Published: October 13, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/health/research/14chil.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

To the Editor:

Having suffered asthma myself I can tell you that the best way to raise parents’ expectations for their asthmatic children is not by having them accept that asthma is a chronic ailment and administer drugs more aggressively as suggested in Mr. Nagourney’s article but to offer them the hope of curing the illness without the use of drugs at all.  I cured my asthma using acupuncture, naturopathy, and homeopathy after the conventional doctors had given up on me.  They told me that my asthma would be chronic and debilitating and the best I could look forward to was a lifetime using steroidal drugs and inhalers.  Refusing to accept those terms, I sought and found relief and a total cure elsewhere.  I’ve not had an asthma attack since 1995.

Unfortunately, conventional doctors have a limited bag of tricks when it comes to many so-called “chronic” illnesses.  Worse yet is that they won’t admit to their limitations and leave you uninformed that there may be options for a cure with which they are unfamiliar.  My asthma was so severe that had I not sought alternative ideas for healing, I might not be alive today.

Asthma in children is particularly difficult for many reasons.  These children tend to miss school, must opt out of activities that could bring on an asthma attack, and have drugs administered at school all of which bring physical and psychological hardship upon the child.  In addition, the drugs themselves could be doing more harm than good by causing a cascade of physiological events that can further debilitate the child. Not to mention the hardship of having to experience the inability to breathe.  This is a tough way to start out in life.

For parents who are interested in a cure, there are two books I recommend they read to inform themselves of their options – one is the newly published The Allergy and Asthma Cure: A Complete 8-Step Nutritional Programby Dr. Fred Pescatore and the other is Reversing Asthma: Breathe Easier with This Revolutionary New Programby Dr. Richard Firshein.  Curing asthma is possible.

Sincerely,

Lynn M. Klein
Certified Holistic Health Counselor

I was shocked to see today’s editorial supporting the The FDA’s approval of the use of radiation on spinach and iceberg lettuce.  What I would like to see instead is the New York Times supporting a return to sustainable agriculture methods, which would eliminate any need to even consider the irradiation of foods. Perhaps if we no longer had large factory farms where animal waste is collected in huge piles that taint ground water for miles around, there would be no pathogens to poison the vegetables grown on neighboring farms.  The solution should never be a Band-Aid but instead, getting to the root of the problem and resolving it.

And while we’re on the subject, the treatment of the animals who reside on such factory farms is barbaric.  I’m not advocating vegetarianism but the animals that provide their flesh for our food supply need to be treated humanely and raised in the way that Mother Nature intended – outdoors in sunshine and fields of grass, not confined in small spaces, lying in their own feces, and eating corn which they cannot digest properly causing them distress and serious illness.   Our country has gone woefully astray in its food policies and that’s what the most important newspaper in the world needs to be saying.

I for one don’t believe there is an inconsistency with Emeril Lagasse using butter, cream and other fatty foods on his “Emeril Green” show on Planet Green. There is much research that says Ms. Stanley’s point of view is outdated and  just plain wrong. See yesterday’s article in The Washington Post titled “The Great Divide, Who Says Good Nutrition Means Animal Fats? Weston A. Price” by Jane Black. Or read Nina Planck’s “Real Food,” Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and all of the books by Sally Fallon and Dr. Mary Enig. Even Walter Willet at the Harvard School of Public Health is starting to come around on the subject of fat in the diet.

The fact is that since the American public was told to go low fat, there’s been an exponential rise in obesity, diabetes, and many other chronic diseases. The French never gave up the fat in their diet – copious amounts of butter, cream, and fois gras just for starters. Julia Child was aghast at the low fat movement. The French people have far lower rates of obesity than Americans, lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes and a longer life-expectancy. Although they are starting to move in the same direction as Americans as they start to adopt our fast food, junk food lifestyle. Fast food and junk food contain lots of empty calories and very little nutrition – fat is loaded with nutrients if it’s derived from healthy sources.

No, Emeril has absolutely the right idea – prepare fresh food from scratch with wholesome ingredients as close to the way Mother Nature intended (ever see a cow that dispensed low-fat milk?), eat moderately following your body’s natural instinct not to overeat, and stop depriving yourself of all the foods you love. Deprivation always leads to cravings and bingeing. And overweight and chronic illness. Bravo Emeril!

Lynn M. Klein
Certified Holistic Health Counselor

If the nutrition experts are increasingly embracing whole traditional diets, then why does low-fat dairy still appear as a recommendation in Hobson’s article? Low-fat dairy is not a whole food and people eating traditional diets don’t generally consume it. No matter how hard we try to distance ourselves from the “reductionist approach to nutrition science,” we keep ending up in the same place – recommending low-fat or low-carb diets with the same tunnel vision we’ve had in the past.

If we’re trying to figure out how these “traditional” cultures stay slimmer and healthier than Americans, perhaps it is not just about the specific food choices and their synergies but about a whole lifestyle and reverence for food. Traditional cultures don’t eat fast food and processed junk food. They don’t drink sweetened beverages by the liter. They don’t eat food that is shipped thousands of miles from where it is grown. They don’t generally eat food that is grown from genetically modified seed and treated to heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides. They don’t eat meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy from factory farms where animals are routinely mistreated and their health, and in turn our health, is compromised. Instead of looking at specific food choices, we ought to be looking at our entire food system and how we’ve managed to degrade it so thoroughly in such a short period of time. Americans are overfed and undernourished. It’s a simple notion with very complex ramifications.

It is important to open people’s eyes to the fact that our food choices in the U.S. are often marginal in their ability to support a healthy life. And that slowing down has myriad benefits. There are industrialized cultures all over the world that eat well and live well and have far less obesity and degenerative disease than we do here in the supposed greatest country on earth. We can learn from these cultures instead of foisting our unhealthy lifestyle choices on them in the name of corporate profits.

We can become the greatest of advocates for wellness by speaking with our dollars. The choices we make for nourishment, both in food and lifestyle, will dictate what is available to us. With real and honest information, we can make better choices right now and affect the future of our collective health. It is the role of wellness counselors and health coaches to inform the public about their options but promoting more kale and more tempeh is too limited in scope and not likely to be embraced by many.

Dr. Allison should step down or be removed from his impending role heading up the Obesity Society. The practice of accepting payment from organizations in direct opposition to your professional role immediately removes all credibility. Shame on Allison for trying to defend his corporate affiliations. I doubt highly it’s about his being flattered to act as a spokesman for these entities and more about the money lining his pockets.

The evidence that salt in the diet is responsible for high blood pressure is not proven. Read Gary Taubes latest book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” which uncovers much of the pop-science that has ruled our food choices over the past 50 years. The reason I stopped my subscription to Nutrition Action Newsletter is that I disagree with a large part of your organization’s philosophy. According to Taubes, and in my own research, the studies on which the salt hypothesis and the lipid hypothesis are based are nothing more than suppositions that have never been proven scientifically. Your fearless leader has bought into both of these with a certainty that is a little frightening. If you really have the public’s interest at heart, it’s time for you at CSPI to open your minds and see that in spite of decades of telling people to eat low fat, low salt diets, the nation has been getting increasingly overweight and chronic disease is becoming almost epidemic. This has coincided with a rise in refined carbohydrate consumption, specifically in the form of junk food/fast food. I’m with you 100% on getting people off the junk food but perhaps your efforts are better placed at pushing a farm bill that would encourage the resurgence of the family farm and stopping subsidies for single crops, alerting the public about GMO crops, and overall advocating for a cleaner, higher quality food supply. I know you do back these issues but more of this is what’s in order rather than perpetuating food myths that don’t stand up to close scrutiny. Fat is an essential part of the human diet – this has been proven scientifically over and over again. That includes saturated fat. The only problem is that the quality of the saturated fat in our food supply is compromised by factory farming – that should be your issue, not trying to get the fat out of people’s diets.