us Should Too

We know that human beings were hunter-gatherers before they started herding and farming. We also know that herding and farming hasn’t been going on long–it only started maybe 15,000 years ago, which is only a fraction of the timeline for homo sapiens and other hominids that scientists say were either our ancestors or closely related to us. (I haven’t looked too closely into the science on that yet; as a Christian its particularly important to me to really understand certain things before I decide what I believe about them.)

However, no matter whether humans were created essentially as is, or whether we did come from some other hominids first, our homo sapiens ancestors were still hunter-gatherers. And a lot of people miss a very important word there. Hunter.

“But they just hunted rodents and insects and other easy to catch gross things!”

Well, no.

Our ancestors invented tools like the atl-atl tens of thousands of years before they ever invented a blow. Tools like these were invented in the Middle Paleolithic period, even as early as 90,000 years ago, allowing game to expand to fish in abundance and even some larger prey–even the woolly mammoth! Imagine hunting something that size! More complicated tools like bows and spears developed as early as 60,000 years ago, allowing hunting to be even easier and abundant. So let me get this straight. Our ancestors were possibly not hunting big game before 90,000 years ago, but still ate meat when they could get it. And they have been increasingly more able to hunt big game since 90,000 years ago.

Think about Native Americans. The teepee made of animals skins is one great example of how a hunter-gatherer type nomadic society utilized their abilities to hunt. The body of just one animal was thoroughly used and highly valued. I remember learning about the hunting parties and the tools used and how much of the animal got used in elementary school during social studies. This isn’t new news, people!

There are still some tribes that live a more hunter-gatherer lifestyle, such as African bush tribes. They are often physically fit, well nourished (except perhaps in times of drought and other factors beyond their control that we don’t experience with the grocery store just down the street), and have very few chronic diseases. Not to say they have none, their incidences are just significantly lower. Most of their causes of death are related to things that we are less likely to encounter and more likely to survive because of modern medicine, and from societal traditions that more modern societies don’t have. Which basically means, even if we don’t want to adopt their social practices and shouldn’t give up an emergency room when we need it, we shouldn’t be afraid of the hunter-gatherer type of diet.

We also have access to a diversity of plants and meats that hunter gatherers usually don’t because of geography. If they have a water buffalo in sight, that’s what they’re going to shoot. They have only their local flora and fauna–what have much more available to us, and we can make use of that.

I’m not saying you should shove your face with tons of bacon–although some days I won’t say no. But I am saying that you should eat lots of vegetables, lots of berries, a fair amount of fruit, some nuts and seeds, a decent amount of meat, and little or no grains, legumes, and dairy.

That’s not to say you can have no cultured food to follow a healthy diet. For instance, a lot of foods we have available, like sweet potatoes, are rare at best if they’re not cultivated, but they’re a perfectly good food choice for you.

I had this in my last post too, but its worth repeating

Anyways, back to meat. I honestly get tired of people trying to say that animal products are horrible for us and our bodies aren’t made to handle them. Especially when those same people say you should eat lots of whole grains. Guess what we’ve been eating for tens of thousands, perhaps even a million, years? Meat. Guess what we’ve been eating for no more than 15,000 years? Grains. Guess which our bodies are most adapted to? Uh, yeah. Meat. We’re meant to eat lots and lots of plants, and meat. Especially fish, which were probably some of the first easily caught meat our ancestors had in abundance. Do you have any idea how good fish is for you? Even most doctors and scientists who advocate plant-based diets have to admit that fish are pretty darn good for the human body.

No matter what I believe about macro-evolution, I do accept micro-evolution, and I believe very firmly that our bodies are designed by both God and nature to handle meat.

The Western Diet and meat eating are not synonymous with each other. You can have a diet that includes meat and be very healthy, as the hunter-gatherers above were before their diet was Westernized. Making the two diets synonymous is a disfavor to people who really want to know what our dietary problems are. The problems aren’t a high protein intake from meat. The problems are sugars, grains, refined foods, bad carbohydrate sources, and in many cases consuming primarily the fattiest, worst meats which are often fed on corn and genetically altered. The solution is to have a more natural diet of more raw, whole foods, choosing lean, good sources of meats, and getting rid of the problem foods.