Have you changed your diet after Fukushima?

[sora]

I stopped drinking milk and eating dairy also giving them to my kids. I'm limiting meat and organic eggs. We eat lots of nori, kelp and seaweed soup. I'm avoiding strawberries, kale, spinach, cabbage and broccoli and produce from California. I've been eating frozen veggies, tropical fruits and grapes from chillie (I wouldn't have bought in the past due to pesticides). I don't know what to do after I finish the frozen meat and veggies in the freezer that I bought pre fukushima. I buy old aged cheedar for now. Probably I will go vegan and will force my children to be vegan? It will be healthier for me, but being a vegan is not easy for kids especially for picky eaters. Very frustrating... How about you? Do you do any supplmenets?

[Arduinna]

no I haven't. I don't see any reason to at all.

[Ldavis24]

WOW...You are on the west coast so I can understand modifying a little bit, especially related to anything from the sea but just wow!

That seems really really drastic but if you are happy with it more power to you.

Personally we haven't change anything here but we also didn't buy a lot of produce that comes from the west coast unless we absolutely have to. Dairy is pretty local as well so no changing that, we get our eggs from our own chickens so another non issue. We are on the East Coast.

The only thing I have changed is avoiding salmon a bit more than usual and well we weren't really doing a lot seafood anyway since the oil spill in the gulf. They can say it is all fine and the oil is gone and it hasn't impacted the seafood but I think it is a load of bull...Then again we aren't a big shellfish family anyway.

[RubThyNeighbor]

Wow

A tad extreme?

We just added some watercress (high in iodine) and some sea vegetables

Took out the fish from my fav sushi place which comes from Japan.

[sora]

I'm in Vancouver and concerned especially of the constant radioactive rain even in May. 

I'm following the advice here.

http://www.infowars.com/europeans-warned-to-avoid-milk-and-vegetables-due-to-high-radiation-levels/

I'm also following discussions at the uc berkley nuclear engineering department's public forum. http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218

I'm being cautious as I'm still breastfeeding and I have small children.

I'm really surprised that I'm viewed as extreme on this board. I am viewed as such by mainstream people though. But those are the people who don't believe in organic/natural foods anyways. People are speculating but there is a thought that free range meat and grass fed beef less safe than factory farmed meat because the animals feed on grass contaminated with radiation. What an irony. I just want to give up on meat if I have to eat factory farmed chemical loaded meat.

[Ldavis24]

Sora, I wouldn't call you extreme but it certainly is kinda drastic to go VEGAN because of your concerns....

That said you aren't extreme in my head because a guy on another forum I visit about chickens has been apparently taking Iodine tablets or something and was wondering how to force his chickens to take them as well...So you might be out there, but you aren't EXTREME!

[serenbat]

I'm really surprised that I'm viewed as extreme on this board. 

if you do go vegan what do you plan to eat-just frozen and south american? and for how long?

are you not concerned about a "balanced" approach and not getting a rounded nutrient diet?

I also find it extreme and know that most products prior to the Japanese disaster were not routinely checked and thus you really don't have a base to know what the levels were (even extremely low ones) prior to now.

If you are avoiding your local meats and eggs are you also avoiding all local produce, regardless of organic, because they could be washed with high level water?

What about your drinking supply?

Not eating food directly effected in one thing, avoiding is still quite hard, not to mention just dealing with daily life of washing hands.

[sora]

I'm trying to minimize risk as much as I can.  The higher up the food chain, the more pollutants are eaten and stored. so less animal product = healthier.

I'm thinking of growing sprouts and wheatgrass indoors with filtered water from Reverse Osmosis (don't know if it actually removes radiation).

Of course there are things I cannot do about - air, rain, and water and everything else practically. What about kids playing in the dirts and grass and playing with sand? I am exposed to rain every day.

Are there efforts going to be futile because I cannot control most of exposures.

[Ldavis24]

NM I take it back, yeah I think you are getting extreme but I'm way over on the other side of the country so it's not really freaking me out at all.

[serenbat]

In the US and Canada, not to mention the rest of the world, we have been importing food and OTHER goods from Japan since WWII--remember 2 big bombs were dropped???

 very extreme -IMO

[happyhippie]

Hi Sora, well we are directly on the west coast. At first I was very nervous, and figured that we should eliminate a lot of foods. 

However, what was the alternative? Is there anything better for us than leafy greens? Anything better for you than local organics? Pesticide ridden produce from other parts of the world? Nope sorry. Frozen veggies, bottled water, food that is processed? Nothing, for us, outweighed the goodness of local organics, be it meat, dairy, veggies, whatever. 

I suppose if it makes you feel comfortable, go vegan. However, a Vegan without spinach, kale, and sprouts??

Anyways, this is our new reality. We have to pick up and move on. Since we are being exposed to rad in food and water we have to choose other helpful habits, like eliminating sugars, and ridding ourselves of other environmental toxins within our homes. 

[HollyBearsMom]

Yeah, way extreme.  How long do you plan on eating like that?

[Alyantavid]

I think the exposure you're getting from Fukushima is probably less what you're exposed to on a daily basis.  You can't prevent everything from happening and the benefits of local, grassfed meat outweigh any risk of them ingesting grass that may have a bit of radiation on it. 

Even if you somehow found a way to eat something that hadn't ever been exposed to this particular radiation, it's probably been exposed to something else that could potentially cause some other problem. 

You have to figure out the best way to feed your family.  But you can't do that based on every news story that comes out or pretty soon you won't be able to eat or drink anything. 

[sora]

I hope you guys are right. Having a balanced diet might outweigh. Because honestly I don't know how long I can live like this. There has been background radiation all around but ingesting particles of radiation is different from being exposed to x rays and being on the plain. I learnt alot from raido ecoshock.org. But the more I learn, the more I get scared. 

Who to believe? There is so much info out there. I'm leaning towards believing sources mentioned in ecoshock, such as Chris Busby, Helen Caldicott. There are differences in opinions.

Epidemiologist Dr. Wing thinks people outside of Japan shouldn’t do anything to attempt to reduce radiation exposure: Leading Epidemiologist: Instead of Trying to Avoid Japanese Radiation, Put Your Energy Into Demanding a Saner Energy Policy

French anti-nuclear NGO CRIIAD says that pregnant women and infants should take steps to reduce exposure: French Nuclear Group Warns that Children and Pregnant Mothers Should Protect Themselves from Radiation

Prof Chris busby,

I attach my “don’t panic” paper. However, since then I have re-thought this advice as the thing is still fissioning and releasing 10 to the fourteen becquerels a day. This will mean that Sr-90 [strontium 90] and Uranium and particulates will be building up in the USA and Europe. I will assess this later but for now I think it prudent to stop drinking milk.

[laohaire]

I file this under the "what can ya do?" category.

I won't tell you that radiation is not a problem, and I won't tell you that you shouldn't be concerned about environmental contaminants, and I won't tell you that thinking about what you eat is not worthwhile, and I won't tell you that going vegan is extreme. I don't believe any of those.

I do think it's easy to lose sight of the big picture, though, and that's coming from someone who's done just that from time to time.

There is, quite unfortunately, a limit to what you can protect yourself from. It's not right and it's not fair - the selfish choices of other humans are forcibly imposed on us all. And some of it is just humans just doing the best they can with what they've got. And some of it is just the physics of the world; we do live in a global ecosystem as well as living in subsystems and subsubsystems and so on.

So all the radiation in the world, and not just from Fukushima, is a reality in our lives. Some of it caused by humans, some natural. The pesticides and other chemicals of the world are affecting even those who follow the most strict organic lifestyles. We have our choice of showering in chlorinated water or poisoned rainwater. Most of us have mercury slowly leaking into our bloodstreams from dental fillings. I am not making light of these things at all, they concern me. But the radiation fallout here is just one factor of many hazards we have to face - and all we can do is muscle on through the best we can.

You might indeed choose to eat vegan. Personally, I've pretty much decided to stop eating the top-of-the-food-chain fish myself, because indeed they accumulate a lot of poisons from our sadly destroyed oceans. I am not sure if factory farmed meat is necessarily better off because they have to eat the corn that's been out in the field anyway. I don't see any real risk to you trying whatever you want to try, including growing wheatgrass on your windowsill - as long as you can continually evaluate the risks and benefits. Please don't choose malnourishment over eating something grown in the soil.

Don't forget, people in Japan have to keep on going, they don't have a choice either. i won't claim that nobody will suffer any consequences from it, but we need to just do the best we can, right?

This is a sincere question and not a dig in any way: do you have anxiety? I think that our survival depends on the right balance to anxiety. We need to be aware of the threats in our lives, and I value mindfulness above all else. Yes, ask these questions, research them. But for us to really survive, we can't get caught up in details too much. We have to keep the big picture in mind. Don't let your worry about Fukushima impact your life more than Fukusima itself.

[springmum]

According the UC Berkely's radiation dept. (they are testing local air, water, milk, and some veggies) http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2525#kale there are still detectable levels of cesium in kale and strawberries. Cesium worries me enough that we can afford to avoid them for now until I can grow some in our garden. 

The EPA did testing all over America and radiation was showing up in the air, water and milk across the U.S. at various points so being far from the west coast doesn't mean we aren't getting exposure. (see their site for results)

I'm not on the west coast, and although my risk many not be zero I feel comfortable buying local meat, and growing my own veggies this summer. I have been selective about large leaf veggies from the west coast as we are TTC.

Yes, the levels are low, but I saw the quote somewhere about no safe level of radiation.....and don't forget we are ingesting it, as well as drinking it, as well as breathing it as well as getting rained on.

So am I on the "extreme" side....no, but I totally get why some are trying hard to reduce their exposure. If I were on the west coast I might be doing things differently. We of course learned from Chernobyl about the problems with milk (iodine compounds up the food chain, many children developed cancer) Don't forget we are milk producing as well....if I were nursing right now I would likely be taking a few more precautions.

I have increased our anti-ox vitamin's (especially Vit c) and read something about spirulina http://www.resorthealth.com/herbs/spirulina.html being given to children after Chernobyl to help protect them. So I'm adding some of that too. For some increasing iodine is good.....caution with too much iodine as it can cause more problems. 

Japan has just released a news article saying that the plant experienced a nuclear meltdown 16 hours after the flood, so I don't trust they are giving us accurate info. That is a significant amount of radiation poured into our atmosphere. The media has totally dropped the story because it's not interesting enough, but for some this is still very important.

At the end of the day we all have to decide for our own families what we are comfortable with and who's information we choose to believe.

I feel very sad and angry for the people in Japan....they of course are in a much more serious situation :(

[sora]

Thanks for the great advice.  Your words are very helpful and put things into perspectives. I do think I have an anxiety issue, overly concerned about health in particular. That happened after I had my first baby and started reading a lot about toxins and chemicals.My husband once said that he missed me who once I was, who could really enjoy life. Now I'm a worrier.

Still on the fences about milk and dairy though...

[happyhippie]

 Sora. 

Quote:

Don't let your worry about Fukushima impact your life more than Fukusima itself.

Very well put laohaire. I appreciate this point of view. 

[mommy212]

I don;t worry about it, and we are in Tacoma, WA. I will be joining a CSA soon and buying local raw milk. In my opinion the only way to protect them totally would be to hole up in a shack in the appalachian mountains or something. I still prefer to buy local organic food since it is either vegetables grown with poison nearby or vegetables grown with poison elsewhere.

[mommytimes2]

Sora--I don't think you are being extreme. You have very good reason to be concerned and anxious. It is a really awful situation, especially for those in Japan. I can't even imagine what mothers there are going through. As you already know from the links you provided, in Europe it was recommended for pregnant and breastfeeding women to avoid raw local milk and leafy vegetables. The same article also noted that on the US West Coast/Canada, the fallout levels would be 8-10x higher. I live in CA, with two small children. Given that iodine 131 is showing up in the milk supply right now, we are avoiding dairy for a few months. I think this is reasonable. I am also buying frozen vegetables for now. With small children, the risks from ingested radiation are much greater. Some precautions are not a bad thing.

One thing I found while doing my own research about Fukushima that was interesting was how much of our planet has already been exposed to significant fallout from nuclear testing. That did put some things in perspective for me. Of course, I'd heard of the nuclear testing, but did not realize how extensive it was. In the US, literally hundreds of nuclear weapons were detonated above ground, and hundreds more below ground, in Nevada. This spread significant radioactive fallout all over the US, with most of it landing in the mid-west. As you know, radioactive isotopes like cesium, strontium, and plutonium take hundreds even thousands of years to decay. And much of our food (wheat, corn, beef, milk) is grown here. So, this is something we have been living with/exposed to since the 1940's when testing began. Kind of ironic that that made me feel better. But, with that said, it is estimated that close to 75,000 thyroid cancers in the US resulted from children drinking milk from cows that grazed on these pastures where fallout landed. Because the US gov't never warned anyone.

Sorry, none of this is probably making you feel any better. With all that said, UC Berkely in CA has testing (air, rainwater, milk, etc) information, and the results are somewhat reassuring:  http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling  Take care! 

Edited by mommytimes2 - 5/18/11 at 1:12am