random stuff; 'female' topics; weston price

8:42 AM 6/1/10

They wanted me to write a blog this morning. I'm not feeling very well but I can write. I started my period and had only mild cramps. Every time I get my period I am grateful to still be fertile and to still have a chance.

I made a mistake some time ago when I wrote a blog where I said that the Weston A. Price Foundation started in 1999, or something like that. I don't know where I got that idea, but it's totally wrong. The WAPF started a long time ago, decades ago. I don't want to say exactly when because I don't remember, but it might have been in the 1950s or 1960s. I think maybe I read that they made a WEBSITE in 1999, or something.

'They' want me to mention again that the Weston Price movement has its grains of truth, mixed with some mistakes - a light side and a dark side. Objectivism was the same way. When Nathaniel Branden left Ayn Rand, he began to criticize the Objectivist movement, while also appreciating the good that it was doing, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I want to do that with Weston Price.

I was reading it again, reading the book and the website. I looked into the stuff about soil depletion. But while glancing through this again I saw several different articles mentioning people eating bone marrow and making bone marrow into soup. 'They,' the voices, apparently know more about this than I do - apparently, they've heard of, or seen, many incidents of people eating bone marrow with no idea of how extremely poisonous it is. Yet all these different articles and different writers are talking about various cultures that eat it. They don't say anything about the dangers of eating bone marrow or cooking it. They don't say anything about, maybe, a special method of preparing it to make sure that it's safe to eat.

There are other things that you 'can' eat, if only you prepare the food a special way. You can eat puffer fish, but if you make the slightest mistake while preparing it, you will die of poisoning. You have to eat exactly the right parts of the fish and prepare them in exactly the right way. It's like playing Russian Roulette. If you enjoy risking your life for no good reason, then you can try eating puffer fish. That's one of those foods that you 'can' eat, but actually, it's deadly poisonous most of the time.

I've also seen websites where people talk about foraging for edible wild plants. I've seen websites where they said that milkweed was edible. They said you could boil the roots of milkweed and eat them. However, milkweed is a heart poison. There are butterflies that eat milkweed and collect the poison inside their bodies so that predators can't eat them - monarch butterflies, if I recall correctly.

Plant poisons accumulate in different parts of the plant - sometimes the poisons are worst in the leaves, while there's not much in the roots, and maybe that's true of milkweed. But there will be a low level of poison throughout the plant, I think, and also, you will have to cut the plant and touch it and handle it, which means you will touch the leaves and stems while trying to collect the 'edible' roots. Doing all that, you will poison yourself by breathing the poison and by absorbing it through the skin, even if you don't eat it. For all practical purposes, NOTHING on the milkweed plant should be eaten, at least, that's what I think. But then, if I followed that rule, I would have to say that potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants aren't edible, either, because they have poisonous leaves. But I eat those all the time. (The deadly nightshade plant family, those vegetables I listed, can cause arthritis for some people, so in a way, they are slightly poisonous.)

There was some famous author who wrote a book, 'Stalking The Wild Asparagus,' or something. He died of a heart attack at a relatively young age, and everybody was surprised, because how could a plant-eating 'healthy' person die of a heart attack? If he was eating poisonous plants like milkweed, then that explains it well enough to me. I don't know whether this particular guy tried to eat milkweed or not, so I can only imagine what might have caused his heart attack.

I don't like to see ignorance. I don't like it that people advocate foraging for wild edible plants, while not knowing about the poisons, and not knowing about transdermal (skin) poisoning especially. There was another incident where I was bothered by their ignorance. I saw a news article on the web where some guy died of a heart attack while he was in the process of judging a rhododendron flower competition. Rhododendrons are poisonous and they cause heart attacks. The article, in total ignorance, said, 'At least he died while doing something he loved.' They should have said, 'He died BECAUSE of doing something he loved.' They saw no connection at all, no cause-and-effect connection, between handling rhododendrons, and dying of a heart attack then and there. No connection at all. Everybody thinks that you can only poison yourself by EATING a rhododendron, or any other poison. They have no idea about poisoning through the skin, and poisoning through vapors that you breathe.

Rhododendrons are so poisonous that I was getting chest pains from the vapors coming off the big bunch of bushes down the street from me, and they are quite far away, I don't know, a hundred feet away or so. I had to close my bedroom windows because the breeze was blowing rhododendron vapors into my room, and my chest was hurting and my left arm was going numb. (At the doctor, they did an electrocardiogram on me, and the doctor said that it showed no evidence that I had ever actually had a real heart attack, even though I've had these chest pains and left arm numbness, and lack of circulation in my feet.) Rhododendrons cause you to have heart arrhythmia. It's not a heart attack, it's just the heart not beating properly, and it can't move the blood around because of the way it's beating. After I closed my bedroom windows, I stopped having the chest pains and the left arm numbness. I also get that effect if I drive up the roads into the mountains, past all the 'mountain laurel' (this is a different word for rhododendron, and people disagree about what they're called - there are many different species) - when I drive past them in my car, my left arm goes numb, I feel heart palpitations, and my chest hurts, but only for a few seconds, merely from inhaling the vapors coming off the plants by the road.

Anyway, I'm rereading the Weston Price websites and I'm not seeing any information about how dangerous foods can be if they are not prepared properly, and if you don't know what to expect from them. Nothing, anywhere, ANYWHERE, has said anything about bone marrow causing the symptoms I experienced. I ate only a tiny little crumb or two, but it was so sickening that I almost threw up. I also nearly lost consciousness - my eyes went dark for a second - I actually saw darkness come down over my eyesight. I started clenching my teeth really hard, and I was clenching them for hours. It gave me a feeling of adrenaline, fear, and trauma, and I felt like I needed to run and get rid of the energy. I felt like I was being killed. I felt like I was going to die. This was an actual sensation: I felt how it feels when you have been severely injured, and your body is releasing trauma hormones, and you're feeling the fight-or-flight sensation. I felt as though irreversible damage had been done to my body. I don't know how to describe that feeling. It's a sensation of wrongness. 'Wrongness,' that's the only word I can say for it. I felt that my body was 'wrong,' like if your leg gets ripped off or something like that. Permanent wrongness, permanent destruction of your body. That's the hormone contained in bone marrow.

I could be mistaken. It might not be a hormone. It could be a mineral, or something else. I don't know WHAT it is. I just know that it is SOMETHING in bone marrow that is so horribly poisonous, I'm sure it could kill you, or make you vomit uncontrollably for hours, or lose consciousness. I had only a tiny bit, while I was being cautioned and warned by voices that I was hearing at the time, telling me to only eat a tiny little crumb of it and then wait for the results. It took about five minutes before it started triggering the vomit reflex. So, imagine if you didn't know anything was wrong, and you kept eating lots and lots of bone marrow for that five minutes, thinking it was okay, while it took five minutes to 'sink in' and start triggering the reflex. You would be severely poisoned and not know anything was wrong. It actually tasted and felt okay going down. It didn't taste bad. Nothing would have warned me.

That is the dark side of the Weston Price movement. Some of the foods that they are talking about could be extremely dangerous. I'm sure there are proper ways to prepare them, but the website articles don't warn you that you have to be very careful about this. And in our society, we don't eat many animal organs, except liver - that's the only unusual animal organ I've ever had, beef liver, and I liked it. I haven't had any in a long time. But all the other organs are totally unknown.

I read one article where they said that some particular group of people ate everything except the spleen, but they didn't say WHY that group avoided the spleen. Why don't they eat it? What happens if you eat the spleen? This is something we need to know. It might not merely be a 'custom' or 'superstition.' It might be something terrible which is important for us to know. Maybe eating the spleen can kill you, and we need to know about this, but nothing else was said about why that group avoided it.

Over at Peter's house I have watched the Food Network or whatever it's called. There was this guy who went around the country doing challenges, like the Suicide Wings Challenge. These were chicken wings cooked with a spicy sauce made from a whole bunch of ground-up hot peppers and chili pepper sauce, and I don't remember the details, but only a few people had ever succeeded in eating all six chicken wings. This guy tried it and failed, so he went back back to try again, and he filmed it, and he succeeded.

Sometimes when I walk through the grocery store I see the bone marrow and I wonder if there is anything I could do to make it edible. I'm not going to try it, especially not right now, and if I did, I would want to cook it outdoors so that the poisonous vapors wouldn't contaminate my house and my refrigerator again. (The vapors in my refrigerator actually landed in the other food and drinks, and if I ate them, it triggered the vomit reflex again.) I'd cook it on a fire or something. But I feel that same feeling of having failed at something and wanting to try it again someday, like the guy on TV who went back and took the challenge again. And it isn't like an obsession. It's just something I think of when I see the bone marrow, and also, it's something that 'they,' the voices, put into my head, once in a while, one of their ideas that they want to urge me to do.

I would say that the marrow might have to be cooked for a very long time, like 24 hours, if you're boiling it in soup. Or it might have to be roasted at a very high temperature. I don't know.

But I think mostly they just want me to talk about it, to question the Weston Price movement. It is actually a 'movement' in our culture. There are lots of people reading the books and changing their own diets.

Salvaging the value from this movement: It is actually true that there are these deformities in the shape of the face and the skull, and the brain, along with other parts of the body. For a while, I was saying that the 'cephalo-pelvic disproportion' idea was a myth. Doctors were telling women that they couldn't have babies because the babies' heads were too big to fit through the pelvis, so they had to have a Cesarean section instead. I thought this was all bullcrap. But I've read in WP that one of the deformities is a small, narrow pelvis which makes it hard to have children. They say that this deformity actually exists.

I thought it didn't make sense that people's pelvic bones could be too small to have children. How did we humans reproduce all these millions of years without help if we had something wrong with our pelvis? I found the answer: There is USUALLY nothing wrong with the pelvis at all, until you start living the modern lifestyle and producing people with deformed, narrow pelvises. It isn't from bad DNA. It's from bad nutrition and harmful chemicals that cause deformities in the bodies of our children, who grow up to be unable to have children of their own.

That's why I hesitate to say that Cesarean sections should be totally forbidden (in my religion). I don't know whether the pelvic deformity is as bad as they say it is. Is it REALLY too narrow for the child to go through, or is that only because the mothers are forced to lie on their back on a table with their feet up in the stirrups - the worst possible position for childbirth? The pelvis has some flexible places that allow it to spread open wider. It's not just one solid piece of bone. It's able to open further, but you have to get into the right position, which is a crouching, squatting, bending position that women naturally get into if you let them move around while giving birth, instead of lying on the table at the hospital. So how bad is the pelvic deformity? I still don't know.

Another great thing about the Weston Price research is: the 'nature versus nurture' debate. He calls it 'intercepted nature' or something like that - I would have to look it up again. To summarize this idea: Most of the time, our DNA (our 'nature') is just fine, but something that we DO (our 'nurture') screws it up. You would have good DNA, except then, you were born to parents who were eating bad foods and being exposed to poisons, so it prevented you from forming correctly. People are born with a lot of problems and they think they have 'bad DNA' and they should never have children because they'll pass along all their problems to their children. Fortunately, that's not necessarily true. Because of WP, we know that unhealthy parents CAN give birth to healthy children. That's especially reassuring to me. I really hope that I can prevent my children from having the problems that I have.

They also say that racial mixing doesn't cause problems. This is a wonderful thing for me to hear. Some people advocate racial purity, for a lot of reasons, and they sometimes say that the deterioration of modern society is caused by racial mixing. I LIKE the idea of racial mixing. I like variety. I like the idea of getting DNA from faraway groups of people that are drastically different from myself. And it's true, I've only dated white people, because those are the people around me, and I am not necessarily going to marry someone from another race, but I am saying that I like the idea. I mean that I like the idea as part of a whole culture, a culture that allows and encourages people to mix. Some people say that facial deformities and crowded teeth are caused by racial mixing, and WP showed that this is not true, so that's good news for anybody who values other races and ethnic groups and wants them to mix together.

I also need to talk about fertilizer, but that's too big of a subject for me right now. I don't like chemical fertilizers, but soil mineral depletion is real, and a lot of times you do have to use some kind of fertilizer. I would want to find out about 'good' and 'bad' ways to fertilize the soil. (I don't like using manure - so many diseases get into our food because of manure. There have to be right ways and wrong ways to use manure, too.) Anyway I'll write about that some other time.

The main idea was that when I talk about eating unusual foods or doing anything non-mainstream with food, I also have to mention that there are dangers to it, and you don't always know what the dangers will be ahead of time. You can't just go out and drink raw milk, for instance, because you don't know where that milk came from, and it might have come from cows that are sick with diseases - for instance, the WP book, or maybe the website, said the brucellosis was a problem in some areas, so they cooked their milk. You don't just run out and do something without having any idea what will happen.

I want to do different things that the mainstream isn't doing, but I want to know about the dangers and protect people against them, so that we can get the most value out of doing those things, and the least harm.