(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

My folks, bar youngest sister, all went to see Star Wars. Obviously I can't go. Koff koff hack hack koff. So I grabbed one of the books I've been meaning to read. Spiritual Foodways: An Ecofeminist Perspective on Our Sacred Journey With Food, Teresa Marbut. Sounds fascinating, right?

In the introduction, Marbut outs her son as autistic, ADHD, schizophrenic, and bipolar. And then asserts (no footnotes on this assertion; at this point in the introduction, there have been eighty footnotes, so it's not that she is having trouble with the concept of citing sources) "Each of these conditions has been linked--as probable, partial causal factors--with the foods I ate as a child, the foods I ate before I got pregnant with him, and the foods I ate during my pregnancy;" also the BPA in his baby bottles and the processed foods he himself ate when small.

I am really pissed off at this author.

Comments

[silverhare]

Wowwwwww. That author is .... *shakes head, searching for words* an asshat.

Sooooooooooooo

[dialecticdreamer]

She didn't interact with him? Take him with her to the grocery store (cigarette smoke, pesticide use), the park (pesticides, cigarette smoke, other substances), or to stores to buy household items and clothes (industrial cleaners, sizing, and items doused in chemical baths before being shipped from other nations to the US, for example). Even if he's not trying the little baby Birkenstocks ON, he's breathing around all of these unknown residues.

But back to interaction: what about the social interactions and events which shaped his intellectual, emotional and social development?

Oh,wait, no, it's ALL attributable to BPA and non-organic food consumption.

[shanaqui]

...Well. She's not wrong that food she ate up to his birth could've affected his epigenome. (And if she's not talking about epigenetics, then she's just wrong.)

But I'm not sure I've seen anything linking epigenetics with any of those things.

[untonuggan]

holy fucking shitballs. that's...wow. (inserts rant about ethics in science journalism, just because, as well as what should be Mom Ethics.)

also, i have read some things being like "bipolar and schizophrenia may very likely be genetics based and triggered epigenetics, but we have no idea WHAT the triggers are or how to turn them off and this needs a bajillion more dollars and years of research."

which would seem like something...she...could...footnote.

oh look, here, this took less than 5 minutes:

"The fluctuating course and the evidence that stress can play a triggering role in bipolar disorder suggest the possibility of an epigenetic component to pathogenesis and pathophysiology....No definitive results have yet been published that clearly demonstrate a role for epigenetic variation in bipolar disorder etiology or pathophysiology."

Shinozaki, Gen, Benjamin Hing and James B. Potash (December 31, 2015). Epigenetics in Psychiatry (pp. 265-278). Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124171145000139

[tptigger]

I think that book can go back to the library unread

[silveradept]

Sounds like someone really wants to pay their solution, without actually bothering to check for the factual matter, or who would get hurt in the process.