Crunchy Lies

in which I learn that there are no safe choices

This essay is pretty personal, so I may put it under a paywall at some point. For now I will leave it free to all readers, so that others might possibly learn from my experiences.

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One of the universal principles of parenting I’ve learned in my 11 years of mothering is that there is no choice you can make as a parent which guarantees a specific outcome in your child.

I have numerous personal examples I could list, but the one I will speak specifically to here relates to the holistic health community and the false security it sometimes offers, especially to young mothers. There are a lot of gurus and organizations out there, several in particular (which I won’t name, because I think that’s tacky) who essentially promise “robust health” if you follow their tenets and principles. While I certainly don’t think living a healthy lifestyle is a bad idea, it is foolish to believe in a formulaic concept of treating oneself or raising children. No amount of cod liver oil is going to guarantee a perfectly healthy child (Does that give away one of the groups I’m speaking of?).

I think a lot of us “crunchy moms” look to our own past and our own issues which in hindsight could have been solved by a diet change, supplement, or therapy, and we think that if we just make the right choices as parents ourselves, those problems can be avoided going forwards. These feelings are supported by the holistic health community, which is populated by very well meaning people - people who unfortunately often propagate paranoid spirals surrounding “imperfect” lifestyle choices and connecting dots on health problems that are impossible to prove as not connected (or, if they are indeed, linked after all).

Don’t get me started on the toxic mold community.

Here is my story; just one part of my life story which pertains to my first born child and our lived experience doing all the healthy things and getting a different outcome than we were promised. I do not detail all of the choices I made and the characteristics of our diet and lifestyle at the time to seem holier-than-thou or to navel-gaze, but to emphasize my meaning in this essay of how the supposed righteousness of our choices can still result in an undesired outcome, especially in regards to health.

Our story begins with a 20-year old first-time mother (me!) who was determined to do it all right. For several years prior to getting married, I had been thoroughly immersed in holistic living - sprouted foods, local organic produce, herbs, essential oils, yoga, weightlifting, natural fiber clothing, and so on. I was a vegan for 2 years, then switched to a Paleo-type diet once I realized how depleted I had become from a lack of animal products in my diet. In the few months before my first pregnancy, I completed the GAPS Diet and had transitioned to a Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF) style of eating, complete with homemade fermented beet kvass, sardines, liver pate, homemade soaked nut butters, and a food co-op membership where we purchased grass-fed meats and raw dairy. It was on this diet that I undertook my first pregnancy, during which I had no complications save some morning sickness for the first 1.5 trimesters.

I was so in love with my unborn baby and - as I said before - wanted to do everything as “right” as I possibly could. For the first time in my life, I was faced with the reality of how our choices directly affect others dependent upon us - and what more direct way to experience that than in pregnancy? The realization of how fragile life really is had begun to dawn upon me, and the holistic health community and gurus seemed to offer a lot of reassurances as to choices I could make that would essentially guarantee robust health in myself and my future children. We had long ago ditched personal care and cleaning products with artificial chemicals or fragrances. I wore blue light blocking glasses at the designated times to protect my circadian rhythm. I took a long walk every day and did pregnancy yoga most days. I was in massage therapy school throughout the duration of my pregnancy and received massages as part of our training several times a week (which was AMAZING, highly recommend). We shopped for only natural fiber secondhand clothing or bought organic baby clothing and blankets directly.

My husband introduced me to the concept of home birth, which I had rarely encountered prior to my pregnancy. My mother-in-law had birthed two of her children at home, and I was enchanted by the concept of beginning our family in the intimate comfort of our own home (though we were renting an apartment at the time). We devoured books like “Birth Without Violence,” “The Bradley Method” and “Spiritual Midwifery.” After doing lots of research, we decided to pursue a birth at home with a local well-known midwife. I went exactly two weeks “overdue” and had a 21-hour labor, to finally meet our beloved son. Labor was the hardest thing I had ever done until that point in my life, and I felt so proud of myself for enduring the strong sensations without medication.

Breastfeeding turned out to be absolute hell. Our son had a terrible latch and I couldn’t find anyone at the time who would take me seriously about the possibility of a tongue or lip tie. It was not even an option in my mind to switch to formula, so we persevered bloodily until I transitioned to a nipple shield for 6 months. I was able to wean him off the shield eventually, then my son continued to breastfeed until he was 2.5 years old, past the birth of his younger brother. We coslept. I didn’t own a baby bassinet, changing table, or crib. Just an organic cotton baby carrier which he napped in while we took walks several times a day. We cloth diapered and I made my own baby wipes from organic castile soap and grapefruit seed extract.

My son received multiple chiropractic adjustments by our family osteopath within the first month of his life, and then several throughout each subsequent year. We did not vaccinate him. He was not circumcised. We continued on our WAPF-style diet, feeding him bits of beef heart, avocado, sauerkraut juice, bone marrow, and squash from our garden as his first foods. He did not get sick until he was 1.5 years old. He never wore shoes with a typical sole, only barefoot-style moccasins or no shoes at all. Around 7 months after he was born, we moved in with my husbands grandfather on his farm, and we spent most of our time outdoors taking walks, gardening, exploring, climbing, all of the things you’re supposed to do to develop a healthy sense of proprioception, a diverse gut microbiome, and a regulated circadian rhythm.

Himalayan salt lamps populated every room as alternatives to blue light-emitting LED lamps. He didn’t watch TV or any shows until after his second birthday, by which time we had moved in with my in-laws while we began work on our fixer upper farm located nearby. The only show we allowed him to watch was a 1990s beautifully animated production of the Beatrix Potter stories, and that was because I now had another baby to take care of.

basically the most holistically crunchy family ever, right? Art by Alex Grey

I’m going to pause here and say that we really thought all of these choices we had made and our dedication to a holistic lifestyle were going to produce a child with great health, free from the problems I had grown up facing. He’d be safe from the awful allergies I had, the eye issues and learning disabilities my husband experienced. and the sensory issues I struggled with as a child! I think it’s not an uncommon belief among first-time parents that we can out-nurture a lot of qualities we see as being the fault of our own parents; and maybe that’s true, to an extent.

But one of the first scales to fall from my eyes was when I read a new report on the fermented cod liver oil I had been giving my son daily - highly recommended as one of the key pillars of robust health. Apparently it was rancid and actually very harmful to consume, a far cry from what the producer and associated company had claimed. The holistic health organization affiliated with this fermented cod liver oil refused to settle the matter properly, and I was so disappointed in them and myself for trusting these people to dispense unbiased advice in pursuit of health. We stopped consuming the oil immediately, but then I was left with the fear and doubt of what I had possibly done to my family in feeding them this rancid, potentially cancer-causing product. Crunchy moms in online groups would not hesitate to point to that cod liver oil, or the polyester clothing my son wore once in awhile, or the xanthan gum in some gluten free bagels I bought infrequently as a potential cause of my sons keratosis pilaris and cradle cap that I could not get rid of, no matter what I tried.

We learned that my son had amblyopia and astigmatism in his left eye after his 3-year old well visit, and promptly took him to a fantastic ophthalmologist who treats her patients with vision therapy. He continued progressing throughout his childhood fairly normally until the age of 7, which is when so many of our false ideas about health were shattered.

It was in the end of winter that my mom first noticed a change in my son’s demeanor. She saw us once a week, so the changes he was undergoing were more pronounced to her eyes than ours. We had chalked his symptoms up to nervousness about his upcoming First Holy Communion sacrament, and perhaps a simultaneous growth spurt. He was tired, cold, did not want to do any of his normal hobbies or activities. Hungry all the time - but what 7 year old boy isn’t? I suspected a metabolism issue once I took his temperature and read it as 95.6 Fahrenheit. He progressed to the point where he was napping daily on the couch, and eventually didn’t want to get off the couch at all. We could begin to see his ribs, unusual for my son’s strong and muscular frame.

I’m forever grateful to my mother for advising us to consider if he might have Type 1 Diabetes - a diagnosis I had never even thought possible. Weren’t we healthy? Hadn’t we done all we could to protect our son against autoimmune disease? I had very little knowledge about T1D at the time, but I did know vaguely that it wasn’t the same as Type 2. I checked my son’s blood sugar with our at-home glucose reader and it was well over 300 mg/dl. We were shocked.

Driving to the hospital that night - I had read on Dr. Google that we shouldn’t waste any time getting him started on insulin, as the precipitous nature of DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) was not to be taken lightly - my husband and I just sat in our feelings and pondered the lesson we had been handed by life. As I stated before, this is really of the story of how we learned that there are no safe choices in life. We were not victims of the holistic health community, my son’s diagnosis had not been inflicted upon us. Our pediatrician later suggested his recent Covid infection as a possible cause for his development of T1D, but of course we have no way to prove that (although there are research articles detailing the increase in diagnoses in the subsequent months after infection).

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In the following days and months, I could not shake the feeling that I had done something wrong, that I missed some slight element in my son’s health that may have prevented him developing this disease. Not unlike the repeated mental checking a mother may do to verify that yes, she is sure all of her children exited the car in summer; or that no, that pot on the stove was not on when she left the house, I scanned my memory and previous feelings for something, anything we may have missed. I kept finding myself thinking that we were healthy enough that we could cure my son while he was still in the “honeymoon” phase of T1D - maybe if I researched long enough I could find a way to reset his beta cells so they wouldn’t all self-destruct? The reclusive farmer we purchase our chicken feed and grass-fed beef from suggested some homeopaths in Arizona that supposedly cured Type 1 Diabetes on a regular basis. I was never able to find any information on those miracle workers, curiously. Ray Peat devotees repeatedly mentioned a diet exclusive in brewers yeast would heal the pancreas from self destruction. I know that people claiming a source for a cure have good intentions - I used to be one of them myself - but it certainly didn’t help our mental distress over this huge life change. We mourned my son’s loss of a “normal” life and the responsibilities he would never be able to cast off, all the while hoping against hope that maybe we’d be the ones to figure out the cure.

All this to say that we were fools to ever think that our lifestyle choices would infinitely protect us from disease. And shouldn’t we have known this all along? We live in a fallen world, a flawed world in which we will never be perfect. Humans are meant to be born, live, age, and die. Perfect health is not meant to be the ultimate goal of our lives on Earth. My family and I are Catholic, and we believe that our primary purpose in life is to come to Know, Love, and Serve God - but we fell for the humanistic falsehood that with the ascendancy of man can come security from life’s damages.

We had come close to conflating health with a sense of righteousness; arrogance, in a way, that shielded our superiorly healthy selves from the physical issues the rest of the world suffered, implying it was through their poor choices. (And of course, a lot of illness does happen due to a lack of responsibility for one’s health.) I never actually thought of the pretend morality of our choices in such terms, but in hindsight it’s the only thing that makes sense considering our immature shock at my sons diagnosis.

It’s a particular kind of unholy pressure we put upon ourselves to assume that our health is nigh-solely determined by our personal choices. Just like the damaging secular humanistic assumptions about the nature of man behind a lot of attachment parenting theory (another post is in the works on this, it’s too much to get into here), it’s just not reasonable to hold the mental schema of everything going wrong being our own fault. It’s just not the nature of the world, or humanity.

It’s a terrifying reality to face, but one that I think all parents will have to come to terms with sooner or later. We do the best we can with our children - we love them, nurture them, shepherd them, delight in them. But no amount of prayers to God will keep your child from being abducted. Despite your best efforts, your child may become an estranged drug addict in their adult years. You are not guaranteed a healthy baby just because you ate the right foods in pregnancy. And so on.

I think we “crunchy moms” can unconsciously cling to holistic health tenets as a way of grasping at a false security from the immediately uncontrollable parts of life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen heartbreaking posts in online crunchy moms forums concerning SIDS - where a young baby dies and other women immediately jump in to assume the baby died from vaccination or a chemical-laden crib mattress, only to find that the parents did not vaccinate their child and didn’t use such a mattress; or autism - where the parents are searching for advice and the other group members assume the child was vaccine damaged or is eating an unhealthy diet laden with artificial dyes and processed foods, except that the child wasn’t vaccinated and has never consumed any of those foods. You notice that the comments drift off quickly after the parents share more qualifying information about their situation that proves the other members’ certain declarations of trauma invalid. I don’t blame these people, because I was one of them myself. It’s much more comforting to blame infant death, learning disabilities, autoimmune disease, and chronic illness on controllable choices than to recognize that these things happen despite our best efforts to avoid them.

Crunchy folks of a particular persuasion may be reading this and thinking to themselves, “Of course, that’s where she went wrong. Their choice to X Y Z is what gave that kid diabetes” or “Should have done ____ and this wouldn’t have happened.” Other people may think “These people are nuts for having been this health-oriented in the first place.” And I think both kinds of people are correct. It is crazy to be overly health-oriented and expectant of a particular outcome, only to be devastated when it doesn’t happen. And it very well could have been some choice we either made or didn’t make that led to my son developing a chronic, incurable illness. We will never know, and we really don’t need to know. Our pursuit of health must be properly ordered towards the care of our bodies, minds, and the Earth, but not to the point of expecting liberation from the fallen realities of our world.

I still make many of the same choices detailed above in our current family life, with a few differences mainly due to convenience or deciding that certain things weren’t as important as we thought they were. In no way am I suggesting that we should not still strive to the best of our ability to live as healthfully as we can, in order to serve God, our selves, and the people around us. But my wish is that our story can serve as a tempering influence on folks who are tempted to take an undue security in their decisions.

Don’t count on that local seasonal produce to keep you from sickness forever.

Don’t assume that never vaccinating will guarantee your child freedom from autism.

Don’t hold yourself responsible for every imperfection in your child.

Don’t fall for the crunchy lies!