What the heck have we been eating?

Its really astonishing reading the labels and marketing nowadays. All Natural, No Hormones, Real Cheese, Cage Free, and of course Organic. What the heck were we eating before? And why is it so hard to find real food?

About a year ago I learned all about high fructose corn syrup. First of all its not something found naturally but lab created. Supposedly it makes you more hungry and is one of the worst things for your body. Around the late ’80s, sweetener consumption in the US went from mainly sugar to about 50% high fructose corn syrup! Wow, I never got the memo on that!  Remember Supersize Me… it wasn’t really about the burgers and fries but about the gallons of coke we consume which has high fructose corn syrup. So the really scary part is… its in everything. When I buy whole grain bread… it has high fructose corn syrup. What! I thought I was being a discerning consumer. There are only about 4 of 30 brands of bread that don’t have it (Mortons and Organic brands).

Okay but that is really only part of the story. There is actually something called Food Science. Engineering our food to make it taste better, look better, smell better, and last longer. Huh, interesting. Even our vegetables are engineered… and as an engineer I know about optimizing tradeoffs. So we get bigger, juicier, apples. Nice. But apples today have half the nutritional value than apples 50 years ago. So the catch is Food Scientists are trading off profit maximization for nutrition.

Anyone who cooks with onions may have experienced this first hand. At Costco you can find an onion twice the size but with what turns out to be half the taste. There is something wrong if you cut an onion and you don’t cry. The little organic ones bring me to tears! Interestingly recently I thought, I will start a vegetable garden. I found seeds online called Heirloom seeds. These are supposedly the original, non-genetically engineered versions. So again, what the heck have we been eating? And worse, now vegetables are not as good for me as they used to be? I thought organic was just about pesticides but there is so much more.

Its no wonder we are obese. We need to eat twice as much to get the same nutrional value. We inject our bodies with chemicals that creates insulin resistance and supresses our natural feeling of fullness. So I’m one of those people who is annoyed by the organic hype… but buy nothing but. I look forward to the day we go back to trusting nature over engineers.

We Are Pre-wired for Kindness

Wow, I was excited when I read this in a book called Social Intelligence. Sometimes we forget when we turn on the TV but people innately care about other people. This is why we feel better after helping someone or involunarily smile when someone else does.

Interestingly, the other side of this, we also frown when we see a scary movie or feel sad when we hear bad news. What Social Intelligence is suggesting is that we feel empathy. This is a valuable trait for communicating and relating to others. But more importantly this was necessary for survival thousands of years ago… before widespread communication.

One look of horror from another person can be communcated with a single expression to hundreds of people. Without speaking, they all run… from say a pre-historic lion. This is an amazingly efficient form of mass-communication.

Even though we probably don’t need this sort of communication today… we need to beware of the way we are wired… we are all impacted by each other. A sour face, a critical glare, and harsh word — particulary to your little one — can have a real impact. Social Intelligence highlights how these external reactions translate into brain and body reactions — releasing stress hormones. We can actually get sick by being around negative people.

So what did I get out of this… a smile not only brightens my day but by daughters and everyone around me. And it can help make them healthier too.

Don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys

And for that matter don’t let your daughters grow up to be princesses.

A fantastic book by Eckert Tolle talks about how we are training our kids to be something they are not and ultimately fulfilling stereotypes. The reality is that boys cry and girls punch (as any mom knows). The problem with reinforcing these stereotypical behaviors is that we end up in a society that is not “aware” or self realized. And this impact has led to world wars, terrorism, prostitution, and many of our worlds woes. 

Really each of has Yin (passive, gentle, feminine) and Yang (active, bright, masculine) in us. I often worry that my daughter is a bit… too much. She is very strong, fast, agressive… or put another way vivacious, dynamic, exciting. I have no doubt she’ll be the next Meg Whitman or Oprah!

Imagine a world where people were free to express themselves, be present, and live without constraints. Let’s stop teaching our daughters to sit still and our sons to be tough. Let’s teach them how to be the best they can be.

Temper Temper

Why do toddlers need to have temper tantrums from a Cave Mommy perspective. Why would temper tantrums be a favorable trait that would help the toddler survive? And more importantly, how can we avoid them?

A cave toddler screams to get attention. This would help them survive in some situations (and thus pass on this tantrum gene). After all, its hard to ignore a screaming two-year old. But more importantly, they scream when something goes wrong. For example, if the toddler is eating a fallen berry and a cave uncle comes by and takes it away. That screaming may help get it back. Certainly it makes the point of “I’m not happy, give it back now” without even uttering a word. That’s pretty efficient. And it would get a quick response before the perpetrator has time to pop that berrry into his own mouth.

So how do we work with these god given (or naturally selected for) traits today? Well, tantrums only happen for a reason — to communicate swiftly and unignorably. A ‘no reason’ tantrum would not have been tolerated by impatient cave mommy or others in the cave people community. So if tantrums have a cause, they can be avoided.

What causes tantrums today? Simply put, a toddler gets stressed. After all, what would you do if you had no power to choose what you do. Stress even for adults is caused by situations where we do not have control. Toddlers are always at the mercy of others… what they eat, when they sleep, where they go, how they play, and who takes care of them.

So simply put, avoid tantrums by giving power to our toddlers! Keep a routine that toddlers can predict. Now they know what’s coming next and can mentally prepare. Offer them choices — do you want to sit in your high chair or booster seat? Avoid surprises that derail them… and when I say surprises I mean the bad kind like oh time to sleep now! Waaaaah. Minimize the stress and uncertaintly by explaining everything, in detail, repeating often.

“We are going to Grandma’s house. You can play with Grandma and then she’ll give you dinner, and then play some more, and then she’ll give you milk, and brush your teeth, then you’ll go pee pee, then Grandma will read you a book, and then you’ll go sleepy sleepy! Okay? You are going to sleep with Grandma tonight. Then tomorrow Mommy is going to wake up and get in the car and drive to Grandma’s house and pick you up.”

No detail is too small for your curious little happy tantrum free toddler.

Blink and the Cave Mommy

Blink is a book by the author of Tipping Point… that describes how we would all be better off if we followed our instincts. This is something I believe in from a Cave Mommy perspective. Just like Eskimos can identify thousands of different kinds of snowflakes (when the rest of us only see snow), mommies can distinguish nuances in her baby’s cry. In an instant we have an instinct whether he is hungry, tired, bored, sleepy, frustrated, or hurt.

It intuitively makes sense WHAT happens… almost like pattern finding. We get a series of sensory inputs that we run against data points we collect each day. We make quick multivariate correlations and force rank possible solutions — all in an instant. Explaining HOW and defending my instinct is more difficult… like explaining how to ride a bike. On a conscious level, I have no idea what variables I used. Was it a hand movement or facial expression or sound?

The WHY is based on natural selection. Any cave man or woman has an advantage if they can make good decisions quickly. This before databases, power point, and of course analysis paralysis. Cave Mommies had to do the number crunching and get to a conclusion in their head, quickly.

We rely on our instincts every minute of every day whether it is for caring for our child, identifying trouble as our toddler walks in park, or picking a new nanny. What’s most important and the book Blink articulates so well… is that we’ve got to trust these Cave Mommy instincts. As soon as your thinking and reasoning mind take over you are very likely to come up with a different, reasonable, defensible, rational but wrong conclusion.

Upside of Lazy

Like many moms, I am “energy optimizing”… that is I’d like to do the least amount work for the maximum amount of benefit. OK, so my husband would just call me lazy. However, there are some merits to what he would call laziness and what I would call smart about use of time and energy… particularly when it comes to parenting. And this philosophy fits well with the overall Cave Baby Theory.

That is, in natural selection, the traits with the advantage are most likely to get passed on. Given the lack of technology and etc… cave mommy’s had to balance a whole lot of things and get by. They didn’t have the same societal pressures we have today to IMPRESS OTHERS WITH MY GREAT PARENTING SKILLS or follow laws around negligence and child abuse. They had to do it all, simply and naturally. If it wasn’t simple, natural, or have some reward attached… they probably wouldn’t have done it.

My top 3 Lazy Mom Parenting Tips:

Do more lying down – Nurse while you sleep. For me being sleep deprived just was not an option. Maybe its the engineer in me that tried to reverse engineer how cave mommies probably would have fed their kids at night. Roll over, get in the right position… and let baby do the rest… oh and get your rest. Okay its not a pretty site… reminds me of all the piglets at the farm latching on to their mommy but it works.

Don’t get up — I’m a working mom so getting up in the middle of the night is also not an option. Also, my kids get up early so having them play in my bed versus screaming in the other room is preferred. I don’t have to get up! You may wonder if they’ll ever leave my bed but my toddler had no problem transitioning as soon as she could walk. In fact she liked having her own room and bed. Now she can get out of bed herself and walk over to our room in the morning.

Just be– I love shopping for cute little developmental toys but more and more I’m realizing that I don’t need this stuff. Cave Mommies raised babies without more than themselves and nature around them. My six month old is happy seeing my face or playing with her feet and of course hearing my voice. My toddler can spend hours and hours at the beach… something we love too. My toddler learned counting and ABCs just from some good old fashioned singing– no batteries required.

Cry or Be Eaten

Last night, as my six month old daughter was falling asleep she fussed a little. She was lying next to me but she struggled to get closer. As soon as I picked her up she fell asleep. This happens a lot, but this time I wondered why. What was the purpose? If every trait went through natural selection… what is the advantage of crying?

If my daughter were a cave baby, her fussing would have actually made her more safe. By picking her up she was less likely to fall prey to a mountain lion, coyote, or even a hawk. I used to think of crying for communicating hunger or some other problem, but crying also could be a way to keep mommy close and thus… to keep baby protected.

There must have been a wide range of traits (some babies cried too much and some too little). The cave babies that did not cry much had a distinct DISadvantage. Cave Mommy wouldn’t know when to feed the baby and they could perhaps leave the baby unattended for periods of time with little complaint. These cave babies would not have survived… and so this wonderful no-crying -gene did not get passed down.

Babies that cried too much also were at a disadvantage. These babies that would not stop crying were probably more likely to at some point also get ignored because there was nothing the Cave Mommy could do. This crying-too-much gene then too would be less likely to get passed on.

So am I spoiling my 6 month old by holding her? I’m just acknowledging her survival instinct which balances just the right amount of fussing/crying to communicate her needs to me. Crying has a real purpose and its better respond to it as nature intended rather than ignoring it.�

Cave Baby Theory

What did the cave mommies do and why is that relevant today? If you believe in natural selection… where animals evolve based on traits that “work”… then cave babies hold the key to how we are supposed to raise our kids today. People probably haven’t evolved much in the last thousand years. Generally now everyone has a chance to reproduce and pass on their genes except for maybe evolution based on disease. So I’d argue our physical and emotional needs haven’t changed much.

So I like to muse about what cave mommies did to raise happy cave babies. This is thinking about what their lives and needs were like before the introduction of all the new technologies, lifestyles, busy-ness, and problems of our modern world.

Whenever I get stuck… I think what would the cave mommy have done? Would she have let her baby cry it out? Or stuck her baby in another baby cave? 

One thing I love about the cave baby theory is that I don’t think having babies was intended to be a huge sacrifice. There were probably ways that the cave mommies made things easy for themselves. For example nursing in her sleep while the cave baby lies next to her.  If things were any more difficult… like the sleepless nights new mom’s face today… I suspect those cave babies would have starved… and then the trait of waking up in the middle of the night would have been eliminated from the gene pool!