By Colleen Huber, Naturopathyworks
During at least some of their childhood, you've probably watched your son or daughter notice
"the grass is definitely greener elsewhere." One of the biggest challenges to your family's healthy lifestyle is your child's perception that other people are privileged simply because they eat differently.
The parents' strategic awareness and preparation for a child's fascination with the Standard American Diet (SAD) is paramount.
Adults also fall into conforming to SAD just because so many other people are doing it. That said, what law states that you must conform 100 percent to all majority cultural practices, including some of those practices that are kind of dumb, and definitely not good for your health?
At no time is the parents' advantage greater than in earliest childhood for understanding the crucial role of food in setting the course for either chronic disease or a lifetime of good health.
At no other time is the parent's advantage greater for establishing a healthy routine. By the time a child is ready to start school, he or she is already developing a strong interest in being like their friends and doing what their friends are doing.
Use that head start to your advantage. You care way more about the quality of your child's food for several years, including pregnancy, before your child begins to feel pulled by the influence of those outside your family.
Use that time to create a bubble of a near-perfectly healthy lifestyle your child will get used to and will associate with home and family for the rest of his or her life.
Changing to a whole-food diet can of course be accomplished later, at the expense of tantrums, grumbling and other exaggerations of angst. The earlier you do it, the easier it can be.
Creating a Routine
An easy, healthy routine is your greatest strength, because when you begin getting used to buying, preparing and eating whole organic foods, and make them the first impulse for meal preparation, remember you are building a solid dietary foundation for your children's diets and fulfilling their expectations of healthy good food being a part of their daily lives.
If you still don't believe making the transition to whole food is easy, please take a look at my article on how to cook whole food from scratch. It will become second nature for them as well to reach for whole rather than processed foods and to value those produced without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, MSG, sweeteners and preservatives.
Kids learn from familiarity to appreciate the great energized feeling they get from a glass of raw milk, a handful of carrot sticks or a meal with dark leafy greens.
If you are just now transitioning to a whole-food diet, let your children fill up on as much whole healthy food as they want. The practical advantage of eating whole fresh foods: Kids substitute, by their sheer bulk, the chemicals and denatured food derivatives that we might otherwise eat.
My suggestions for starting your kids off on the right foot:
1. The earlier you start the easier and the more effective your efforts.
Breast-fed kids have huge lifetime health advantages over formula-fed babies. You will never again have the opportunity to make such a strong health impact in such a short amount of time, and for less effort and expense than formula feeding. Even if circumstances only allow you to breastfeed your child for a short time, the advantages are enormous and will manifest throughout your child's life.
2. The first solid foods a child eats should be whole foods, like cooked squash, carrot, broccoli and other vegetables, avocado, banana and watermelon.
Snacks and meals for toddlers and preschoolers should be entirely whole foods. Their beverage is water, and that's it, until you find a raw milk source. And even then, the main beverage is water. Toddlers do not need to know that things like pasta and ice cream exist.
Parents who exclaim, "But how can I feed them healthy food when macaroni and cheese is the only thing that they'll eat?" have started off with the wrong items in the kitchen, and are going to have to endure some tantrums to establish a better way of eating. This will be made easier if you keep the television away from them.
3. TV teaches a processed food and pharmaceutical lifestyle.
The messages you're striving to keep your child away from are delivered continually:
- Eat out, or open a package to get your ready-made food.
- Pour yourself a glass of colored liquid.
- Your life is just not happy until you take a pill.
If you have to de-program what the TV is telling your kids, you won't be able to compete. Nobody can! TV is so flashy and persuasive that you'll be like Sisyphus always having to roll his rock back up the hill.
Either get rid of the TV or keep it in a room that always remains locked, to be viewed together only occasionally (when you want to watch an age-appropriate movie or program with them). Kids raised without TV are easily spotted by their teachers: They're the ones with good focus and lengthy attention spans.
Some families who decide against TV after their kids are already hooked can resolve this issue any number of ways:
- One day, the TV becomes mysteriously "broken," and parents just don't get around to buying a new one.
- The TV has to make way for some new bookshelves and ends up on a high shelf in the garage. Anybody who wants to watch it has to go stand next to the car to do so. Suddenly, the flashiness loses a lot of its grip on your children's minds.
4. Your children's first friends will tend to be those whose parents you befriend.
In other words, almost any two little kids close in age who spend time together will end up playing together, but you are the one who has the discretion to choose your friends wisely. So, I suggest you choose your child's playmates before your child gets around to it.
It is very important in your effort to build a whole food household to bring into your lives moms and dads who are committed to roughly the same kind of diet you are, especially if you also must battle junk-food peddling relatives.
When your children see others outside of your family eating healthy food, they will understand it is not just some weird quirk of yours, but that there actually exists an outside community of like-minded healthy people. When you've gathered enough of these friends into your lives, it will also become obvious to your child the whole food people also look a whole lot healthier than the junk food junkies.
If you don't have a big enough sample size to convince your children, take them to the biggest health food store in your neighborhood and have them watch the customers. Then take them into a typical supermarket, and have them do the same thing. After leaving the supermarket, compare the two experiences and discuss them with your child.
In which store were people generally heavier and more fatigued? In which store did they see more energetic, moderate weight people of all ages? That kind of powerfully persuasive evidence would even give pause to a teenager who is tempted by fast-food eating peers.
5. Keep junk food out of the house.
Naturopathic physician Dr. Kenneth Proefrock says the battle over good food is won or lost at the supermarket. If you can walk past processed food at the supermarket and keep on going, you've won. But if cookies made it into your shopping cart, they will invade your cupboards, and you will end up eating them all and regretting them.
Do yourself and your kids a favor: When you're all shopping together, don't even bother going down the processed food aisles. Shop the periphery where the vegetables, fruits, meats and dairy are, and that's it. Involve your children by letting them make choices among all of those.
Pears, peaches or plums? Spinach, mustard greens or romaine? Poultry, fish or red meat? Their choices will be all the tastier when you get home, because each of them got to make their own choices.
6. Self-esteem is important to your children's comfort with their diet.
Your children also have to participate in social structures involving a majority of children who eat differently than you do. The challenge is to help your children maintain their self-esteem and to honor their family's food choices while being respectful of the decisions other people make. All this has to be accomplished with a minimum of awkwardness and isolation.
One family shops for mostly organic food, but also at large warehouse supermarkets, where various appetizers are offered to shoppers around the store. Their five-year old daughter summarized her family's food choices by saying, "Look, hot dogs. That's okay, Mommy. We don't eat that. We eat different food, and that's okay too."
Regressing from the wisdom of this five-year old, an older child's fear of being different will be fairly calamitous, especially in adolescence, unless there is a strong awareness and self-respect regarding the individual's right to eat differently than most, and the good reasons for doing so.
7. Talking to your children is the most important thing you can do.
The more the differences become obvious to your children between their diets and ones others follow, the more talk is needed. It is very important for your children to know their healthy lifestyle is at the vanguard of the direction society is moving in, not at the rear.
For example, explain to your children processed food companies are using far fewer trans fats than even a few years ago. Also, fast food chains are offering healthier options than just a year ago, following their comeuppance from the film Super Size Me and other public criticism.
School districts are getting continued pressure from parents to ban soft drink and junk food vending machines in their children's schools. Consistently, a majority of parents surveyed oppose such machines. Additionally, a majority of adults said they would also prefer to eat organic food if it were available in their area and at a comparable price to non-organic products.
Let your children appreciate your family is way more advanced than many others just because you know how vital it is to eat right. It is gratifying to know that the world is moving in a good direction. Organic food is growing at 12 percent per year. Even the mighty McDonald's bowed to the public outcry for healthier food.
Now, your children just need to practice patience as the rest of the world catches up to your trendsetting.
Colleen Huber is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and was reported in The Washington Post.
Her double-blind placebo-controlled research in homeopathy has appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her Web site Naturopathyworks introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating that natural medicine does work.