Lately I've been feeling like I cannot win when it comes to the health of my children.
Disclaimer: my children are very healthy, are seldom sick, have zero allergies (Ben has a touch of seasonal allergy). Chris & I have hearty constitutions as well.
As a mom, I want to do the best for my children. I want to feed them good food, exercise their minds & bodies, and most importantly teach them about God and His love for them. Seems not too difficult, right? Well, here's a typical day and what I feel I'm up against in parentheses:
We wake up around 6:30 am. I go for a run while Chris feeds this kids breakfast, usually chocolate milk (that organic milk was too expensive at $6/gallon last week, so I bought conventional) for Ben, orange juice with calcium for Caroline and non-sugary cereal. I come back from my run and get everyone ready and eat breakfast myself, lately it's been organic yogurt with frozen blueberries, honey & sliced almonds (all non-organic). It's not even 8 am and my family has ingested like 100 pesticides.
I have been trying to limit their TV time to 1 - 2 hours per day, so we go outside to the park so they can run around and not succumb to the childhood obesity epidemic in this country. I put sunscreen on them (crap, I can't find my organic sunscreen and all I have is Aveeno, which I read on the label has ingredients that can cause skin cancer). I guiltily slather some on so they don't get sunburns and head out to the park.
Kids run around and we eat a healthy lunch, which consists of turkey sandwiches (turkey with nitrates and non-organic cheese), pretzels (high fructose corn syrup) or nuts and apples (non-organic, part of the dirty dozen). Go home, Caroline takes a nap and I do a quiet time, take a mini-nap and then start on dinner. Since I've been trying to switch us to a less meat-dependent diet since the way we produce meat in this country is horrendous, so it will be tofu stir-fry (tofu is made of GMO soy and stir fry contains non-organic vegetables). Dessert will be homemade popsicles made with orange, peach (non-organic, on dirty dozen list) & mango juice.
At the end of this day, they've probably consumed thousands of pesticides and exposed to lots of harmful chemicals. We belong to an organic vegetable CSA (which starts in 2 weeks), as well as an organic meat CSA. This is a LOT of money for our one-income family and yet my family is still exposed. Everything on the dirty dozen list are things we eat on a regular basis so converting all of that to organic is going to add $30+/week to our grocery list! I already buy potatoes, lettuce & peppers organic, but can't bring myself to buy organic apples because I don't think they taste as good and have to be imported from Chile and Argentina.
I'm the type of person who worries about what I can't control (i.e., plane crashes, tornadoes and the like) and so I try to control as much as I possibly can in the meantime. But it sometimes seems impossible to control the chemicals and pesticides that go into my family's bodies without spending all of our money. Plus, I think that we eat pretty healthy!
It's frustrating to me as I live in a community where children live off of pop and chips and other junk food. Is it not better to give children fruits and vegetables instead of junk food with zero nutritional value? But then their pesticide level in their bodies goes up as well as most people on food stamps cannot afford organic produce. Heck, most people with middle class incomes can't afford it. Does that mean that good health is restricted to only the wealthy? Food, Inc. gave an alarming statistic that 1 in 3 children born after 1990 will develop type 2 diabetes. If you're a minority living in the inner city, that statistic jumps to 1 in 2.
Boo. The older I get, the more cynical I am about our government (that they actually care about the people and aren't completely beholden to lobbyists -- in this case the food industry), corporations who only care about money and their shareholders and just capitalism in general. I am sick of feeding my children a piece of tofu and worrying that they are going to get cancer! I feel like it's never enough.
3 comments:
I know what you mean, this issue is very frustrating for me too. We eat a lot of beans since I only buy meat once a week.
I don't buy most of the dirty dozen organic unless it's inexpensive. I just avoid it altogether and do the 'clean 15' instead (we eat a lot of frozen fruit/veggies because TJ's sells bags of pesticide-free wild blueberries for very cheap and I can also get 'clean 15' frozen veggies for much more reasonable than fresh).
Here's the latest list of bad/good produce: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/06/01/dirty.dozen.produce.pesticide/index.html?hpt=C2
This is a really good post. I am not as worried about it (probably as I should be), but it is frustrating to me. The amount you would have to spend on groceries for a family of four to eat that way is ridiculous.
Like your family the dirty dozen is our primary vegetable and fruit intake (not to mention the cheaper fruits and veggies). As it is, milk is probably the largest percentage of our grocery bill. I cannot even imagine spending double for it. On the one hand, you can donate a dollar a day to feed someone in another country and yet it seems to take about $1000 a month to feed a family of four healthy organic food in America.
I try to set small goals for myself, but the situation is so multi-faceted. I hope that since I am moving slowly toward progress in this area, progress will also happen in our country as I move. We eat so little processed food, but it still seems that every single thing we eat has something wrong with it.
BTW, not to frustrate you anymore, but have you heard about this??? When I first heard, I was shocked.
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/02/whole-foods-365-organic-made-in-china-an-abc-expose/
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