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Infant Mortality Thoughts
In remote villages and in ages past (before antibiotics) infant mortality was very high. Even kings and queens saw many of their children die before adulthood. Walk around a New England cemetery and you can see all the little graves of those who didn't make it.
I was watching a documentary called "The Only Son" about a western-educated young man who returns to his village in a very remote part of the Himalayas. In this village there is no medicine. It takes a plane ride and 10 days on a horse for him to reach the village. There he speaks to his sister who has never left the village. She has some sort of scarring or disease on her face. She is nursing a baby. She tells him that she has already had 5 children, but that 2 have died. The scarring on the sister's face made me think of some of the infections I've had on my face that needed antibiotics to fix. I haven't had any like that since going low VA.
The foods that we see them talk about are dairy, wheat, barley, potatoes. His mother milks 2 or 3 cows a day. We see her churn butter in a tall churn, and then put the butter milk into their tea. I'm pretty sure we see them anoint one another with the butter when he leaves town. Perhaps butter is sacred to them, and I can see why.
I couldn't help but think about how my siblings and I (who perhaps had a high VA mother) probably wouldn't have made it to adulthood without antibiotics. I'm thinking that the Himalayan diet might be quite high in dairy and especially when things aren't going well when it comes to the other farming. The cows can always eat grasses, but the people might get a bad crop of potatoes or barley.
A part of me wonders if the babies with higher tolerance to VA are the ones that survive in a primitive setting? And they are labeled "the strong"? The boy's sister who grew up in the village was described as being "stronger".
The boy's sister is asked how many children she wants, and she replies, with a smile: "twenty!" (this despite already loosing 2 of her five). Brave to keep such a goal despite the inherent heartaches. It made me wonder if the fertility span of human womanhood lasts just long enough to have enough babies so that at least some will end up with a strong ability to detox VA quickly, and go on to adulthood!
Another point that arises in my mind: because of antibiotics, are we seeing many more humans make it to adulthood who do not have a strong ability to detox VA? And when husband and wife both have a weak ability to detox VA, then things get worse and worse genetically.
I've said many times that my grandmother seemed to have been raised on a naturally low VA diet. This was before antibiotics.
Her parents had 12 children and 11 made it to adulthood.
They served a diet of carb and meat, with veg and fruit and dairy in "garnish" portions only. The father was proud that he could serve his large family meat daily (at dinner). Lunch was often bread. Breakfast was oatmeal. The condiments were things like kraut, pickles, applesauce, prunes, milk in tea. Eggs once a week, legumes once a week. The meat was often beef and pork.
Another interesting factoid from the Nepali family is that the first girl brought to Kathmandu for medical help was suffering from severe scoliosis. She was a child shepherdess who lived very close to the family herd, going into the high elevations with the animals and her aunt who milked them and made butter and cheese. I can imagine that she was getting lots of dairy products and it is interesting that she probably had plenty of vitamin D from sunshine, and fresh air to help her detox pathways.
The father of the family was a herbalist, and I think it probably was heart breaking to him that his herbalism didn't stop the progression of sick children in the family. I've grown to have a skeptical eye on herbs, as they are probably filled with not only VA but other pesky plant chemicals. I no longer think of plants as always wanting to help us, and believe sometimes they are more interested in doing things like killing pest bugs. (I do realize that possibly a small amount of culinary herbs is traditional and that the poison is in the dosage).
Another thought that arises with me today is that these people are Buddhist and probably vegetarian or semi-vegetarian. Personally I don't think that dairy and eggs is a viable replacement for meat in the diet, these foods are just too high in VA.
In an area with no refrigeration, I suppose that also makes sense, because what do you do with a huge animal?
I sort of imagine that if they were not vegetarian that a community would have a town butcher and that, with planning, people could eat meat through the year by using some sort of currency or bartering. You bring your cow to the butcher this month, your neighbor would bring a cow next month etc and everyone has meat all year.
Weston Price talked about how, in the remote Swiss Alps, people prepared a meat dish each Sunday, and the bones and leftovers were made into soup for the rest of the week. I would say this is the major difference between the remote Swiss diet and the remote Himalayan diet. Price rated the Swiss diet highly and thought it resulted in straight, strong teeth.
I noticed that some of the children who were sent away from the village for health problems had crooked teeth, while their father's were straight. It made me wonder whether the village had changed other things in the last few decades. Were they receiving something modern from outside the village that was making things worse? vitamin pills? Sugar? junk fats? vaccines? corn-based animal feeds? weed killers? infant formula?
I just added infant formula to the list of things that ?might? be being donated or coming to this village via helpful charities.
When I think about my grandmother/mother/me, I often think the domino effect might have begun at my mother's lactation--my grandmother was told to bottle feed.
Could low B vitamins be the problem? Are these people getting deficient foods when they go trade in Tibet?
Now, my grandmother, as I've said, grew up on a seemingly perfect old-world diet. But then she married my grandfather, a guy who drove the Wonder Bread truck.
This article talks about how just after the turn of the century bread changed to being industrial and suddenly *pelegra* began to be rampant. Once they put two and two together, industrial bread makers were forced to enrich their products. (Could this be the change that Weston Price saw too?).
Now, my grandmother's parents were, it turns out, *artisanal* bakers. Interesting that she might have gone from one kind of bread (the kind that didn't cause pelegra?) to the other. My grandmother told me that the bread she had at home was mostly white, but had a small amount of whole rye in it. The fact that it was mostly white still makes me wonder if something ELSE changed when industrial bread started being used. I suppose chemicals were added. Perhaps corners were cut, as is hinted in this article.
Perhaps her low B-vitamin status caused her to not make enough breast milk, thus the doc told her to bottle feed. And then to make matters worse, Mom was put on early baby milks which were probably also deficient.
Is the enrichment itself problematic? I've heard it said that adding just SOME of the b vitamins to bread set you up for OTHER b vitamin deficiencies.
https://www.mashed.com/162509/the-untold-truth-of-wonder-bread/
I know a guy from Nepal, and he has told me that they have "Wonder Bread" type products in Katmandu. I would guess that the remote villagers make flatbread. I would not be surprised if one of the supplies these villagers trade (in Tibet) is bread and flour. I wonder how much their bread-making traditions have changed.