Cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Lipitor are some of the most dangerous drugs around, causing serious side effects, and blocking the body’s ability to manufacture cholesterol—which is a vital substance in the body for brain functioning and tissue repair. This talk will examine traditional high-fat diets and the healthy populations that ate them—from the Arctic to Africa. It will also look at myths and truths about cholesterol and how our culture has been misled into eating dangerously low-fat diets that create many long-term health problems, including, ironically, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
November 12, 2009: 6 to 7:30 pm, suggested donation: $10
Upper Valley Food Coop, in White River Junction, VT
For more information call (802) 785-2503 or email sustainablemedicine@gmail.com
About the Instructor:
Didi Pershouse, certified homeopath and licensed acupuncturist, has provided gentle and affordable health care in the Upper Valley for over 15 years. She is co-author of the latest homeopathy textbook: “Vital Expression: A Manual on Homeopathic Casetaking.” She is the local chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, and founder of The Center for Sustainable Medicine in Thetford Center, VT where she practices homeopathy, acupuncture, and nutritional counseling. She has traveled and taught extensively in the field of alternative medicine. You can read her Sustainable Medicine Manifesto online at www.sustainablemedicine.org
Didi Pershouse, founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, was asked to testify last Friday in front of the Committee on Agriculture at the Vermont State House on the use and safety of raw, unpasteurized milk. The bill, H-125, seeks to allow unlimited sales of raw milk directly from farms that meet the required safety regulations as well as allow deliveries directly to customers. Pershouse spoke in favor of the bill, with a couple of proposed amendments.
Pershouse’s testimony, lasting about 20 minutes, (but interrupted by the Attorney General’s testimony) began by pointing out the irony that humans breast feed their children, and pump and store that milk, without any of the precautions used by raw milk farmers. “If we don’t allow sales of raw milk, then perhaps we should require pasteurization of breast milk. A child can reach in its diaper and grab back onto the breast. A mother doesn’t always shower before breastfeeding. Why are we so worried about cows milk from clean healthy cows?” She went on to point out that vegetables also are grown in manure and dirt, and that we don’t require pasteurization of those. “But, if we are worried about raw milk, then certainly all lettuce should be boiled before eaten, and carrots too. No more crunchy carrots. Too dirty.”
Finally she pointed out that she could walk into the village store and buy alcohol and cigarettes, which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, yet could not buy the most basic pure food there is: milk, straight from the cow.
One female representative apologized to the male members present before asking a question about breastfeeding, saying she didn’t want to “embarrass anyone,” then asked “Are there really no government regulations for storing breast milk?”
One of the amendments proposed by Pershouse was that the language in the bill be changed from “Farm Fresh Milk” to “Raw Milk”–since that is the term that most consumers use when looking for raw milk, (and “unpasteurized” implies that pasteurization is the normal state of milk.) The second amendment she proposed was that farmers should be responsible for cleaning all jars returned by customers. The reasoning given was that if a customer’s unclean jar were to contaminate the milk, the raw milk industry in general would be blamed–rather than tracing it back to a dirty dishbrush, for example.
An article in today’s New York Times highlights the need for real food and sustainable agriculture, and offers a promising view that Obama and his agriculture secretary may be on track. The best part is reading about how many members of Congress are carrying Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dillemma around with them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22food.html
After burning out from a double major in biochemistry and linguistics and a year of medical school, Adam Lake took a year off to travel through Central and South America studying permaculture and herbal medicine. In 2008 he returned for his second year of medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia and helped start their alternative medicine interest group. Aside from medicine, Adam is interested in economics, rock climbing, wilderness survival, and all things food related.
After learning of Adam’s adventures with fermentation, I asked him if he would use his medical knowledge and practical experience to write a short article on the medical value of unpasteurized fermented foods. –Didi Pershouse
“Hey Adam!” my roommate Steve calls to me while looking in the fridge. I turn from the pile of dishes built up in the sink form a day or two of bachelor-pad living, and see Steve holding up a half-full container of milk. “Do you think this went bad?” Cautiously I swirl the jug a bit looking for obvious lumps. When nothing awry appears, I take a distanced whiff…but it smells more like sour cream than rancid milk.
“Huh,” I say, glancing over at the several bubbling jars next to the sink, “It’s not really bad…it’s soured instead. You could still drink it.” I take a sip to back up my guess. Nothing thrilling, just sour milk, on its way to becoming yogurt or some new cheese. The common bacteria that would tend to make milk rancid appear to have been out-competed by tastier lactobacilli , and I suspect the sourdough and lacto-fermenting oat cultures next to the sink are the cause. I make a mental note about that, as this is the first kitchen I’ve lived in with so many fermentation projects going on.
A few months prior, I had run into a book by Sandor Katz called Wild Fermentation, which appealed to me for several reasons. (more…)
I have a friend who brings me raw, unpasteurized milk, homemade yogurt, butter, and sour cream—all from cows feeding exclusively on grass, summer and winter. It all tastes incredible, and even better knowing that it comes directly from someone I know and like.
He is in excellent health, only needing a tune-up when he falls off a tractor or works a little too hard. At those times, I give him acupuncture, or a homeopathic remedy, a little hands on healing, and a bowl of soup, when we have time. During his visits to my clinic, he can lie down, go to a deep place of relaxation, and feel his energy being balanced out.
Essentially, we are doing each other the same favor—he is giving me food that is deeply nourishing, I am giving him health care that is deeply nourishing. Neither of us is harming the planet as we do it, and there is nothing in our work that is anything but positive, no side effects or toxins downstream. We both enjoy our own work, and benefit from each other’s. We trust each other’s work, knowing full well that only the best intentions go into it.
There is something very satisfying about the fact that his food gives me the energy to do my work, and my work gives him the energy to produce his food. It is just another cycle of nature, and one that has been going on for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, all over the world—the healer heals the community, the community feeds the healer, (since the healer doesn’t always have time to milk the cows.)
If I was practicing pharmaceutical medicine, and he was practicing chemical agribusiness, my “care” would be very different. I wouldn’t know him very well because he would be rushed in and out of his office visits. There certainly wouldn’t be time for a bowl of soup or casual conversation. Most of the drugs I gave him would be masking the symptoms but not actually balancing out his body, and often would create long term side effects which I would then treat with more drugs, without ever actually solving the initial problem. According to the American Medical Association Journal, he would have a substantial chance of dying from the drugs I gave him, and an even higher chance of developing serious complications. Adverse drug reactions to drugs properly administered are estimated to be somewhere between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Standard medicine as a whole–if you take into account medical and pharmaceutical errors, adverse side effects, bedsores, and hospital-acquired infections—is the number one cause of death in the U.S. Higher than heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, and all the rest.
His cows, meanwhile, would be eating pesticides, herbicides, genetically engineered products, growth hormones, antibiotics, and other strange non-grass items like leftover cakes and cookies, and blood of other animals. If he brought me the milk and meat from those cows, I would be absorbing little if any calcium, my gut would be off balance from having pasteurized milk without any living enzymes, and further imbalanced by the antibiotics, which kill off the good flora necessary to maintain good health. The hormones fed to the cows would be interfering with my own hormones, making me more susceptible to certain cancers. Essentially, I would be slowly accumulating the residue of all the chemicals that the cow’s “food” was grown with (to kill off every bug, weed, and microbe around it) and all the medicines given to the cows to make up for the cow’s poor nutrition and housing.
At the same time, we both would be creating a nasty stream of waste from our practices, which, combined with all the other agribusiness and pharmaceutical industries would kill off whole landscapes, rivers, and parts of the coastline, leaving large dead zones in which nothing good can flourish.
This also is a cycle, a short but nasty cycle that has been going on for less than 100 years. An unnatural cycle, that just barely arrived, and yet it threatens to ruin everything: our planet, our health, our historical way of life, and even our happiness.
To turn this cycle around doesn’t actually take that much, except a commitment to return to ways that have already been proven sound–sustainable agriculture and medicine. It also requires a commitment to stop being threatened by the fearful voices that say the only safety from germs is to create sterility. A sterile world is a dead world. A fertile world lives and thrives on interrelatedness and interdependence.
Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analyses of prospective studies
Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN.
JAMA 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.
This study analyzed 39 prospective U.S. studies to determine the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Serious ADRs were defined as those requiring hospitalization or resulting in permanent damage. Only ADRs requiring hospital admission or occurring in the hospital were included in the analysis. Overall, the incidence of serious ADRs was 6.7 per 100 patients and that of fatal ADRs was 0.32 per 100 patients. Extrapolation of these data to the entire U.S. population revealed that in 1994 alone, over 2.2 million patients experienced a serious ADR and 106,000 died from this complication. These figures place ADRs between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. These are conservative estimates, since they don’t take in consideration possible ADRs, errors in drug administration, patient non-compliance, overdose, drug abuse, therapeutic failures and injuries and deaths occurring in nursing home patients.
