More on How I Was Born in the Wrong Century

Following the whole cast-iron pan thing...

...superblog Crunchy Chicken is hosting, of all things, a PIONEER WEEK in November. If there was ever anything that this toilet-paper-shunning, toothpaste-making, seldom-showering, scratch-baking household was made for, I would have to say it's that.

You can click the link and check out the rules for the Pioneer Week Challenge. Some of them include only having one light on in the house at a time, minimizing the length of your showers, and cooking all food from scratch. On 98% of them, we're not even waiting until November-- we're already there!

We've also unofficially taken the CK Freeze Yer Buns Challenge...

Like in the summer, when we see how long we can go without turning on the AC (this summer, we only used it a couple of days at all--one of the perks of living in the basement), we like to make a sick little game of seeing how long we can go without turning on the heat in the fall/winter. Virginia winters are so much milder than what we're used to anyway! The funny thing is that we don't even pay for utilities except for water, but in a way, WE ALL PAY FOR THEM. You know what I mean? Just in case you don't: I mean fossil fuels, and global warming, and that kind of thing.

So we sleep under many heavy blankets at night, we dress in layers around the house, we get up and move around if we feel chilly, and Oh, Lord, I have become my parents in the ways I least thought possible.

Another reason to keep the house so cold (ours was 55 degrees today)? It's good for your immune system. The clincher for me was this article from Hen and Harvest, excerpted here:

We need to let our bodies do more work warming and cooling themselves. Several years ago when I sat shivering in my herb teacher’s living room as she told us of the immune benefits of keeping the house at 55 degrees F., I didn’t want to believe her. It wasn’t until the Riot for Austerity’s challenge to lower the thermostat and use less energy for the earth’s sake that I started considering really doing this. Keeping the house cooler in winter, and warmer in summer, revs up the immune system and works that muscle. That doesn’t mean we should feel cold! No, actually helping the body to warm itself is imperative to staying well or overcoming illness. Wear plenty of warm layers in winter, move around more and take in lots of warm foods and drinks.

Doing more manual labor, walking and biking and moving around more will not only help us keep warm, but it also makes us breathe harder–which pumps up the immune system too–and sweat–which works one of the channels of elimination, the skin‘s pores.

Eating local and seasonal “real food” instead of energy-intensive processed foods, helps our digestive system. To paraphrase Michael Pollen in In Defense of Food, for immune health don’t regularly eat things that your grandmother (or for some of us, our great-grandmothers) wouldn’t recognize as food. And eat cooked, warm foods and drink warm or at least room temperature liquids as much as possible.

Many of us are trying to be healthy by eating our salads and baby carrots all year long. Cold food is a lot harder for our body to digest. It actually takes important energy away from the work of the immune system, makes our digestive system work overtime, and makes us cold. We all know that in the winter salad greens aren’t naturally growing in the northern climates–they’ve been shipped thousands of miles. With peak oil and high fuel prices, that’s unlikely to continue and that’s a good thing for our bodies. Traditional diets and traditional healing practices include warm foods in the diet at all times for sick people and even most of the time for healthy people. A bowl of oatmeal or cooked eggs are much better for your immune health than granola, and cooked greens or other veggies instead of salad in winter are much more seasonally appropriate. [emphasis mine]

I don't know how she did it, but she actually made the Spartan lifestyle I was exposed to as a child sound appealing. Cozy, even. Long walks, warm sweaters, hot drinks. The whole scenario sounds downright comforting. Another thing that warms you up? Standing with your arms plunged into hot dishwater (and washing the dishes, of course, not just standing there with your arms in greasy water).

More and more we are getting back to the idea that things have been done a certain way through most of human history for a good reason. Call it divine inspiration, trial and error, or survival of the fittest (and it's probably some of all three), but it just doesn't make sense that our generation has poo-pooed thousands of years of human civilization and decided to reinvent the wheel on such basic human needs as food, farming, and, of course, birth. I love the point above about eating locally and in season--though we've been indoctrinated by "health experts" to believe we should be paying premium prices all winter long to eat produce loaded with pesticides and shipped in from Chile.

I've been reading the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook (which is so much more than that--it is so densely loaded with information, I don't know whether I'll ever get through it all), which confirms a lot of what our guts have told us about eating local foods in their natural state, about eating whole real foods instead of living on supplements, and about looking at food as nourishment rather than a series of mathematical equations. It's not that that's just a party-pooper way of looking at nutrition, but it's actually killing people by the millions. If it isn't trans fats (formerly touted as a healthy replacement for saturated fat) it's fake sugar (we were told it was healthier than the real thing!) or heaven forbid, high fructose corn syrup, and do not even get me started on the level of propaganda involved in this.

Surprisingly, another book that takes all this to a whole new level is Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autisim, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies. For a long time, I've watched patients and co-workers and friends struggle to care for seemingly normal children who developed crippling food allergies (or worse, breastmilk allergies?!) or regressed into autism. Clearly, asthma and ADHD have also reached epidemic proportions. The author makes a convincing case that these disorders are all related to the same processes of inflammation and infection in three body systems: the immune system, the digestive system, and the neurological system. He talks about insults from environmental hazards, genetic predisposition, dietary influences, and yes, the heavy metals found in vaccines. (If you think the medical community denies this from a place of objectivity, think again.) It's a very articulate, compassionate read, and the 52 five-star reviews on Amazon (many from parents of affected children) are a strong support for what he's saying.

All of this leads me to believe in the (unpopular) idea that just maybe, life wasn't designed to be easy. That back around the fall of man, that whole thing about pain in childbirth and toil in bringing forth fruit from the land wasn't just about labor and farming. Life on this earth is never going to be utopian--never going to be free from pain and disease. Why is it that any time something, whether a nutritional advance (margarine, Splenda) or a medical one (vaccines, epidurals), seems too good to be true--it usually, on a large scale, is?