Product Description

The second volume in the New York Times bestselling Green This! series, Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care is a complete guide to raising healthy kids. Environmental activist and children's advocate Deirdre Imus addresses specific issues faced by children in every age group -- from infants to adolescents and beyond. With a focus on preventing rather than treating childhood illnesses, Deirdre concentrates on educating and empowering parents with information such as:

• How to make sure your child is vaccinated safely

• Which plastic bottles and toys are least toxic

• How to lobby for safer school environments and support children's environmental health studies

• Advice from leading "green" pediatricians and nationally recognized doctors such as Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.

Chock-full of research and advice, Growing Up Green makes it easy for you to introduce your child to the "living green" way of life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17320 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

A Letter to Parents

Half a century ago, most parents had a pretty good sense of their responsibilities toward their children: to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, an education, and, of course, love. Like parents throughout history, they did whatever was in their power to keep their children safe, to protect them from harm.

But what does it mean today, to "keep our children safe"? In recent years, the job of raising -- and protecting -- our children seems to have become a lot more complicated. Our lifestyles have undergone radical changes over the past few decades, and so has the environment we live in.

As a culture, we seem to be in constant motion. We work more, and sleep less, than ever before. Instead of making time for a good old-fashioned sit-down dinner at home, we opt for the drive-in window of the nearest fast-food restaurant. We live off processed foods loaded with sugars, synthetic additives, and trans fats. We skip our morning walk and instead spend hours of every day locked inside our cars or plugged into various electronic devices.

And perhaps most significantly, harmful toxins have become more and more present in our environment. Every week, more chemicals are introduced into our environment, often without first being tested for safety on humans, much less safety on children. These toxins pervade every aspect of our lives: the air we breathe, the water we drink, even the clothes we wear. We spray our lawns with pesticides, and eat fish contaminated with mercury, and drink milk pumped up with hormones. We sleep on mattresses treated with bioaccumulative flame retardants and scrub our kitchens -- and our faces -- with irritating chemicals. We're inundating ourselves with toxins twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and most of the time we don't even know it!

So what, you might be asking, does any of this have to do with raising a child?

The answer is absolutely everything. Over the past thirty years, these changes in our lifestyle, diet, and environment have taken a dramatic -- and tragic -- toll on our children's health. We're seeing epidemic levels of diabetes and obesity. Pediatric cancers have risen steadily at a rate of 1 percent annually over the last twenty years. A poor diet and lack of exercise have contributed to an epidemic of childhood obesity, with one in six children in the United States between the ages of six and nineteen considered overweight. Asthma rates have increased tenfold over the last decade. Approximately one out of every six U.S. children has a developmental disability, including speech and language disorders, learning disabilities, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Approximately 1 in 150 American children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).One out of every eight babies is born premature in this country, and the rate of premature births increased nearly 31 percent between 1981 and 2003. Rheumatoid arthritis has become the third-most-common childhood disease -- among infants. Childhood allergies are at record levels.

If you're like me, you probably feel pretty horrified upon confronting these sobering facts for the first time. But I don't want this information to frighten or paralyze you. On the contrary: It should empower you to start asking some critical questions about what's causing this extraordinary increase in diseases over the last twenty-five years and what you as a parent can do to reverse these trends.

The World Health Organization estimates that we could prevent more than 80 percent of all chronic illnesses by improving our lifestyles in simple ways, like working to reduce our exposure to environmental pollutants and eating a healthier diet. Eighty percent! So why aren't we doing more to protect our children?

For a number of reasons, children are more adversely affected by exposure to environmental toxins than adults. Pound for pound of body weight, they breathe and eat more than we do. Their still-developing immune systems might mistakenly treat the toxins as naturally occurring enzymes or hormones. And because children are growing and developing so fast, dangerous cell mutations can multiply at a faster rate. Children are also less capable of detoxifying and excreting chemicals than adults. Their blood-brain barrier is still porous and allows more chemicals to reach their brains.

The environmental toxins most harmful to children include:

• Mercury (in vaccines, fish, dental amalgams, coal-burning
• emissions, incinerators, landfills)
• Toxic cleaning products
• PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)
• Lead
• Air pollutants such as dioxins, volatile organic compounds
• (VOCs), asbestos
• Environmental and/or tobacco smoke
• Pesticides sprayed in the home and on the lawn
• Pesticides used in lice shampoos
• Pesticides in food and water
• Drinking water contaminants
• Industrial emissions

Many children, particularly those in lower-income urban areas, face a number of these environmental insults on a regular basis, even daily. All I can say is no wonder their health is suffering. Their bodies are overloaded with toxins and deficient in the nutrients they need to develop properly. How could our kids not be chronically ill?

As parents, and as a society, we need to become more vigilant about shielding our children from these environmental insults. We're already way past the tipping point. We can -- we must -- band together to reverse these frightening trends in our children's health.

With that goal in mind, I've written this book for you -- all the concerned parents (and future parents) out there who are ready to take charge of their children's health once and for all. Greening Your Baby is a chronological, stage-by-stage guide that will take you from the moment you first entertain the possibility of having a child all the way through the moment when you send that child off into the "real world," whether that means college or the workplace. Whatever your level of parenting experience, if you have one kid or nine, you can use the information in these pages to secure a better future for your children.

With the necessary tools, you can protect your children from environmental toxins. Throughout this book, I'll be examining how all sorts of different lifestyle choices -- about nutrition, physical fitness, even vaccinations -- may affect the development of your child. I've spoken to more than twenty of the most respected children's health experts in the country about the dangers toxins pose and the actions we can take to reduce kids' exposure to them.

Though I was interested in these issues long before I became a mother, the birth of my son, Wyatt, deepened my determination to clean up our toxic environment. I wanted to give my son the best possible start in life, and I knew that doing so meant reducing his exposure to toxins. How could I help Wyatt and millions of kids like him?

In 1998 -- the same year that I gave birth to Wyatt -- my husband and I realized a longtime dream when we founded the Imus Ranch in Ribera, New Mexico. That summer, and every summer since, we invited children suffering from cancer and various life-threatening blood disorders, such as sickle cell, and children who have lost a brother or sister to sudden infant death syndrome, to experience life on our authentic 1880s-style working cattle ranch.

My experiences over the last decade at the ranch have strengthened my desire to leave our children, and their children, a cleaner world to inherit. We've now had more than seven hundred kids at the ranch, and I've learned a great deal from every single one of them. I like to think that this book reflects many of the lessons I've taken from my summers in New Mexico -- and from every day of the year as a mother.

To me, it all boils down to knowing the right questions to ask and the choices that are available to you. Awareness is the essential tool here. Only when we truly educate ourselves about the widespread threats to our children's health can we take steps to avoid and ultimately eliminate those threats. With that goal in mind, in 2001, I founded the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology at the Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, New Jersey, to raise people's awareness of the environmental factors that contribute to childhood cancer and other serious childhood diseases. In our campaign to reduce kids' exposure to environmental toxins, we place a big emphasis on the dangers of cleaning chemicals and pesticides in schools and homes. We believe that if more parents spoke out about the irreparable harm these substances were doing to our children, people would no longer use them.

The time has come to raise our voices and demand some changes. If we continue bringing up our children in this toxic soup, their health problems will only worsen, and then what will we be left with as a society?

Throughout this book, I've tried to make my suggestions as accessible, realistic, and affordable as possible, since I'm the first to acknowledge that most parents have too much on their plates for any complicated life-turnaround scheme. Even if, like so many families today, you and your partner both have full-time jobs, I promise you that you can make these changes, without any trouble at all. I've always believed that the most significant transformations are the ones that occur slowly, sometimes without our even noticing.

As you read, I'd like you to revisit the question I introduced at the very beginning: What does it mean, these days, to keep your children safe, to protect them from harm? I'm talking about more than just buckling your seatbelt or locking the back door at bedtime. I'm talking about protecting your children's health over the long term.

Yes, the rules of the game have changed over the last few decades. But if there's one thing that parenthood teaches, it's adaptability. And there's no time like the present to put that skill to good use. We must adapt our lifestyles and ...

Customer Reviews

Not the best choice
This book does provide some useful links and ideas but it is mostly a testament of what worked for the author personally and for her one and only child. The book is preachy and light on facts, heavy on opinions. I was horrified by her remarks that state breastfeeding may not be the best choice due to toxins in breastmilk. She does her readers a real disservice by presenting this idea and giving links to organic formula. According to La Leche League International, a reputable authority on breastfeeding, human milk is still the best choice. Also there was not much information on cloth diapering -- the author glossed over the idea saying she could not keep up with the laundry rather than giving resources or facts about a great green idea. I am glad I got this at the library and saved my cash for better resources.

Very disappointed
When I ordered this book, I was so excited to get it. I am always looking for resources that support my decisions for a healthier life style and give me more ideas to implement those choices.

As the mother of three, I have always tried to give my children the best start in life - from good prenatal care, unmedicated births and exclusive breastfeeding to making my own baby food, not vaccinating, buying healthy foods and limiting their exposure to media.

I was appalled to read Imus' very limited and very uninformed information on breastfeeding - which I had assumed would be a very large part of "Growing Up Green." After all, what is "greener" than that? True, there are some toxins present in breastmilk, but what about the toxins and artificial ingredients in formula? What about all the toxins and wasted resources that go into making the formula? What about all the waste that goes into landfills from the packaging of formula and the bottles that must be used to feed the formula? I can't think of anything LESS "green" than that, not to mention the fact that infant formulas have been recalled many times due to contamination. To even imply that artificial feeding (organic or not) is in some way better for our children than breastfeeding is ludicrous.

Imus also writes about how unhealthy our diets are, which is totally true for most Americans. However, she fails to discuss that a mother who has a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods is exposing her child to various tastes through her breastmilk and is therefore more likely to have a child who will develop a taste for these foods.

She mentions several times about the childhood obesity epidemic and the rise in various childhood illnesses such as asthma, allergies and diabetes, yet fails to mention that breastfeeding has been proven to prevent obesity and these other childhood diseases that she speaks so often about. Not only is breastfeeding healthier for children, but also for mothers. Research shows that breastfeeding significantly reduces a woman's chances of pre menopausal breast cancer.

Perhaps one of the most important things Ms. Imus neglects to mention is the fact that breastmilk provides antibodies and immunities to protect our children from various illnesses. That is something that infant formula has never been able to replicate - and probably never will. Breastmilk is a live food, a perfect food. For someone who speaks so often of the importance of making whole foods a part of our diets, she is doing a real disservice to the women and children of this country by suggesting that artificial feeding is in any way equal to or better than breastfeeding simply because there may be toxins present in a mother's milk.

Excellent Resource Material for New Parents....
I found this book very helpful... very readable, and I've referred back to it a few times. I didn't purchase it like it was.... the be-all end-all this is what we need to do... book. I've taken some of her ideas and suggestions to heart (in fact the natural ear ache remedy works) and those that don't fit w/what we can do right now... we'll work our way towards them (or not). I didn't feel as though she were lecturing, but I also agree w/quite a lot of her views, particularly w/regard to vaccines and the BPA and Phthalates in plastic which I go to great pains to avoid... altho i'm not a fanatic about it...you can only do what you can DO and that's really what I got from the book. It's better to do what you can... and be aware!

I'd also recommend Healthy Child Healthy World and The Vaccine Book, I've found them all to be great resources as a new Mom.