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7 More Things That a New Mom Needs, Postpartum Edition

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Emily in Blog, Safe & Natural Parenting

Building on the success of our 15 Things New Moms Really Need list, I’d like to add seven more things that a post-partum mom really needs. Per usual, add to this list as you see fit. What were among your personal lifesavers?

Me? My husband (see item 5), as well as:

1. Nipple Cream
Hell hath no fury like a baby’s first few weeks of nursing. No matter what they tell you, it hurts. It freakin’ hurts. And then, one day, it doesn’t. The timeline varies woman to woman, but one thing I think we can all agree on is a good nipple cream goes a long way to alleviated discomfort from dry, chapped or cracked nips.

Lansinoh, the only topical nipple cream endorsed by La Leche League International, “is more effective than expressed breastmilk, combined with breastfeeding education, in reducing nipple pain and promoting healing of nipple trauma.”

2. Medela Nursing Shells
Nursing pads are a no-brainer; nursing shells are a stroke of genius. Should any soreness ensue, new moms are going to want to air out their nipples as much as possible. They’re also going to want to leave the house. These nursing shells from Medela will help alleviate that discomfort, and prevent further irritation. They also come with reusable absorbant inserts to catch any leaks, of which there will be many.

3. A Boppy
Seeing a pattern here? We here at SCP are big time breastfeeding advocates and believe that in order for a woman to nurse successfully, she’s going to need a lot of support. For example, the Boppy!

Do not succumb to any imitators or substitutes. The Boppy is hands down the most versatile, nursing friendly and useful nursing pillow that will have several lives – from birth through all stages of infancy. My Brest Friend is also good, though it not as versatile.

4. A Belly Bandit
Trust me, combined with nursing, using the Belly Bandit is an almost foolproof way to get your figure back after pregnancy. Moreover, women who have had c-section births are going to need some post partum support. The Bamboo Belly Bandit is antibacterial and more durable than cotton. It’s also a sustainable crop grown without the use of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and excess water. It’s one of the greenest fibers around.

5. A Live In Cleaning Service
Allow me a gender stereotype for a moment. Upon viewing my husband on his hands on knees mopping the floor by hand, followed by folding laundry and stacking it neatly in my son’s armoire, my sister proclaimed: “by God, he cleans like a woman!”

If hiring a full-time maid is not in your budget, challenge your husband to a gender-bending contest. A clean home is a happy home and, believe you me, you’re going to want to be in as happy and clean a home as possible because…

6. An Over Stimulation Ban
About a week – give or take – after giving birth, get ready for the crash. It’s a pretty major one of the hormonal sort and, if you’re lucky, it will happen once and level off. The day it happened to me, I sobbed for an entire day despairing that I was the worst mother on the planet, though I’d only been one for all of five days. It was brought on by, you guessed it…a mess in the kitchen and house full of well-wishers. The great thing about new babies is that they’re new for a good amount of time. Take it easy in those early days and ban all over stimulation.

7. More Pajamas
Not for mom, though that would be nice. More pajamas for baby, who can poop up to ten times a day. They’re on an exclusively liquid diet so you can imagine how pervasive a flood it can sometimes be. No diaper, I don’t care what brand or material it is, can fully withstand it. If you’re planning a visit to a new mom, come armed with a couple pairs of pajamas. She’ll love you for it.

What did I miss? I’m looking for other new mom essentials.

Ban Barbie? How to Protect Our Girls From Unrealistic Standards

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Emily in Safe & Natural Parenting

Screen shot 2011 05 02 at 12.18.40 292x300 Ban Barbie? How to Protect Our Girls From Unrealistic Standards I love this project from Galia Slayen, a student at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Prompted by the struggles she had as an adolescent with an eating disorder, she created a life size Barbie – built to scale – to demonstrate just how absurd Mattel’s standard of beauty is. A standard that we’ve been buying for our little girls for decades.

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While Slayen does not blame Barbie for her anorexia, she does attribute some of her body image issues to the iconic plaything. In her piece on The Huffington Post, she writes:

If Barbie were an actual women, she would be 5’9″ tall, have a 39″ bust, an 18″ waist, 33″ hips and a size 3 shoe.

At 5’9″ tall and weighing 110 lbs, Barbie would have a BMI of 16.24 and fit the weight criteria for anorexia. She likely would not menstruate.

If Barbie was a real woman, she’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions.

With horse hooves for feet (a size 3 shoe?) that last point is a real nuh duh.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Barbie’s come under scrutiny. The same goes for her bug-eyed, bubble-headed girlfriend in the fishnet stockings. Nevertheless, Bratz and Barbies have become an irrepressible presence in the lives of girls, just one among a slew of other hyper-sexualized paraphenelia being hurled at her each day.

Take, for example, the padded bikini top being marketed to seven year-olds and their parents, since they are ultimately the ones making the purchase. The bikini, which has been renamed the “lightly lined triangle”, is from none other than Abercrombie & Fitch Kids who, curiously enough, do not sell one-piece bathing suits for girls. This is the same company that sells ‘cute butt’ leggings for ten-year olds and came under fire a few years ago for purveying thongs to 7 year-olds.

As a mother and a woman, I can’t help but worry for our girls. What about you?

If you’re the parent of a girl, how are you protecting her from becoming hyper-sexualized or falling prey to unrealistic standards of beauty? Have you considered banning Barbie from your home?

5 Things “Nesting” Pregnant People Should Get Rid Of…Now!

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Emily in Detoxing Your Home

First, some bad news. Lead and other harmful chemicals can accumulate in the body and be passed on to babies. As kids get older—and especially when they become toddlers—they are even more susceptible to dangerous toxins.

“Thanks for that,” you’re probably thinking. But here’s the good news…

If you have not already passed into the nesting stage of your pregnancy, you soon will. Trust me. You will find yourself laundering, folding, dusting, cleaning and—now!—detoxing with a fervour that will feel supernatural.

Keep it natural, mamas-to-be, and clean responsibly (get your natural cleaning kit on our FB page). And don’t forget to add these five items to your checklist.

1. Toxic cleaners
According to Kidsafe NSW, common cleaners and chemicals around the home are responsible for 95% of all childhood poisoning incidents. Now is the time to rid your home of chemical-laden products (like bleach, laundry detergents, disinfectants, oven cleaners, furniture polishes and floor cleaners) and stock up on non-toxic products with childproof tops.

2. Specialty chemicals
Pregnant women should steer clear of solvents, pesticides (including insecticides, herbicides and fungicides), dry cleaning fluids and anti-mould preparations.

3. Bug zappers
Yes, bugs suck. But those cockroach baits and other bug trapping contraptions really blow…as in lots of chemicals. You shouldn’t be around them, Ms. Preggers. Your child, who will start crawling before you know it, will be drawn to them like insects to a light bulb. Trash ‘em. Besides, do they even work?

4. Dustballs
House dust contains lead, toxic chemicals, allergens, moulds and fibres that can irritate the lungs. Dust frequently, and air out your home as often as possible.

5. Rx
Leftover chemicals and cleaners must be disposed of responsibly. Equally as important, hazardous medicines must be secured or—better yet—returned to the chemist. If you’re in Australia, a great resource is www.returnedmed.com.au. Otherwise visit your local chemist.

There’s five from us. Let’s hear five from you.

What’s on your nesting “to trash” list?

Safe Care’s 3 Online Parenting Faves. Where’s Your Tribe?

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Emily in News & Views

Online parenting sites and communities can equal big bucks for new media companies, and they also offer us a huge savings: maternal and paternal sanity. Here are 3 that, IMHO, have mastered the fine art of parenting.

Is your favorite on the list? Comments expected!

There are so many parenting sites out there and I’m sure that I have a login addy to just about all of them. Being a mom, though, one must picky and particularly choosey about what sites to return to again and again. Otherwise, the worldwide web can quickly turn into worldwide void—and damn it—guess who forgot to go grocery shopping because they wasted all that time on yet another celeb baby installment?

I mean, does having an opinion on penis gummies make me a better mother?

Nowadays I maintain a strict set of criteria determining where I turn to for parenting news and views. What I want is information or an honest insight conveyed to me with a sense of (intelligent) humor, wit and empathy. Above all else, it must all take place in a 100% judgment-free zone. I critique myself enough as it is.

So on to my picks. Let me know if you agree and share your top three, too! What keeps you coming back? And what totally turns you off?

Have you ever been a die-hard part of an online community and jumped ship? Tell us about it!

Okay! Drum roll please…

Mothering.com
It’s unfortunate that the days of Mothering the magazine are gone. I spent many an OB visit flipping through its pages, but luckily for us the Santa Fe, New Mexico brand pioneered onto the web scene long ago. The first issue of Mothering went into print in 1976. Come 1995, they bought the domain name and three years later launched the site. It was originally meant to be a customer service portal for subscribers, but when they launghed their discussion forums in 1999 a rich natural parenting community was born.

It was the first site recommended to me when I got pregnant and it’s the first site I recommend to mothers-to-be, nursing moms, co-sleepers, the cloth-diapering set, and natural-minded parents galore.

Rating: A-grade, all the way

Babble
Babble doesn’t offer much of a community apart from its blogs. But here, blogs—written by some of the most interesting writers blogging on the topic today—are king. Here you’ll find insights that are smart, modern and urbane. At times, you’ll shake your head. But with Babble, you can at least count on using it.

I can’t help but be partial to a website, which has even been nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Overall Website, that calls parenting for what it is: “one of life’s crucible experiences…rapturous, backbreaking and hysterically funny.

Rating: a solid B

Essential Baby:
Last I checked, there were about 204,522 members on board—and 1,117 of them online. That’s because Essential Baby is the largest online parenting community in Australia.

It’s international, mainstream…a bit heavy on the celeb parenting scene, fine. But it offers a reliable and broad range of expertise for parents of babies and toddlers—and really active forums.

Rating: a fair B-minus

It’s Autism Awareness Month: Okay, now can someone tell us what the heck is going on?

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Emily in Safe & Natural Parenting

From over-diagnosis to “Extreme Male Theory” (even internet dating) the exact reason for the increase in autism is still up for debate. It’s enough to drive a mom insane.

bedtime reading for moms 300x199 It’s Autism Awareness Month: Okay, now can someone tell us what the heck is going on?

And you used to read fiction! Welcome to bedtime reading, for moms.

The first time I was due to take my son in for vaccines, I was so overloaded with information—pros and cons, horror stories galore, questions regarding my own parenting ethics—that I cancelled the appointment. I know there are other moms out there who are just as tormented by the dreaded letters MMR, along with TDaP and HIB as I am.

It is such a complex and loaded subject that for me to venture an opinion as to how any mother (other than myself) should handle the great vaccine debate would be foolhardy. As for the experts, some trusted sources say they are incontestably a danger while others insist that they’re not.

Ugh. Seriously, ugh!

No doubt, to make an informed decision requires a lot of mommy research. The most helpful, un-biased information I came across was in The Vaccine Book. You can see how battered and dog-eared my copy is!

Elsewhere in the scientific and medical community, the trend is, indeed, moving towards a consensus that the constant onslaught of toxic chemicals into our homes (via Teflon, plastics, and formaldehyde) is making us sick and absolutely puts the development of our children’s brains at serious risk.

Particularly risky, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are found in every home in America. Moreover, as Dr. Karp explains, “our exposure to them has risen in parallel with the surge in autism diagnoses.”

I can’t help but raise my eyebrows at that one.

There’s also been a theory proposed by Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen called Extreme Male Theory, which speculates that certain environmental factors are contributing to the over-masculinization of fetal brains and that’s why it’s no accident that autism-type disorders are up to ten times more common in boys.

And…according to the World Wildlife Fund, our kids are exposed to more than 70,000 human made chemicals on the market today and that’s gotta make you wonder.

Look, the definition of the Autism Spectrum Disorder is a broad one and I don’t know if we will ever know for sure what causes it. I even met a lawyer who herself was assigned to the Spectrum when she was a child, married a man on the Spectrum and the two of them, not surprisingly, have a child on the Spectrum. She suggested Internet dating had something to do with it. No kidding.

In her estimation, sites like e-Harmony are bringing together adults who were once deemed “socially awkward” but who are now (unbeknownst to them or not) on the Spectrum. Um, okay. I said, but the argument has merit.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Do you think vaccines are to blame for the rise in autism rates? What about household chemicals? Does either scenario impact your vaccination schedule or the way you clean your house? Please share! Together, maybe we can figure this stuff out.

Expecting? 15 Things You Really Need on Your Registry

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Emily in featured, Safe & Natural Parenting

My son was born in 2009, making it a recent enough event that I know what’s on supply and far enough away to know what’s a total waste of money and time. The crib, for example, can wait. In fact, ours ended up being used as a giant laundry basket. The same goes for the buggy.

Seriously. Save your money! It’s impossible to predict what your mutual sleep and strolling needs will end up being until you meet your baby. There’s an abundance of other ways your friends and family can part with their money.

1. Non-toxic cleaning products:
At around 37 weeks into your pregnancy, you are going to go into major nesting mode with a zest for laundering and cleaning that will feel otherworldly. What you eat, your baby eats. What you inhale goes right into his delicate little system, too. That’s why it’s of utmost importance that you switch to natural and non-toxic cleaning products early in your pregnancy. To maintain your supply, hint to your family and friends that this Safe Care Clean starter kit would make a really good gift.

2. Lots of Aden + Anais muslin baby swaddles:
The first time I came across these gorgeous and versatile swaddles was in a boutique clothing store in Brooklyn, NY. Now, I see them everywhere. And there’s a reason. They’re cute, they make incredible gifts and you really can use them for just about anything. We used ours for swaddling (obviously), blanketing, shading, cuddling, picnicking. They are so versatile, in fact, that the folks over at Magic Bean have put together a list of twenty ways to use them.

3. Baby slings, wraps and carriers:
Slings are investments you should probably make post baby. I went so wild for Hot Slings that I bought four of them without even knowing whether or not they’d be right for my body or my baby’s. They’re certainly pretty. But it turned out they were completely wrong for us. I switched to the Maya Wrap until my son was about six months old and then settled on the Ergo, which I use to this day.

My son is over 33 pounds and, dare I say it, the Ergo is still (mostly) comfortable.

While you won’t get immediate use out of your Ergo, it’s a must to stick on your gift registry. In my opinion it is the best soft structured carrier on the market and I’ve tried a few, trust me. I was nursing a slight, um, addiction for a while. While the side carry is so hard to figure out that I didn’t even bother, it has made up for that awkwardness with durability. Ranging in price from $114 to $145, if someone else wants to shell out for it, let ‘em.

4. Lactation support:
Perhaps it’s because I had such a hard time with nursing in the beginning – indeed the circumstances surrounding my son’s birth created a hot bed for the sorts of problems I experienced – nursing was very painful. I’ll get into breastfeeding later, but remember while a “bad latch” is immensely frustrating and you might even feel guilty because of it, don’t beat yourself up.

For some of us, it takes a little more time and a lot of patience to learn the art of nursing. This isn’t something you can put on your registry, but it’s definitely something you can source from your mom friends. Before you give birth, ask them to hook you up with a really good lactation consultant and put her on speed dial. The same goes for La Leche League International. Check out your local group now so they can be there to support you in your hour of need.

5. Cloth diapers starter kit:
I so regret not using cloth diapers and I take all the blame for not doing the research I should have done. I understood cloth diapering in general, but found the whole process of getting set-up oddly intimidating. I’ve spent who knows how many thousands of dollars on throwaway diapers when I could have made a much better investment, for my family and the planet, up front.

Next time around, I’m going to invest in a starter kit and be done with it. I suggest you do the same. It’ll be worth it.

6. Plenty of pajamas:
You will be amazed at how often they poop and how pervasive their poop is. By pervasive I mean…well, consider their liquid diet. With newborns, there’s no such thing as too many pajamas. Precious, lacy, delicate (i.e. stain unfriendly) get ups, on the other hand? Proceed with caution.

7. Hats:
My son was a winter baby and I didn’t take into account how many hats he would need to round out the season. Basic skull caps made from organic, soft material is the way to go.

8. Night light:
Sleeping through the night means slumbering in five-hour stretches. For a newborn, there’s no such thing. You’re going to be up every three hours at least. Embrace the night with a decent night-light, like this one made from recycled materials. Your toes will thank you for not stubbing them to death.

9. A good book:
You know, babies sleep a lot and you will be amazed by how much down time you’ll have on your hands. Now’s the time to read the entire Millennium series if you haven’t already.

10. Breast pump:
Engorged breasts seriously suck. Don’t rent, like I did, or cheap out on anything but top shelf. In my opinion, Medela pumps are the best consumer choice. They’re reasonably priced, portable and, above all else, effective.

11. A really good (PVC-free) changing pad:
Vinyl is waterproof. That’s nice. But…it’s also really toxic for their little butts and for the planet. Since you will want to leave the house to show off your bundle of joy, make sure you register for a changing pad that can go with you and grow with you. Inhabitots features some really inspiring examples.

12. Boppy Nursing Pillow:
I’ve tried other nursing pillows and my own pillows and must say that when the Boppy came into my life, it revolutionized the way I nurse. It’s no wonder that they’ve received so many awards and accolades. Well-deserved.

13. Activity mat:
Oh, the time you and your little one will spend on your activity mat. Ours became a real litmus test of how much he was developing month to month. Most of the videos in my vast library of my son’s first three months were shot while he was on his mat. Those are memories that I’ll forever cherish.

14. Book, books and more books:
And if there’s a book you really like, ask for two copies. Baby saliva is a powerful solvent that will eat through your board books turning Sandra Boynton’s dancing cows and pigs into cardboard mush.

15. Cuteness for the sake of it:
Look, spending $35 on a baby sweater is a bit indulgent. But I gotta say, if the in-laws are buying…come on, let them spoil you. I specify you and not your baby because they’re already cute by virtue of being babies. Sweaters like these are made for the sake of mommy, and there’s not a single thing wrong with that.

Did I miss anything? What are must haves for new moms? Tell me in the comments below!

Join Our Community!

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Emily in featured

Yeah, yeah…we know we’re not the first ones to hop on the Facebook bandwagon. But we, like everyone else, did it for a reason. As the number one social networking site in the galaxy (although…what do we really know about the cosmos?) Facebook is the best place to connect with other moms and dads that share some of the same parenting values and ideals as we do.

Realistically, you can’t come by Safe Care Parenting everyday (heck, neither can I). More than likely, though, you’ll check your Facebook profile. At least once. Come on by and like us so we can tap into your news stream with heath & parenting news, ethics & conversation, funny stories & links worth reading. We’re still posting here at Safe Care Parenting, just once or twice a week. On Facebook, we’ll be checking in five days a week (maybe even weekends).

Over and out! See you on Facebook.

Air Freshener: It’s a $1 Billion Business (Even If It Is Febreezy Poison)

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Emily in Detoxing Your Home, featured

You thought your grandparents were the only people left on the planet using air freshener? Think again. Along with Pampers, Tide and Pantene, among Procter & Gamble’s biggest selling products is Febreze. Between them, the big four contribute to 70% of P&Gs annual sales, which hovers around $80 billion annually.

Look. We’re not going to fault the avid air freshening consumer for wanting their home to smell fruity or sea foamy clean (though have you actually smelled sea foam?). It’s just the problem with spritzing up your house with air freshener is that it’s akin to bathing your kid in the bidet. It’s not a bath; it’s a coverup. Full disclosure: I myself am guilty of the bidet bath.

But according to Healthy Child Healthy World (a reliable source on this sort of thing if ever there was one), air fresheners work by “coating your nasal passages with an oil film or releasing a nerve-deadening agent.”

For the love of our children…do we really need to be spraying this stuff in our homes?

Toxic chemicals like camphor, phenol, ethanol, formaldehyde, and artificial fragrances give air fresheners their fresh-like smell and exposure to these chemicals can cause headaches, rashes, dizziness, migraines, asthma attacks, mental confusion, coughing and who knows what else. Some ingredients found in air fresheners have even been linked to cancer.

In a study published last year in Environmental Health, women who use more household cleaning products, like air fresheners, doubled their risk of breast cancer. And the implication for our children isn’t so fresh either: toxic phthalates, found in air fresheners have been linked to birth defects.

A Safe Care Parents best bet is this: save some dough, save your family the headaches. Summer breeze is readily and cheaply available via your house’s built in ventilation units: windows and doors.

What do you use to freshen up the air in your home? Is air freshener a must for you? Let’s talk about it…

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, Except When You’re Writing About Parenting

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Emily in Safe & Natural Parenting

Parenting isn’t always pretty and in a mommy market obsessed with the grittiest of nitty personal details, Safe Care Parenting wonders, what happens when blogging and writing about parenting gets downright Care-less?

This blog is called Safe Care Parenting. We’re very specific about what we write about and why we write it. We’re not inflammatory or even all that controversial. But in a buzz-obsessed marketplace where even the most inflammatory comments are a currency as good as gold, maybe we should reconsider our approach.

In old media, shock jocks like Howard Stern ruled the airwaves. In “now” media, an emerging trend these days seems to be shock mom everything. It’s driving traffic and sales, yes. But does it come at a long-term cost? Do parenting memoirists have a responsibility to protect the families about whom they write (i.e., theirs)? Or are we living in a brazen new world where parental discretion is a bore?

Here are three examples to get the conversation moving…

1. Last week, this Babble blogger pondered, “I think I love my son just a little bit more than my daughter.” And that’s not all she mused about…

There are moments – in my Sophie’s Choice type musings – when I wonder which child it would really be worse to lose…if I were ever forced to choose…It’s like watching a bus accident on TV: you can’t help but wonder, “What if that was my kid??”

…Then I feel terrible and ashamed for ever having thought such a thing, because I really love my daughter and I would never want to lose her at all. When she’s not being defiant, she’s a lovely little girl…

2. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of the critically acclaimed memoir “Hiroshima in the Morning,” posed an interesting question in an article she wrote last month on Salon.com. In an essay titled, Why I Left My Kids, she asks, does being a good mother mean being a full-time mother?

In 2001, 16 days after my youngest son’s third birthday, I walked out the door of my Brooklyn, N.Y., brownstone with one piece of luggage. I was leaving my family. Two sons, age 5 and 3, and my childhood-sweetheart husband, my partner for 20 years.

…

The question I am always asked is, “How could you leave your children?” How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed? As if I abandoned them on a desert island, amid flaming airplane debris and got into the lifeboat alone?

Hyperbolic. Inflammatory. But that’s part of the point. Because my relationship with my children survives. In fact, it has improved.

3. And, of course, you’ve no doubt heard all about the Tigress herself, Amy Chua. She wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a brutally honest account of extreme parenting, “the Chinese way.” In a WSJ article that went mega-viral, she wrote:

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn’t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early.

I think most of us would agree: calling your child “garbage” is extreme. But it does, indeed, generate conversation. Uncomfortably honest explorations of motherhood, such as Rizzuto’s, are not experienced in a vacuum and provide insight into otherwise taboo points of view. And Kate’s blog certainly got us babbling in contrition, admission, admonition, you name it—‘cause if you’re a mom, chances are you have an opinion. Over 400 wrote in on the comments and 3,000 liked it on Facebook. From the looks of it, though, her status as shock mom of the week might have left her with some egg on her face.

You can’t unwrite words. Let me delete that. You can unwrite words. Once you hit publish you can’t take it back, kind of like calling your kid garbage…for better or worse.

Let us know in the comments below: do you think these shock moms are being refreshingly honest or demonstrating shockingly bad taste?

The Five Second Rule? Well, That Depends on Our Protagonist

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Emily in Detoxing Your Home, Safe & Natural Parenting

A Tale of Two Germs: The Country Microbe vs. The Big City Bug

Humans are funny about microbes and germs, as well we should be. Some of them are dangerous. As such, we launch antibacterial crusades in our kitchens, bedrooms, play areas, dining areas—you name it—often to the detriment of our immune systems.

The more obsessed we, as a species, have become with “clean” the more our immune systems have shifted away from fighting infections to developing more allergic predispositions.

Basically, overly sterile environments lead to higher rates of illnesses, particularly among children, so much so that when we—and they—do come in contact pollen, mold, animal dander and dust, the consequences can be disastrous. Add to that Petri dish smaller households with fewer children passing germs to one another and decreased outdoor playtime, over cleaning (hyper-sterilizing, we’ll tag it) has become the dangerous new epidemic.

Look. Soap serves its purpose; the more natural the better. But there’s something to be said for letting kids get their hands dirty, and that is:

The Tale of the Innocent Country Microbe…

In a study published online in The New England Journal of Medicine last month, researchers found that kids who grow up in environments that afford them a wide range of microbial exposures, such as traditional farms, are protected from childhood asthma and atopy.

Apparently, the chance that kids growing up on or near a farm developing asthma was reduced by up to 51 percent, particularly if there were any cows, pigs, and hay involved.

…vs. the Plotting of the Big City Bug

I was riding the B or D line—can’t remember which—into Manhattan one morning years ago, watching a twenty or thirty-something year-old immigrant mother feeding her toddler bits of banana. She dropped a piece on the surface of the subway car and, quite reasonably, left it there. The mother’s mother was with her and made a show of picking up the banana to feed it to her grandchild.

This, of course, did not go over well with her daughter and grandma proceeded to put the banana into her mouth, which had been on the floor for all of 1.35 seconds, and swallow it with an obvious “bite me!” air as if to comment on Americanization of her daughter’s sensibilities. As an American, I could see her point. Some of us are very fastidious when it comes to the encroachment of germs, but upon further introspection I don’t think it’s fair to assume this wordless exchange had anything to do with cultural or inter-generational differences. It was likely a continuation of the five-second debate that’s been taking place in households all over the world for millennia.

“The five-second rule probably should become the zero-second rule,” Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College, told the New York Times—bursting bubbles from here to Timbuktu. “Eating dropped food poses a risk for ingestion of bacteria and subsequent gastrointestinal disease, and the time the food sits on the floor does not change the risk.”

The risk of bacterial transfer depends on things like the type of floor (a NYC subway car, in this case), the type of food (bananas are rather absorbant), the type of bacteria (hmmm, transit proof), and how long the bacteria have been on the floor (knowing the MTA, who knows?).

All that adds up to, “Grandma! That’s gross.”

What to do when a germ encroaches on you?

Don’t panic or carpet-bomb the sanctity of your home with gallons of bleach or industrial-strength antibacterial drones. You can “see them working”, sure. But that’s because of the isobutene, safe enough…but a highly flammable and explosive substance that could very well cause narcosis, nevertheless.

Opt for a natural solution like vinegar and switch to non-toxic products like Safe Care Clean.

And never underestimate the power of open windows, chem-free dusting, and keeping the moldy beast at bay.

It’s a new sort of “clean” to get used to, but as Mr. Dickens wrote:

It’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.

Next week on classics Friday: Of Mites and Men…

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