Green-er

While I'm not usually known to follow popular social trends such as buying organic foods only and hopping on the "green" bandwagon, there is one thing to be said for having children -- they will definitely change you, make you think more about the world around you and look at it from a different perspective. Lately I've been tormented with the safety issue of vaccines, the apparently rising rate of autism and other neurological disorders, why it takes 2 1/2 months to get in to see an allergist, and now with Marcelo's confirmed allergy issues, the changes I must make to the food that sustains him and the bottles he drinks it from.

The new Nutramigen formula from Enfamil recommended by the allergist, I calculated would cost us about $200/month for 4 feedings per day. Wow. When I switched Sofia to formula, I think it only cost us about $50/month and she consumed more than Marcelo does. Unfortunately, in doing my price comparison shopping, I came across some disturbing information about the ingredients in Nutramigen, namely that it contains MSG , 46% corn syrup solids, and a high amount of the heavy metal Mn, a known neurotoxin. What?! Why would a doctor, an allergist no less, recommend that I give my baby a giant dose of corn syrup, MSG and Manganese for Pete's sake! (you know what I really meant to say here). Moreover, if Marcelo is going to go from one bottle to four bottles a day, I'm looking to get rid of all of our rather pricey Avent bottles because they contain BPA which can leach out into the milk. BPA has recently come under scrutiny due to a recent study and is already planned to be baned in Canada, though not in the USA.

Hello?! If you're walking over a bridge that is falling apart several times a day but people say it's still OK because it hasn't yet fallen down, no one has broken an ankle much less died, do you continue to walk it or do you find another route. Duh. Why do we have to wait for mass quantities of people to be have neurological or other tragic and irreversible health issues to safeguard the health of our children. That's like saying -oh yep, fifty people fell of the bridge today so it looks like it's not a safe as we thought; um let's not use it anymore and find a different route instead.

So, there's some companies out there, "green" companies?, that are selling BPA free baby bottles (e.g. BornFree, GreenToGrow) . We need at least 8 new bottles with nipples. At about $14.50 a piece, this would cost us $116 to replace bottles we already have. Plus we need to buy new sippy cups too because the ones we have are made by Avent, a company in denial of the potential hazards of BPA. How ironic that they became famous for developing the wide neck bottle/nipple that was more like the breast but could care less if their bottles could cause serious health problems. Is it because they are now owned by Phillips. I don't know, I don't care. I don't have time to know all these things. I also need to buy a drinking container for Sofia to use at daycare because they like to re-use plastic water bottles. I need one that doesn't have an exposed mouth piece (daycare-falling on the ground-germs, etc.), so I'm looking at this one, $15 -cha ching.

So yes, I realize I'm talking about several things here but the living "green" craze, this is what bothers me. Why does living "green" need to mean that you need to have or just spend a lot of money, like being green means you're being better than everyone else and a related way of feeling better than everyone else is having or just spending more money. It annoys me to no end. I mean $10 to get a cheap plastic bottle that you could get before they started making them with the supposedly more expensive polycarbonate (i.e. BPA). But you can feel good about yourself because you're being "green".

I do like to recycle because our city provides us with a giant recycle bin which they pick up every other week. I have no problem separating my recyclable garbage from my garbage garbage and neither does Sofia. I'm glad she will grow up never questioning the fact that you could just throw everything out together. She knows what goes in which bin and sometimes she'll ask me. The fact that for the first several months we had the new recycle bin, unbeknown to me, Ray had been throwing everything in the regular garbage bin anyway may mean Ray is more brown than green. (I only found this out when we were talking to our neighbor about the new bins and Ray said he didn't even know why they were doing that because we hardly ever had anything to throw in there anyway. I think the aspartame in his diet coke is affecting his brain). We have the low-e bulbs in our house, we have secondary water, I've even recently switched to some organic foods such as eggs and oatmeal. But frankly, there's only so far I can go with the whole green thing. I mean, would I really rather eat lettuce with pesticide or lettuce with e-coli. I don't know. For now, I'm going with the one that doesn't cost four times the price. Last year Earth's Best had a recall on it's organic baby foods. It makes it hard to chose, much less, to pay more for what you know is best for your children when in fact, you can't necessarily know it at all.

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*Update 5/8/08 - I was able to get on a live chat with Dr Greene today and pose my question about the questionable ingredients in Nutramigen. I was very disappointment that he basically skirted the MSG and corn syrup solids issues completely. He did say he was concerned about the high level of Manganese but then later decided it was OK if my child was of solid food eating age. Entirely not helpful nor insightful. He agreed that Nestle Good Start with "comfort proteins" wasn't going to help but I already knew that. So I guess, the only other alternative is Infamil Alimentum which may not be as effective as Nutramigen.
Still looking for bottles, but apparently my Avent sippy cups are OK.
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There's so many links I could include with this post it's ridiculous, but here are just a few
http://www.thegreenguide.com/products/Kids_&_Babies/Baby_Bottles
http://www.naturemoms.com/blog/2007/09/04/bpa-free-safe-sippy-cups/