Health has to compete with industry
For over 40 years I have been working with mothers and babies to teach about and to encourage breastfeeding. Most mothers make milk starting in pregnancy, and will have an increase in milk volume after the placenta is delivered. Yet the big question in my work is “will the mother give this milk to her baby or throw it away?” No other animal has to make a choice about feeding its baby. Industry coupled with a lack of paid maternity leave makes feeding a substitute seem easier. This belief is fostered by an industry earning enormous profits, one-quarter of which they spend on marketing. No one and no thing is marketing breastfeeding; the natural way can’t compete.
The same is true with nutrition. I found a quote today from a well-researched and well-written book “How Not to Die” by Michael Greger MD, FACLM. On page 269, Dr. Greger says, “The science is the science. Too much of the nutrition world is split into camps, each following their respective guru. What other field of serious scientific inquiry is like that? After all, 2 + 2 = 4, regardless of what your favorite mathematician thinks. This is because there isn’t a trillion-dollar industry that profits from confusing people about arithmetic. If you were getting conflicting message from all sides about basic math, in desperation, you might have to choose one authority to stick with, hoping that person will accurately represent the available research. Who has time to read and decipher all the original source material?”
This nails it for me.
I prefer to eat whole foods that I prepare myself, instead of some factory constructed arrangement of nutrients and chemicals. My choice is more expensive, less taxing to the environment, and better for my health.
What do you think?
