Food Issues

A (large) excerpt from an article about why it is so important to support breastfeeding mothers. I found it interesting though because of her thoughts on food and Americans. We are known currently for being an overweight and unhealthy people, this sheds some light on why.

From: Why Support For Breastfeeding Matters more Than Ever By Ellen Malmon

Like me, many women in their thirties and forties never saw a drop of breast milk in their lives before actually producing, it, and we seemed to have survived. It's finally dawning on us, however, that the whole host of health problems we and our children are suffering now: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc. comes from our co-dependent relationship with industrialized food. Michael Pollan, in the brilliant Ominvore's Dilemma, writes that the great cuisines of the world developed through trial and error over centuries to produce a distinctive and healthy diet. Polyglot America has no such tradition, so we careen from diet to diet, fad to fad, RDA to RDA in an effort to figure out the best way to eat. This lack of tradition, combined with our industrialized food supply has severed our basic human relationship with food. This happens even earlier than we might realize, in infancy, with the casual introduction of manufactured baby formula.
Perhaps with science's effort to isolate the health effects of nutrients in food, we ignore the possibility that maybe it's not the antioxidants, minerals, and flavinoids alone, that maybe it's the entire piece of broccoli eaten at the table with your family that makes it healthy. Breast milk is a baby's first real food. While formula mimics the nutrients of breast milk, scientists admit it's still only an approximation of what Nature provides. One scientist even admits that it's "embarrassing" how little they understand the contents and mechanics of breast milk. The AAP thoroughly documents the health benefits of breastfeeding to babies, mothers and even the community at large. In addition to these benefits, breastfeeding helps reestablish our relationship to the natural food chain and starts our children on a path to a healthy relationship with food. The choice to breastfeed should be an easy one to make, but sadly is often constrained by circumstance. That is why we need to push for more cultural and institutional support for breastfeeding, support that women of every class desperately need.
I have no desire to demonize, criticize or demoralize those women who don't or can't breastfeed. The world is full of mothers who can't make enough milk, babies who can't nurse properly, and mothers who work and can't take the time out of their day regularly to pump. Formula seems like an easy solution. But the history of formula, like that of all manufactured food, is filled with tragic scandal: from Nestle's disastrous marketing of formula in Third World countries, to the deaths of infants in China due to melanin-laced formula, and even the recent discovery that supposedly superior organic formula was filled with unholy amounts of sugar. In a best-case scenario, formula is not poison, but it's not real food either.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-malmon/ipeaceful-revolutioni-why_b_322523.html