Avoiding dietary diseases

[A Me]

I've been thinking a lot about making sure when everything collapses that we still get the nutrients we need to avoid the dietary diseases (rickets, scurvy, beri beri, etc.). Now, whole grains and beans take care of a lot of that, but rickets is a tricky one.

First, vit D... the best source is sunlight. But how many of us are going to be spending a lot of time in the sun if the violence is such that we spend a lot of time indoors? As for supplements, most are fish derived (cod liver oil, you know) and the state of the oceans now is such that fish products may not be a good idea.

Then there's calcium. That opens a whole floodgate of conflicting opinions: greens are the best source, greens are the worst source, milk drinkers are actually leeching calcium from their bodies, calcium carbonate (limestone) is assimilated the best, calcium carbonate is awful and you should be taking calcium citrate, and on, and on. I am learning that when it comes to plant sources, there are some you need to watch out for and some processing methods that work well for certain greens but only inhibit calcium intake in others. And I'm also really fascinated by the work of Dr. Weston Price.

So, what steps are you taking in your food storage program to make sure your family gets all the nutrients it needs?

[moonwhim]

I understand that sprouting seeds (wheat, etc.) provides a lot of the nutrients you are talking about.

[SmallFarm]

winter squash is a good source of calcium.

[Jason]

Organic is the only way to fly!!!

Imagine what kind of physical condition you would be in if you had your food injected intravenously and only with the core 4 or 5 main ingredients to give you the appearance of being healthy. Wouldn't be long before you would need genetic modification in order to survive disease and bugs!

[A Me]

I see what y'all are saying and I agree with most of it. But what about kids?

A little background. My husband and I manage to eat sprouts fairly often and one of our kids adores alfalfa sprouts. However, we have a couple that won't touch sprouts, squash, any of the green leafies, and one of that couple can't handle dairy except (we've very recently found) in fermented form. We don't feel right about giving him a lot of fermented dairy (just one of those feelings we've learned to go with) and we feel he really needs to eat the greens but he's the kind of kid who will literally not eat if he's told he has to eat a bite of greens (or any other vegetable) first. That method worked with all our other children except this one.

This, combined with a lack of calcium in me from multiple births and a lack of adequate food when we were going through the foreclosure during which time I was pregnant with this child, and a decreased amount of sun in general because of all the health problems we'd been going through ever since the foreclosure led to rickets. That's what the doctors finally decided.

It shocked everyone in our area because we're known for eating healthy (you have no idea how many times I've gone over our diet since wondering what I did wrong). He's on vit D supplements and calcium, so he's thriving now... doing just fantastic. It shocked us for many reasons and completely blew my confidence as a mom. It's been a few months since the diagnosis and I'm just now starting to get a little of that confidence back.

The nutritionists (the nice ones) said that vit D deficiency is becoming very common in the U.S. The not-so-nice ones said that of course he would get rickets because we cut out a whole food group (never mind the fact that he has trouble with dairy and that their own handouts said children could live on a vegan diet). One doctor pointed out that some kids need very little of a nutrient while some need huge amounts. In all, the people we've talked to have been very supportive, but it's still a hard thing to recover from.

Now that I've got that background out of the way, I started this topic because I wanted to see if anyone else has been adding redundancy into their food plans (if the kid won't eat this, we'll try this, etc.). In the research I've done since, it seems that some of the people most at risk for rickets are those who try to live a whole foods diet in an area where they must stay inside fairly often (cold northerly climates) and especially those who cut out dairy. Historically, it showed up among children who worked in factories and in the mines or whose parents kept them indoors most of the time.

The whole experience showed me that there's a balance to nutrition and it includes things I would have never considered (like adequate sunlight). In a situation where everything falls apart in our world, redundancy becomes increasingly important and when you shift one part of a diet/lifestyle, everything else shifts as well.

I think of the kids in Sarajevo who spent most of their time hidden in an apartment because their parents were afraid the snipers were going to get them. Or the Jewish kids who stayed in hidden rooms during the Holocaust. And that's just sunlight. I have pioneer ancestors and one of the stories talks about how they gave away all their food when they saw how bad things were in the Salt Lake Valley in the early days. They survived for weeks on whatever they could scrounge from the Valley itself (including wild greens) until more supplies came in.

I know many of us are relying on our food storage or our gardens, but what if neither of them exist? What if you can't get any supplements? Could you balance your child's diet or your own in the most dire of situations?

I think I'm rambling now and perhaps I've put out too much info. I'll stop talking for now. More later.

[pjbrownie]

snicker snicker. I thought you were going to have a discussion on Celiac disease, peanut and almond allergies, lactose intolerance and other pansy modern dietary diseases. I probably have a couple of them hehe

[A Me]

Ooooooo. Very interesting those. Lactose intolerance is something that runs in our family. We don't have any powdered milk in our storage because of it beyond a small bit someone gave to us once. We don't intend to ever use that for ourselves.

Pansy. Heh.

As for us, we've decided, and our experience with supplements supports, that there is no true substitute for sun. You can avoid the worst of disease with supplements and barely squeak by (as our child did when they were receiving supplements but no sunlight) or you can get the sun, get the full dose your body needs of vitamin D and make great gains (as our child did when we added 20-30 minutes of sunlight daily to his treatment).

The rest we're still figuring out.

Maybe I should have titled this "Possible Dietary Diseases After the Collapse We Thought We'd Never See Again"? Scurvy, beri beri, rickets... oh what fun we might have.

[ChildWise]

Full scope nutrition: Research MORINGA

Natural antibiotics: Research Grapefruit Seed Extract.

[sackcloth and ashes]

Have you tried making green smoothies for the child who doesn't like greens? I know you can buy powdered greens. They're expensive and I don't know how long they last but if you were rotating them, you might be able to keep some greens with the vitamins for a while. I freeze spinach and kale to use in smoothies. I started calling green smoothies green robi drinks (there's a green monster on a cartoon show called Robi) and got my daughter to drink them. Anyway, thanks for the post. I have thought about this but haven't really tied myself down to researching it just yet.

[Rose Garden]

Haven't you read Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon's cookbook? It begins with about 50 pages of nutrition information and includes additional information at the beginning of each section. Sally Fallon is the head of the Weston A. Price Foundation. She says you can get vitamin D from meant and dairy products from animals who have been pasture raised. There's tons of other information on getting adequate nutrition, too. As a cookbook, it's just average since it doesn't discuss adaptation enough, in my opinion, which is imperative if you are doing this kind of cooking, but the nutrition information is priceless. There's blogs popping up here and there though that help with the adaptation, including one that frequently discusses allergy problems: http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/; http://happyinthekitchen-withtara.blogspot.com/.