IIDS: Friday, June 22nd

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. -Harriet Lerner, psychologist (b. 1944) 

In today's excerpt - human female breasts, which gain much attention for reasons unrelated to their milk, accumulate more toxins than any other organ in the body and pass them on to infants as part of breast milk:

"Breasts, it turns out, are a particularly fine mirror of our industrial lives. They accumulate more toxins than other organs and process them differently.

"If human breast milk, nature's perfect food, came stamped with an ingredients label, it would read something like this: 4 percent fat, vitamins A, C, E, and K, sugars, essential minerals, proteins, enzymes, and antibodies. It contains 100 per­cent of the recommended daily allowance of virtually everything a baby needs to grow, plus, as we've seen, a solid hedge of extras to help ward off a lifetime of diseases ranging from diabetes to cancer. Despite exhaustion, visiting relatives, and dirty laundry, every time we nurse our babies, the love hormone oxytocin courses out of our pituitaries like a warm bath. Human milk is like ice cream, penicil­lin, and the drug ecstasy all wrapped up in two pretty packages.

"But read down the label a little farther, and the fine print sounds considerably less appetizing: DDT, PCBs, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dibenzofurans, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic. When we nurse our babies, we feed them not only the fats and sugars that fire their immune systems, cellular metabolisms, and cerebral synapses. We also feed them, in albeit miniscule amounts, paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline by-products, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungi­cides, and flame-retardants.

P,

With apologies, I am out tomorrow with obligations in the morning and a FND
match in the early evening.

As to the berry pickin, I think that is a a great plan. If it is before the
end of the month there may be one more Sister from here, ripe for the
pickin.

By the by, check out the free Jazz at the Jazz fest. We are going to see
some free Jazz on GI at noon tomorrow. W

Rugs Argentinas