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This company and this state that just don’t have their priorities straight.
An Ohio woman was fired for taking unauthorized breaks for pumping breast milk. She sued, stating that the firing was sexual discrimination. Here’s a story on the matter.
While the Ohio supreme court ruled against her, it was a close call. One judge, Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, disagreed with the ruling, and wrote “The appellate court does not explain why Allen’s trips to the restroom outside scheduled break times were different from the restroom trips other employees made outside scheduled break times. There is no evidence in the record about any limit on the length of unscheduled restroom breaks and no evidence that employees had to seek permission from a supervisor to take an unscheduled restroom break. There is evidence only that unscheduled bathroom breaks were allowed and that LaNisa Allen was fired for taking them. What made her breaks different?”
I agree. A milk pumping break is no different than a bathroom break.
Here in Colorado, we have a law that requires any employer of more than two employees to provide reasonable break time for nursing mothers to pump breast milk, as well as a private place to do it that isn’t a bathroom stall. We have enacted this law because it is best for public health and workplace efficiency. Mothers who nurse their children miss less work because their children do not get sick as often. The mothers also get sick less often, they are less likely to suffer from post partum depression and some studies suggest that nursing reduces your chances of developing breast cancer. Children who are nursed, in addition to getting sick less often, are less likely to become obese, develop allergies, get cavaties, are less picky eaters (and therefore more likely to eat healthy as adults). Breastmilk is also cheaper than formula, which frees up mothers to spend money on more important things, such as better health care, healthier foods, better education for her child, etc.
Mothers who nurse and children who drink breast milk are healthier. This equals less work missed by the mother, less school missed by the child later in life, and less of a burden on our health care system. Both mother and child are able to be more productive members of society and more productive workers in the long run. Encouraging mothers to nurse creates better citizens and making it easier for them to continue nursing after going back to work makes their lives and jobs happier and easier, meaning they will be more productive.
It is in our nations best interest to encourage mothers to nurse and to do what it takes to make it easy for them. Apparently the State of Ohio and the company this woman worked for (Isotoner) were too short sighted to see that.
Many mother’s groups are calling for a boycott of Isotoner and I agree. I don’t buy their products anyhow, but I certainly never will now.
Here are my birthday wishes for today, my 26th birthday.
- I wish everyone in this country had access to top quality health care. Health care that includes as many holistic options as conventional ones.
- I wish single mothers got paid as much as married mothers. I wish mothers got paid as much as single women. And I wish all women got paid as much as men.
- I wish parents who abandoned their children would be held accountable for their actions, and that conservative talking heads would stop spouting cruelty about the parents who actually do stick around.
- I wish every consenting adult is able to make a legal commitment binding them in love to any other consenting adult.
- I wish the government would stop subsidizing junk food.
- I wish the whole world would go see Food Inc. and The Business of Being Born.
- I wish you would become a fan of Rock Your Birth Doula Services on Facebook.
- I wish all single moms, and especially all single pregnant women, would read Mari Gallion’s book, The Single Woman’s Guide to a Happy Pregnancy.
- I wish that President Obama would actually do something worth getting the Republicans this angry.
- I wish people would start voting for third parties.
- I wish world governments would take the 350 goals seriously.
- I wish Whole Foods hadn’t bought out Wild Oats, and Wild Oats hadn’t bought out Alfalfa’s.
- I wish Placebo hadn’t cancelled their American tour.
- I wish this country and culture would make ease of breast feeding for all women a top priority.
- I wish the United States had a maternity leave policy like Canada does. One year off at 60% of your pay, plus one optional year off, unpaid.
- I wish mothering were recognized as the full time job that it is.
- I wish men would stop lying about how tall they are.
- I wish companies built consumer goods to last, instead of to break, become obsolete, or go out of style within a year or two (or less!).
- I wish we’d get serious about alternative fuel and energy resources.
- I wish CAFOs would go away.
- I wish we would crack down on companies who hire illegal immigrants, instead of cracking down on the illegal immigrants individually. Companies who hire illegal immigrants usually do it so that they can commit grievous human rights violations without fear of penalty.
- I wish we focused more on Fair Trade and less on NAFTA.
- I wish all chemicals had to be tested for safety before they are put on the market in consumer goods.
- I wish drug companies weren’t allowed to advertise to the general public.
- I wish there were an ocean in Colorado, and also a place where avocados, bananas and citrus fruit would grow, then I would have no problem going to an entirely local diet.
- I wish I could speed read.
- I wish that I will be able to send Elijah to schools that don’t focus on standardized tests, especially not in Kindergarten. On that note, I wish every parent in America would read Crisis in the Kindergarten.
- I wish I was a size 10 again.
- I wish my mouse would stop doing the weird stuff its doing.
Now I’m going to go make some potato soup for my birthday meal. Yum.
The CDC is talking about making routine circumcision a recommended procedure for all newborn males in this country to prevent the spread of HIV, based on some studies done in Africa that seemed to conclude that circumcision may reduce the chances of contracting HIV in heterosexual males through sex.
The studies were done in Africa, where most men are un circumcised. Volunteers came in to participate in the studies, and men were given the choice whether or not they wanted to be circed, rather than randomly assigning, which makes the studies biased right there.
The studies were also flawed in that the study groups were too small to get an accurate conclusion and there were no controls, basically setting the study up to support the hypothesis. That is not science.
How does circumcision prevent the spread of HIV? That is a question that these studies have failed to answer because they have not been conducted scientifically. For all we know, the spread of HIV in these studies could have easily been less in circumcised men because the circumcised men were more hesitant to show their unusual looking penis, and therefore had less promiscuous sex. In fact, a look at these studies makes that seem very likely indeed. Until I can be given an explination as to how circumcision prevents the spread of HIV, I can’t believe these studies. They just don’t make sense.
Furthermore, even the CDC is quite clear on the fact that circumcision would have very little effect on AIDS rates here IF (and its a big if) the conclusions of these African studies are correct. Most AIDS transmissions in this country take place between gay males and drug users, these studies say nothing about circumcision protecting from transmission in these cases.
Even if we can conclude that these studies are correct, the alleged effectiveness rate of circumcision in preventing HIV is still WAY below the effectiveness of condoms, and leagues below limiting sexual parters. I see very little justification for making a recommendation for a surgical procedure that carries a long list of risks when there are more effective, cheaper, and less dangerous preventative measures out there.
We need more scientificly based studies to confirm this alleged link between circumcision and reduced HIV rates. Remember, only 15% (most of whom are Muslims) of the world’s male population is circumcised, so clearly there are large pockets of uncircumcised populations (say, Europe) where AIDS is not as big of a problem as it is here, where some 75% of men are circumcised. Those are some large numbers that suggest these studies may not be accurate enough to start suggesting routine circumcision.
I think its seriously flawed to start telling people that being circumcised is going to protect them from HIV. It has about the same effectiveness rate as the pull out method does in preventing the spread of HIV. I’d hate to see the country take this as an excuse to no longer use condoms. Circumcised men contract and pass on HIV every day!
One day there was no internet at work, so there was nothing much for the people in our office to do. Somehow, the topic of vegetarianism came up, and I said to one of the Sergeants in our office that I understood the draw of vegetarianism.
“What is it?” He asked, skeptical.
“Its healthier, it has a lower carbon footprint, its cheaper,” I replied, but he cut me off.
“Lower carbon foot print?” he scoffed.
“Yeah,” I replied, preparing myself to explain to him why it was better for the environment than meat eating. But that wasn’t where his next line of questions were leading.
“So, do you have a problem with motorcycles?” he asked.
I was a little confused by the question. “No. Why would I?”
“Because motorcycles are the most polluting vehicles on the road,” he said, explaining that motorcycles do not have the same efficiency standards as cars, and adding some things about the motorcycle engine I did not understand. I was a little surprised, I had always assumed motorcycles had less emissions than cars, because their fuel efficiency is so much better than cars (I’m still going to have to look up his claim, because I want to know this fact for sure), but I still didn’t understand what that would have to do with the carbon footprint of a vegetarian lifestyle.
I questioned him further. He gave me a slew of ideas. That giving up meat made no difference if people are still doing things like riding motorcycles. That lots of things, like motorcycles, should be more important to people than their food (I corrected him on that one, the livestock industry puts more greenhouse gasses into our environment than motorcycles do, it puts more into the atmosphere than all vehicles do!). That one person wouldn’t make a difference just by changing their diet. What it all came down to was this; going vegetarian isn’t going to fix everything, it may not even be the biggest impact you can make, so why bother?
I tried comparing it to going on a diet. When you go on a diet, you evaluate the foods you eat and decide where you can and where you want to make changes. You may be able to give up drinking sodas with each meal, but you can’t give up your morning coffee. Maybe you’re willing to go exercise every morning in order to have a few hundred more calories to eat each day.
He said that was just jumping on the “green” bandwagon and doing as little as possible to be trendy.
So then I explained to him that people who give up meat because of environmental reasons usually do lots of other things to be environmentally friendly too. At that point, I think he was done with the conversation.
I wish I could have gotten across to him that people can’t be expected to do everything, and the environmental movement doesn’t expect that of people either. Everyone’s got different lifestyles and different needs as a result. It would be unreasonable to expect a person in an apartment in the heart of a city to be able to grow most of their own food. It is unreasonable to expect someone with an hour long commute and a kid to drop off at daycare, like me, to take the bus to work in a city with so-so public transportation. It is unreasonable to expect a single mother living off of minimum wage and WIC to buy everything organic. The environmentalist movement doesn’t expect it all from us. It gives us a series of suggestions, and hopes that we’ll do the things that work best for us, as many of them as we can.
Environmentalism understands that people are not black and white, and doesn’t expect that we should be able to do it all or do nothing at all. Perhaps what keeps people like the Sergeant in my office from considering the environmental movement is the impression he has that environmentalism requires everything from us. It does not.
Now of course I understand that as a culture, we’re going to have to make some drastic changes pretty quickly here, but we’re never going to get the people like the Sergeant in my office to make a big leap if they can’t even understand the little leaps. I’m all about showing people options. Eating meat, for this guy, is something he could never, ever give up. Okay, fine, what else can he do? Well, he could start by eating locally sourced meat. Meat that wasn’t shipped here from across the country. That would lower his carbon foot print quite a bit. He could switch to only organic, free range and grass fed meats. Not only would that lower the carbon footprint of his diet, but it would mean he’d be eating healthier, tastier meat as well. Maybe he can’t find local meat, and can’t afford organic meat, maybe then he should just try to eat less meat. Maybe to one meat free meal a day, or one meat free day a week. There are lots of options for lowering the carbon footprint of your meat consumption, and no one’s saying he has to be perfect all the time.
Even if he finds none of this fits his needs, that doesn’t mean he can’t do other things to lower his impact. Its not like if his diet isn’t perfect, he can’t use CFLs, or drive a fuel efficient vehicle.
People aren’t black and white, and the environmentalism movement isn’t all or nothing. The more people doing little things, the bigger the impact becomes.
Disclaimer: After seeing him on the Colbert Report a few months ago, I totally have a crush on Michael Pollan. He is not a bad looking older dude. And his environmental values are right in line with mine. SWOON. Yes, I know he’s married and has a 16 year old son. It’s not going to happen anyhow. But my crush is not biasing my book review. His books bias my crush.
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
These are the first words of Michael Pollan’s brilliant book, In Defense of Food. I got it on audio book from the library and it was so good, I listened to it twice.
This book is sort of a sequel to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I haven’t read yet. I don’t think you need to read it to appreciate this book. Pollan starts out the book talking about the history of nutrition science and what its results have been for our health as a nation. Of course everybody knows that we have massive health issues in our country, not the least of which are obesity and diabetes epidemics, but I guess I never put two and two together before. For decades, we’ve been receiving advice about how to eat from nutritionists, food manufacturers and the government, and it hasn’t made us any healthier. In fact, in almost every respect, we are less healthy than we were before the nutrition scientists started advising us.
The part that blew my mind entirely was when he criticized the official dietary sanction put out in the 70’s to eat a low fat diet. Apparently, there was little to no scientific evidence linking dietary fat to heart disease, obesity, or any of the other diseases of civilization. What there is evidence of is that in cultures where the people lived on a traditional diet that was low in animal products, diseases of civilization (as they are called) are almost non existent. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the fat in animal products were causing the problem. Perhaps, as Pollan points out, the problem is something else in the animal products, or perhaps its that in diets heavy in animal products, we tend to eat less plants, and plants prevent the diseases of civilization. We simply don’t know. But what we do know is that the advice to replace animal fat with hydrogenated fat (trans fats) is perhaps the worst piece of health advice anyone could ever follow, because hydrogenated fat is the only fat that has been scientifically proven to cause heart disease. We also are relatively sure that the advice to cut out fat led to adding more refined carbohydrates to our diet, which is very likely at the root of rising obesity and diabetes rates, and to a nation wide deficiency in Omega 3 fatty acids, which can have a disastrous effect on brain and nervous system function, in addition to lots of other health problems.
When I stopped to think about the period after having Elijah, I remembered that as soon as my milk production was well established, about six weeks after his birth, I proceeded to go on a low fat diet. I lost a minimal amount of weight, almost had to quit nursing because my milk supply went way down (and never fully came back), and I suffered from post partum depression and something I could only describe as brain problems. I could not remember anything (seriously, there was a time I had to call my mom to ask her how old I am), I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I couldn’t figure out how to do new things, and I often would be listening to someone speak to me, but be unable to process what they were saying. It basically felt like the connections in my brain had been cut, and even more than a year since I had pretty much abandoned the diet, I was still feeling that way. Pollan proposed something in the book that made it all make sense to me. The brain is 60% fat. The greatest concentration of Omega 3s in the body are in the brain. If I was deficient in fat, it seems reasonable to assume that it might have had a negative effect on my brain, an organ that is primarily fat. I immediately went out and bought some almond butter and flax seed oil, and then I set to researching the links between fat intake and PPD (in between spoonfuls of almond butter and flax seed oil laced fruit smoothies). Apparently, there is much talk about this subject out there, but I was only able to find two actual studies, one confirming a potential link between Omega 3 deficiency and PPD, and one that found that increased fish consumption (fish is high in Omega 3s) did not seem to have any kind of affect on PPD. Some of the doulas I knew emailed me siting other studies that confirmed a link between healthy fat intake and PPD, along with a slew of personal experiences.
But Pollan cautions against following any food trend in which one nutrient is demonized (low-fat, low-carb, etc.) and one is glorified (protein, Omega 3s, etc.). The whole point of the book is that the value of food cannot be measured by amounts of known nutrients. Food is complex, and there is always some new nutrient being discovered and hailed as a miracle nutrient, or a toxin. Often, the nutrients go in and out of vogue with nutrition scientists so quickly that we don’t even know what’s supposed to be healthy and what’s not (the history of the egg is a perfect example). Instead, Pollan says that we should consider foods over nutrients, and eat a well balanced diet without worrying about the nutritional content.
Thus the rule, eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
There are some sub rules, to make the primary rule more clear. For example, don’t eat anything your grandmother (or great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, depending on how old you are) wouldn’t recognize as food. He targets GoGurt while explaining this rule, which made me smile, because GoGurt is a product that grossed me out from the minute I first saw a commercial for it.
Other rules include don’t eat anything with unpronounceable words or things that you don’t know what they are in the ingredient list, especially high fructose corn syrup (I would add aspartame and hydrogenated oil of any kind to that list). Cook your own meals from scratch, always eat at a table, of the plants you eat, most of them should be leaves/fruits/vegetables (as opposed to grains), and eat slower. That’s not all the rules, but it gives you an idea of where he’s going. I don’t think he says a damn thing that any doctor could really argue with (who can argue with a varied diet based primarily on fruits and veggies, then whole grains and nuts, then animal products?), although nutrition scientists and government officials might take offense at his review of the work they do.
I have not eaten the same since reading his book. I have found it easy to abstain from I Can’t Believe Its Not Butter Spray and Skinny Cow Ice Cream. I have been eating a lot more veggies throughout the day (I can’t give up snacking, like he suggests, but I don’t think it’s so bad if you snack on fruits and veggies, right?). He has convinced me to try anchovies (as soon as I find a good recipe for them that might make them seem more palatable). The changes I made to my diet haven’t been that dramatic, but I’m hoping that I can report a positive difference once I’ve been doing them long enough. I’ll keep you all posted.
Who here knows about ICAN? I didn’t, until a friend of mine from the midwifery training program I’m enrolled in was named president.
ICAN is a great organization that provides support and advocacy for women who have had a c-section. Whether you are unable to have babies vaginally, or you have had many a successful VBAC since your cesarean birth, ICAN is a great recourse for you.
They also dedicate themselves to preventing c-sections. Of course c-sections are life saving operations, but they come with many health risks to mother and child, and they are best avoided, if possible. Kind of like chemo therapy. Of course, it kills cancer, but you’re better off avoiding getting cancer in the first place because chemo therapy is awful. If there are ways to prevent cesareans (and cancer), they should be found and implemented, and that is what ICAN is helping to do.
So who’s a little freaked out? I’m not going to lie, I am a little. Sure, more people die of the regular flu every year than are dying from this flu. And more people contract TB every year than have contracted this flu. And I read a horrifying statistic the other day that one in every 38 American boys has autism, (talk about an epidemic!) but you don’t hear a lot of panic about these things on the news.
Still, I’m a little freaked out. I’m freaked out partially because of the swine flu itself, and partially because I’m afraid of what the government’s reaction to the swine flu might be. Not to mention the people out there who are also freaked out.
That’s all I’m going to say about this, because I think it might be being talked about too much.
I am sick though, and Elijah has been too. Cue ominous music.
I read this article about eating your placenta and I thought I’d share it here. What do you guys think? The article makes the point that its just a peice of meat. Okay, sure, just a peice of meat.
BUT IT’S HUMAN MEAT!!
I just can’t get around that.
I know lots of people from other cultures do it, but its just not for me, thanks.
President Obama last night declared that health care reform would be essential for fixing the economy. With that in mind, here is a petition that is being submitted full of ideas for reforming health care so that it is fair for all and truely promotes health, instead of treating syptoms. It addresses issues such as freedom of choice in health care, alternative medicine, tax incentives for purchases that increase health (such as gym memberships) and proposes a free market friendly version of universal health care which covers everyone while still allowing for choice of health care provider and competition in the market place to drive innovation and bring prices down.
Please follow the link below, read about the proposal, and sign the petition. The more people who sign, the more likely it will be that we will have a health care system like this one day.
