Utterly Meaningless

Whatever the deal is with the diet, yet again we have a family with prior social services contact somehow managing to kill (or let die) a child. Someone tell me again how state involvement in family life is necessary to keep children safe …

Criticize the government… but the problem and responsibility still ultimately lies with the parents for being crackpots.

As far as the spin… there are lots of families like this one. I know some, and you probably do too. I think they’re all looney tunes, but they don’t usually kill their kid by their adherence to their strict lifestyles. This family went way over the top and their kids should be fed somewhere!

Anyway, my question is – why in the world would a 5-month old NOT be nursing, and receiving wheat grass and almond milk? Maybe the mom was also so malnourished she couldn’t produce? There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation if the family was so hell-bent on the natural foods.

This article states that they found a physical defect that caused the death:
news-j...05.htm

Mary

The uncooked/unprocessed food idea actually makes some sense. We cook and process the nutrients out of much of our food, then add fat for taste. During the Viet Nam war’s project hamlet, we moved Vietnamese from their villages into ‘strategic hamlets’ and substituted polished and processed, ‘Americanized’ white rice for their normal diet. The result was an outbreak of scurvy because the rice didn’t have the natural nutrients that their original diet had. If the diet had anything to do with this child’s death, it probably stemmed from lack of a particular nutrient, not from the overall philosophy.
I wonder if the child was nursing. There is not enough information to determine whether she was or not from the story. If the mother was malnourished, she probably would not have been able to concieve, so it is likely she is healthy.
My experience with child protection authorities leads me to view this one with skepicism.