When I was a little girl I had fair skin and my mother kept me out of the sun. We didn’t have sunscreen then, we had mothers. We have been slathering baby sunscreen on Tin only to learn that most sunscreens have so many chemicals that are bad for children – even the ones that says Baby Sunscreen. So we’re going to rethink our efforts here and go back to hat and long sleeves and keeping him out of the sun unless of course we’re on the beach and then all of us wear 50 in this house.
I just read about a report on moose that says poor nutrition in utero and through development years causes arthritis in more than half of the moose studied – it might be the same cause of arthritis that we are seeing proliferate in humans. Seeing how I’m dealing with my own lower back and right thumb arthritis now, I’m thinking back to my on in utero nutrition which is hard to know – my mom was in Cuba and I know she was smoking and drinking then but she also came from such good genetic stock that I thought that is what carried her later in life.
I’ve been musing lately about how both of my parents had horrific varicose veins and I know my mom blamed pregnancy and weight gain was blamed by my father – but their circulation was so bad it was visible with almost small animal brain formations on the back of my mother’s knees and splotchy patchworks of spider veins on my fathers. I’m always looking at my veins waiting for the shoe to drop and see those tracks, but so far so good. Knock on wood.
You look at the study of genes and it shows that a change in diet to corn cause a sea change in arthritis for one group of Native Americans whose wild fish and plant diet was shifted to domesticated corn. Still working my way through Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and corn seems to me to be enemy number one. What we know now that we didn’t know then. We eat cows that are ruminates because we can’t eat the grass ourselves. Now we eat corn that we can eat via the cow. It’s not in our genetic makeup to handle this much corn.