Healthy Child Healthy World: Is it Healthy to Raise a Vegetarian Baby?

Vegetarian parents often wonder whether raising their children with a similar diet will affect their nutrition and health.

Dr. Sears explains that with the proper food and information raising a vegetarian baby can be just as healthy.

Democracy Now: Dr. Gabor Maté on ADHD, Bullying and the Destruction of American Childhood

A spike in diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other mental disorders has fueled an unprecedented reliance on pharmaceutical medications to treat children, with long-term effects that remain unknown. We speak with Canadian physician and best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. He argues that these responses are treating surface symptoms as causes while ignoring deeper roots. Dr. Maté says children are in fact reacting to the broader collapse of the nurturing conditions needed for their healthy development.

Time: Move Over, Milk Banks: Facebook and Milk Sharing

Classical art and public health be damned, Facebook has censored countless breast-feeding photos for violating the company’s terms of use, a policy that has inspired more than 250,000 people to join a Facebook group called “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene!” Kwasnica has protested her four account suspensions by e-mailing administrators and keeps doggedly reposting photographs and organizing virtual “nurse-ins” via her Facebook group, Informed Choice: Birth and Beyond. But last month it occurred to her that the global breast-feeding community could use social media to organize real-world, offline “lactivism,” in the form of milk sharing.

The result is a new network called Eats on Feets — a play on Meals on Wheels — that uses Facebook to connect women whose babies need supplemental breast milk to women nearby who have extra milk to give away…

Most women in the U.S. try to breast-feed, but many hit roadblocks. Facebook, however, is helping women turn to each other before they turn to formula. Jeannine Fisk of Eau Claire, Wis., knew she wasn’t producing enough milk for her son when he was 4 weeks old and still not gaining weight. When a midwife suggested that she use donated milk, another mother who was at the birth center offered to pump some milk for Fisk right then and there. Fisk got another 5 oz. from a neighbor and found three more donors via the “Hey Facebook” page and Craigslist. She saw her son grow from wan to chubby, and within three months she was able to increase her own milk production. Now, she’s donating her oversupply and administrating the Wisconsin Eats on Feets page.

Peaceful Parenting:  Mother’s Antithesis

I am large in my skin

I make no apology

This belly grew a baby

Why should it be flat?

It curves with the memory of the womb.

These breasts fed a baby

Why should they be pert?

They swell with the memory of milk.

These hips carried a child

Why should they be slim?

They are full with the memory of life.

My bones are secret under flesh

My skin plump and white and fine

Mine is the face of Botticelli

Mine is the water of the Nile

Mine is the shape of things forbidden

Daughter of Gaia, grown beautiful and wild.

~ Lorri Barrier

Eco Localizer: San Francisco Supervisors Override Mayor Newsom — Happy Meal Toys Officially Banned

The ordinance was approved by the Land Use Committee, and then the Board of Supervisors (despite much opposition from McDonald’s and some delays), and then was vetoed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Yesterday, however, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors barely overrode Mayor Newsom’s veto with a vote of 8-3.

While Mayor Newsom considered the ban well-intentioned, he stated that the decision to buy Happy Meals and other fast food was up to parents and the ban went too far beyond government’s jurisdiction. Of course, 8 San Francisco Supervisors thought otherwise. While it is up to parents what their children eat, they viewed this system as pure, predatory marketing that harmed the health of kids in their area.