With household budgets, bills are paid with income earned.
With weight maintenance, we have movement and exercises balancing calories consumed.
With the unconscious and subconscious nervous system, there are risk factors that strain the system, “paid for” with whatever exercises or stimulation we can do. As with all else, we try to minimize the risk factors and strain, and maximize the healthy stuff.
This post will begin to look at the earliest-encountered risk factors that contribute to the surge in neurological difficulties complicating our lives. Subsequent posts will also cover lifestyle choices, then explore what we can do to minimize the disruption to the nervous system, and to rebuild it.
My whole focus is on discovering and lessening risk factors and finding the best ways to stimulate neuronal health. It’s important to be aware that
Risk factors are not causative factors
Just as smoking doesn’t CAUSE lung cancer but increases its risk, I am not saying that any of these factors are CAUSING our problems. But add up enough and you might have problems; that’s where the exercises and other stimulation become much more important to do.
Obvious factors:
DNA is what it is; if one or both parents have that which you would like to minimize, do your best to minimize other risk factors and get good sensory input going from conception.
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1. Nutrition: Food IS something we have some control over. The more processed a food is, the more chemicals – dyes, preservatives and more – are added. Pretty much all of them are there to increase shelf life, enhance the color, texture, or flavor, but none of which may be helpful to our long-term health. What’s more, they can affect the baby while in utero, as well as once he’s born. The usual advice of buying organic food when you can, and shopping and eating “the edge of the store,” where the unprocessed foods are – pertains to optimizing general health, as well as the development of the nervous system. Ideally, anything you put into your body while pregnant, you would also approve of feeding to a newborn.
2. Nutritionally-linked toxins: Minimize plastics, like water bottles. BPS is frequently substituted for BPA in bottles, but Dr. Leonard Sax (read ANYTHING by him!) makes a good case for avoiding both. We don’t know the effects of Styrofoam or microwaving etc. – so if that’s easy and you’re working hard, think about the joys of drinking and eating from glass or ceramic containers and dishes.
3. Alcohol, tobacco (in any form, toxic to humans) and any other funny stuff you might think about smoking: please just don’t.
Less obvious:
Electromagnetic Fields, or EMFs, particularly wireless technology
Our brains are in explosive-growth mode from the time the actual brain begins to form. We add 250,000 neurons every MINUTE from 7-28 weeks gestation. Electromagnetic fields easily penetrate mom and incomplete, thin skull bones to affect those newly developing neurons. Even after birth, the skull doesn’t fuse completely until close to two years old, and its bones are much thinner than an adult’s.
I believe electromagnetic fields generated by wifi damage that explosive growth of the brain and nervous system. As Dr. Blomberg explains in Movements That Heal, a book he co-authored with Moira Dempsey, it affects the balance between two neurotransmitters: glutamine and GABA. The former is a stimulant to the system, enabling awareness and function; the latter, a calming influence. Ideally, they form a sort of see-saw balance – if you have more than you need of one, the excess converts to the other. However, Dr. Blomberg holds that too much electromagnetic field energy (largely from wireless technology, but also from a myriad of other electrical fields *) can change that balance, so it’s harder to form GABA when necessary. This results in a permanently excited nervous system that has a much harder time learning to calm down. It also results in a leaky gut that has a harder time maintaining neurotransmitter balance.
Which brings me to the gut: there are so many neurotransmitters made in our gastrointestinal (GI) system, that it’s frequently labelled the second brain. Electromagnetic fields, especially wireless technology, also seem to affect the gut microbiome, the balance of microbes that flourish there.
The wireless technology that Dr. Blomberg and the rest of us fret so much about is directly proportional to the strength of the fields. There aren’t as many about anymore, but portable phones (landlines that have non-corded handsets) have very strong electromagnetic fields. Internet routers also are very strong, and then – there’s 5G. OUCH. It’s out there, it’s everywhere, but do your best to keep computers and smartphones as far from fetal and infant heads and tummies as possible. Women developing cardiac symptoms after carrying phones in their bras taught us not to do that. On the same premise, I’ve also been advising that phones should not be carried in pants pockets near reproductive organs and lymph nodes.
* Anything that uses electricity can generate an electrical field: refrigerators, vending machines, computers, televisions, baby monitors; anything with a battery!
Heavy metals
Again, Dr. Blomberg holds that heavy metals – lead, mercury, etc., are as severe toxins as are EMFs, and strongly advises they be absolutely minimized whenever possible. This includes things that are, er, controversial. Coal-fired power plants, mercury in fillings in your teeth as well as vaccines, lead in the air and soil were his favorite things.
You may shoot the messenger if you like, but there are a few unpleasant truths here. Life’s a tradeoff; you may do with this information as you please. My information about vaccines does NOT apply to COVID shots, which do not fit the classic definition of vaccines, but …
- We’re giving an awful lot more vaccines than when we had fewer cases of neurodiversity.
- They generally have a tiny bit of mercury in them.
- The diseases being inoculated against are, in my opinion, either less prevalent or less dangerous than the ones we classically vaccinate for.
It’s a risk factor. You as a parent get to decide how much of which risk factor you’re willing to tolerate for the trade-off we get in health resistance.