Organic foods

[Moongrinner]

Wow! I got much more response than i had thought I would! It's ben interesting to read everyones opinions and thoughts. My LO is only 5 months old and so far everything she eats is organic (brown rice cereal, bananas and applesauce to date) and I certainly plan on keeping it that way as long as possible.

we used to get organic produce delivered to our house and MAN WAS IT SOOOOOOOO GOOD! Unfortunalty I can't afford it now. Not so much because of the price as with my and my man's irratic work schedules we ended up throwing the food out half the time and it just works better to buy little bits as we need it.

Berries, meat and dairy is most important to eat organic I think. berries really suck up pesticides and actually have been known to make the workers ill from picking them! The things they feed livestock that is conventionally raised here in the US is just plain NASTY. It is now illegal (since mad cow and all) to feed dead ground up livestock to the samr species like they used to (dead cow to live cows) but now they just feed the dead (usually diseased) chicken and pigs to the cows and the dead cows and pigs to the chickens and the dead pigs and cows to the chicken along with sawdust and manure and all kinds of "fillers" that these critters just shouldn't be eating. Plus the HUGE amounts of growth hormones pumped into cows especially just can't be good. And all the antibiotics make me nervous too because that's all stored in the meat and milk and then when we ingest it it enters our bodies and antibiotics are becoming increasingly less effective on all the illnesses out there and I believe that overuse of antibiotics is a contributing factor to faster mutation of the "bugs".

I agree that less processed foods and making it from scratch is a super cool and wonderful thing to do!

Anyway...I'll get off my soapbox now

[Nay - Mateo's Mom]

Hey Moongrinner!

I'm with you on the Meat and Dairy bit. At our house ALL of our meats and dairy products are organic. We're slowly transitioning to becoming 100% organic foods. Like you, we buy bits at a time. My mom saw a news thing the other day where they were talking about autism in children, and it used to be something like 1 in 60,000 kids was autistic, and in like 10 years the number is now 1 in 60!! 
The doctors/scientists were relating some of the cause(s) as being the foods we eat here in North America. Our bodies just weren't made to be able to handle all of the chemicals, hormones, steroids, etc. It's scary stuff.
We have a "Whole Foods Market" nearby so that's where I do my meat, dairy and some produce groceries.

Okay, that's my 2 cents.

[Mum-of-Two]

In my area, I am having a very hard time finding organic stage 1 foods!  I've been to countless different stores.  Grant it, I have not made the trip to the specialty store yet, but Gerber used to make an organic line and I understand they are discontinuing it??  Does anyone know if that is true?

I would do more organic if I could find it in stage 1 -- and so far I don't find so much more expensive.  Grant it, we're only on cereals and stage 1 foods, but it doesn't hit my budget any harder than regular foods for now.

[evelyn]

we buy organic as much as we can, and always try to buy in season veg.  The taste is far better and I'm a greenie anyway!!
I read somewhere, that the reason young girls are starting to menstruate earlier is because of the hormones pumped into chickens and cows....now that is scary

[Moongrinner]

Yeah, autism rates have REALLY increased. Another interesting theory about why it is increasing involves vaccines. Look into it-REALLY scary stuff. Most vaccines are made with formaldehyde, mercury, aborted fetus cells. geletain and all sorts of other strange things. Also, children today get waaaaaaayyyyy more vaccines than they used to and the blood-brain barrier isn't established until two years old so all that stuff goes straight to their littlr developing nervous systems.

I'm not saying all vaccines are inherently bad things, I'm just saying some may not be necessary (like flu and chicken pox) and some perhaps ought to postponed (why does a 4 week old need a tetnus vaccine?) Just a thought.

the early development of children nowadasy is scary too! I think it comes mostly from milk and cheese and milk products (especially cheese since it is concentrated milk) I mean, they REALLY pump those cows full of growth hormones to get them to produce as much milk as possible, (I saw pictures of cows with udders swollen to the size of german shepards!) and milk already contains growth hormones naturally to give our babies a head start. The interesting thing is that cow milk has one of the same growth hormones in it as human breastmilk. so just think about that in relation to early development in children and also think about cancer-if one already has some cells with a tendency toward abnormality and we're consuming growth hormones, I mean cancer is just unregulated growth of cells.

 I read a quote from a fellow who worked at a slaughterhouse and he said that some dairy cows bones were so weak from them being forced to give so much milk unaturally (with the "help" of injected or fed hormones) for so long that by the time they got to the slaughterhouse he could take their femur (The largest bone in the body) and break it with his BARE hands!

[Mum of girl, boy, boy]

Hi ya,

This is all very interesting stuff.

People might think I am mad but who cares. My DD can't drink milk due to intolerance and doesn't like cheese. To start with I got all worried about it but then decided to think well it's not the most natural thing for humans to have. She tolerates it on her cereal but that's as far as it goes (as a drink she gets tummy ache). I am really concerned that there is so much emphasis on how much milk our lo's get. Ok so I can't tell how much my DD was getting as far as breast milk was concerned at 10/11 months but it was no where near the amount recommended. I did get worried about it but she was taking as much as she wanted (not because she was too full on solids or anything).

Sometime guidelines are just that but we have instincts to use as well.

Good luck everyone.

J