Letters to the Editor
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A few suggestions
Food that is marketed to the general public is much different today than it was in Ye Olde Days when we were growing up and everything was (allegedly) peachy keen. As Juliebird pointed out, much of today's food is actually "food product," loaded with high-fructose corn syrup and other elements put in for marketing, production, storage and profit reasons, not for nutritional reasons. There's much more of an agri-industrial complex than there used to be.
Convenience food and fast foods are also much more available, heavily marketed and omnipresent. In Ye Olde Days, schools didn't have to "partner" with fast-food companies to make budgets balance, for example.
Then there are the obstacles to exercise that didn't exist in Ye Olde Days. PE used to be daily, now it's more of a twice-a-week thing. Neighborhoods used to be a lot more pedestrian-friendly. And so on.
It's really not constructive to scold today's parents and point to one's own past as some kind of model. The past is past; times change and we can't go backward. For a variety of reasons, there are nutritional challenges that didn't exist when we were kids. I mean, Chinese food additives, anyone? But there are opportunities that might not have existed in the past, too, such as mandates for nutritional and (for some foods) place-of-origin labeling.
A few things that do seem to encourage kids to develop good eating habits are:
-- family visits to farmers' markets and pick-your-own farms, or wild berry patches or fishing streams;
-- eating "local" as much as possible, including from your own garden. Kids seem more interested in food if they know exactly where it comes from.
-- persistence in introducing more healthful food choices. Sometimes you have to offer a particular item or dish 10 times before a kid tries it and likes it;
-- smaller portions and fewer snacks. Some health experts have pointed out that kids who are picky eaters are actually eaters who are not all that hungry. Very young kids may not need all the food that we think they do, and if they're already kind of sated, they're going to eat only treats.
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bread
Commercial wheat flour is just like ordinary flour in that the grains are crushed which makes them very fast to convert into sugar, they're high on the glycemic index. There is more fiber from the husk, but that's it. That means they create an addictive sugar buzz, and leads to obesity and diabetes and such. Basically, treat flour almost as you would cake.
Whole grains are better in that they're slower to digest. But they're still carbs with a lot of calories relative to nutrients. Nuts are more satisfying in smaller quantity, crunchy, and have omegas. Way better imo.
Google glycemic index and you'll be able to answer those questions.
I recommend you try eating some exotic foods, even if they seem odd at first, to develop tastes for more spicy, tangy, and even stinky foods. To be totally blunt, you also want to desensitize taste buds a bit to appreciate spicy and stinky foods.
Thai is a good place to start becasue it's accessible and uses lots of herbs and spices with minimal frying, fats, or carbs if you avoid noodles. When you get to the point where you're craving roasted garlic and vinegar fish sauce with chili over a green papaya salad, because nothing else would hit the spot after a long hike in the sun, bread cravings will be long gone.
Even children in Tropical-Mediterranean cultures crave such foods as garlic, chili, okra, stinky fish stews and such.
Whether it's healthy and exotic taste, or bland and starchy, what you re-train yourself to like is completely up to you, though it helps to have like-minded people around and people from more spicy cultures get a head start.
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@Allie_
Plus, cheese is extremely fattening compared to what you get out of it.
True, though cheese is fine in small quantities. I treat it like I would cheese cake. I'm not going to eat lots of it, so I get strongly flavored cheeses and really enjoy them. Actually, any cheese I could eat in big bites by itself, is probably going to be bland with anything else, and I'm probably going to avoid it.
I'll use a little strong flavored cheese like chevere in a vinaigrette salad to boost the flavor, and a little is all you need.
Or brie or such on pita bread is good, providing it's also eaten with a salad on the side, nuts, olives, pickles, hummus, a little chocolate, wine, fruits like blueberries or peaches, and such. All those flavors compliment and enhance each other, so the net sum is greater than the parts in flavor and satisfaction, but less in calories than eating just the cheese or bread.
Quality over quantity and always eating a diverse mixture to slow eating down and keep it interesting, that's my rule. I try to avoid the "crack" foods which I consider anything that is the type of thing so bland and simple you can just pig out on it unconsciously without any real gratification.
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Thanks healthyskeptic.
I like your advice.
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The letters here demonstrate the problem...
As a culture, we are completely at sea about what constitutes a healthy diet, so much of what we say when we try to talk about this is absolute nonsense.
For example: Healthy Skeptic claims to eat a Mediterranean diet...but eschews BREAD (cuz it's a poison and it's like cake and it causes diabetes), but what Mediterranean culture doesn't have a rich tradition of baking wonderful breads? They are eating all that fish, spices, olives and so forth with BREAD. What he is really exposing is (yet another) American-style DIET, the intent of which is to make you, or get you, THIN, and has very little to do with optimal nutrition.
For that matter, NO FOOD CAUSES DIABETES, not sugar, not cake, not junk food, not corn syrup, not soda pop. Type II Diabetes is a disease, and you have to be genetically predisposed to it in order to develop it, and while being significantly overweight can accelerate your slide into diabetes, it cannot cause diabetes in someone who is not destined to get it anyways. To speak this way about diabetes (which is a tragic illness causing much pain and suffering) is like saying that "homosexuality causes AIDS". It's blaming the victim for his illness, something we don't do with any other disease.
I am firmly in favor of healthful eating, nutrition, fresh food, vegetables & I eat this way myself. But that's because (raised by a very traditional mom, and immigrant grandmothers), I CAN COOK. Even more so, I DO COOK, almost every night. Even when I was a young single woman, or lonely middle aged divorcee, I cooked from scratch for the majority of my meals. My observation of my peers, and younger people (Gen X and Y) is that very, very few of them actually cook on a daily basis....by this, I mean simple ordinary meals, not the once-in-a-great-while party food cooked on your six-burner Viking range. When people see that I actually cook food from scratch daily, they are often astonished, because they eat the majority of their meals out in some manner, grabbed on the go, ordered from takeout....even those who buy food at the supermarket usually get prepared, or partly prepared foods. In many ways, cooking magazines and foodies to the contrary, the art of basic family cooking is mostly dead.
So, this has been a long round about way of getting to the kids, the subject of the article. What do you expect kids to eat when they have been raised on takeout, fast food, canned food, etc.? How many meals do your kids gobble down in the car while you drive around frantically doing errands? It isn't really possible to eat many healthy foods, or to cook, on the lifestyle schedules that most American families live, lifestyles where both parents work (or there is a single working parent) and NOBODY COOKS ANYTHING, except a few things like Kraft Mac and Cheese (which should technically not count as "cooking" anything).
Parents who were used to a VERY long adolecsence themselves, where they could order takeout and eat pizza whenever they felt like it literally don't have the time to do the shopping and cooking required to give their kids good food....nor do they have much desire to do so. And the lack of time their busy schedules allot for families, young parents are especially terrified of having those precious few hours degenerate into nasty battles of "sit there until you eat all the broccoli on your plate, buddy"....they want peace and fun, and a kid who adores you. There is no better way to make a kid adore you than giving them candy, soda, chips and pizza.
If you are about my age (50), you probably remember cafeterias that produced mainstream food, but it was TERRIBLE, mushy, gray slime. One of the reasons that schools caved in on this issue was the apalling amount of WASTE...they discoverd that children were taking the official school lunch, and dumping most of it into the garbage. But these are two genuinely horrible extremes: I refuse to believe there is no healthy middle ground that could be achieved here.
Lastly, I want to once again refer posters to the wonderful, thoughful and intelligent book "Rethinking Thin" by NYTimes writer Gina Kolata. Among many other insightful subjects, she writes about a huge, $20 million study which was instituted in poor schools across the country, designed to both give at-risk (heavy or obese) children optimally nutrious meals, eliminate sodas and snacks, and provide several-times-a-day exercise. It also did nutritional education for the kids, and parents, and cooing classes, menus, and so on. It incorporated every idea mentioned here and then some. The children's participation was close to 100%.
The results? Nothing. Virtually no children lost any weight at all (or maintained weight while growing taller), because nobody changed behavior AFTER SCHOOL AT HOME and in the larger society. Because tired, poor, working parents were unwilling (or unable) to cook healthy food from scratch, and continued to provide junk, grease, fast food and so on to their kids.
What I have concluded from this is that change has to start at HOME, not in the schools (though this does not mean I don't want to see healthy foods and good habits sustained at school!). The number-one cause of unhealthful eating at home is ADULTS WHO WILL NOT SHOP FOR HEALTHY FOOD and will NOT COOK FROM SCRATCH. Until we change this, nothing will change for children.
(Postscript: while writing this, I was eating a small container of organic low-fat yogurt purchased from the sainted food store, Whole Foods. To my dismay, it contained SEVENTEEN GRAMS of sugar! Compare this to a 20 ounce bottle of soda with only 16 grams of sugar. This is what is so maddening and frustrating...even if you are basically a sensible and healthy eating individual, it is almost impossible to make truly good choices anymore without being sabotaged by the Indusrial Food Complex.)