Cozy House

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

The soy industry has managed to market a waste product as a health food, and gullible consumers are eating their way to health problems. Soy is often touted as healthy, and it can be if you pick your soy products carefully, but most of the soy that is on the market is actually very hard on our systems. I was completely fooled by the propaganda on soy and bought into this one hook, line and sinker, feeling virtuous switching to soy milk when I found out I was sensitive to poor quality dairy.

The real paradox of the report is the way in which it avoids dealing with the twin-conundrum of mass-scale monocultural grain production and confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These are the two destructive pillars of an industry gone wrong, yet the U.N. points its global finger not at bad management practices like feedlots and confinement dairies, but at the cows themselves; not at Monsanto, but at real farmers, who raise livestock in accordance with nature’s principles—on grass.

Here's how to become vitamin D deficient: stay inside all day, wear sunscreen anytime you go out, and eat a low-fat diet. Make sure to avoid animal fats in particular. Rickets, once thought of as an antique disease, is making a comeback in developed countries despite fortification of milk (note- it doesn't need to be fortified with fat-soluble vitamins if you don't skim the fat off in the first place!). The resurgence of rickets is not surprising considering our current lifestyle and diet trends. In a recent study, 40% of infants and toddlers in Boston were vitamin D deficient using 30 ng/mL as the cutoff point. 7.5% of the total had rickets and 32.5% showed demineralization of bone tissue! Part of the problem is that mothers' milk is a poor source of vitamin D when the mother herself is deficient. Bring the mothers' vitamin D level up, and breast milk becomes an excellent source.

If people in India, Brazil and Indonesia used as much air-conditioning per capita as we do (and why not, their climates are hotter than ours), they would consume not only their own electricity supplies but also all of the electricity in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Italy -- plus all 60 nations of Africa!