Tuesday, April 23, 2013

WILL KIDS FIND THEIR OWN WAY IF WE CUT THEM LOOSE IN A WORLD OF PACKAGED CRAP?

It's a nice thought:  set our children free in today's world of nutritionally diluted, toxified food, and they will find their own way.  If we just let them alone, they will spontaneously "eat healthy". 

For some kids, this works OK.  They grow up discriminating between foods that enhance their well being, and those that don't, and tend towards the former.  And I want to trust all kids completely, to have faith in their little internal compasses, to believe they will moderate themselves and seek out healthful foods no matter what is generally available. Even so, the laissez faire approach ignores the addictiveness and obiquitouslness of certain foods and personalities.  It minimizes, I believe, the health disaster which is the modern food system as well as the benefits of avoiding artificial chemicals. 

It's the WAY you try to influence your child that matters.  If you do it by modeling healthful eating with love and patience, then you don't lay a guilty shame trip on them.  If you share your own bad choices in real time, and their consequences, you move out of the position of absolute authority and into that of a fellow human trying to find his way.  The adults' taking this stance means the child has less to react against.
I should go without saying that shame and guilt trips on the part of parents are to be avoided as rigorously as monosodium glutamate or chemically altered meats.  But let's not confuse mental and emotional clarity with passive acceptance of the most FUBAR food system the world has ever seen, in terms of overall and long-term health.  In order to be loving, we have to actively oppose it.
Ourselves, we don't absolutely restrict our son or force him to drink healthy nauseating food that he doesn't like.  He is allowed a small "treat" on special occasions.  When my son tells me he ate something not so good, I ask him how he feels, etc.  He often will volunteer the information of his own free will.  Sometimes, he will even connect a tantrum with earlier consumption of a carb-heavy food.
...My own parents did not lay any kind of trip on me about food (my mom hid the granola, but that was only to make it last longer), but I really wish they had made carbs much less available.  I went through my childhood spaced out from eating too much sugar (and starch—which is just sugar in a different form).  For that matter, I went through much of my adulthood spaced out from eating high-carb, 'healthy' food, which did not jive at all with my metabolism—Half a loaf of whole wheat bread spread with half a bunch of whole organic bananas and organic butter, anyone? Half of my life was a non-stop roller coaster of rocketing/crashing blood sugar.  I was bingeing on the hair of the health-food dog.
If I had been exposed to the idea that protein food and vegetables were my most fortifying foods, and/or if my parents had simply supplied me with those foods three meals a day, I would not have been in such a fog.  But "energy" food is addictive and cheap. 

What to buy?  Do the children decide?  And do you not tell your kids about things like insulin resistance and carcinogenic pesticides, for fear of laying a 'trip' on them or seeming too rigid or uptight--or odd, given that most parents are not making an issue of this? 
There is always a level of "control"that parents exercise—that is, choices offered, decisions made, education supplied (not to be confused with shaming or browbeating).  I guess I would call it "influence".  I have witnessed many families uninformed about  nutritional value, who therefore could not have dreamed of oppressively lecturing about it, and yet their children invariably tend toward high-octane, low nutrition foods (white bread, mac 'n' cheese, candy, pop, etc.), even when presented with other choices.  More often than not, those children resist more healthful foods, when it's left up to them, because those foods would not give them the addictive hit and over-the-top flavor of processed foods.  And without some kind of intervention, they will most likely continue to do so all the way through adulthood, through chronic health conditions, and a relatively early death. 
Many processed foods these days are designed to be addictive.  The creation of these foods involves extensive taste-tests focusing on flavor, texture, aftertaste, etc.  Any chemical that enhances any one of these factors, if legal (and lots of them are), becomes part of the recipe.  With children who are reasonably balanced in their metabolism from the get-go—that is, children whose metabolisms are better adapted to a modern diet unnaturally high in starches and sugars—perhaps the issue is realtively more psychological:  if unpressured, they will spontaneously make some better choices.  But for others, whose metabolisms more closely resemble those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, eating modern 'foods' will be an experience as addictive as it is unhealthful.  In fact, you could argue a neat proportional relationship--the more unhealthful a food, the more addictive it is.

Our "ancestors" ate lots of protein and 2 lbs. of low-starch veggies daily (no fat potatoes for them!).  Whole fruits were available only seasonally, less than half the year.  What's more, those who survived were the ones better able to put on fat by bingeing on fruit, much like bears.  Those of use who are more like bears are genetically programmed to find and ingest as much sugar as possible, and in so doing pack on as much fat as possible.  Present a person with such a metabolism with the SAD (Standard American Diet), and s/he will generally overindulge.  Eating becomes a vicious cycle, a roller coaster—one which they won't willingly get off. 

Speaking of bears, consider the grizzlies of Yellowstone:  in spite of being in an entirely natural setting, in spite of the noxious effect of junk food on them and the availability of good, whole food all around them—they chose instead to go dumpster diving.  They ate our garbage,  which was available to them in the form of accessible dumps.  No one was lecturing them about nutrition, it wasn't peer pressure, they weren't rebelling against anybody at all—they were simply responding to the addictiveness of our sugary, white-flour-based foodstuffs.  The only intervention taken at all to rehabilitate the bears, who were becoming unhealthy, was to make our garbage inaccessible to them.  No longer having recourse to junk food, they began to hunt and gather full time again, preying on elk and digging roots and bingeing on berries (in season).
Everywhere you go, at parties and playdates and school, etc., people--even strangers, now--will offer sugar to your child.  Should you just stand by and let the kid decide?  If you know that it will be quite tasty for your child even as any long-term effects go unnoticed?  If  your child has a peanut allergy, but likes peanuts, would you stand by and watch while he ate as many handsful as he wanted in the interest of his freedom?  Would it be any better to let one's child eat his own, slowly manifesting premature death, the cause of which will forever be obscure given the sheer weight and number of possible factors present in the foods you are allowing, and of which he has no knowledge? 
Think about all of the unnatural chemicals present in factory-farmed meats: 1) antibiotics, 2) the bacteria themselves, which the antibiotics are meant to counter, present in huge numbers in any building crammed with livestock and their excrement, 3) growth hormone, 4) herbicides (sprayed on the fields where the feed is grown), 5) pesticides (ditto), 6) artificial fertilizers.  The fabulous five.  No one knows exactly what long-term effects they have individually, much less as a combination 1-2-3-4-5 punch.  And your child will never notice any of the five, even if their meat slab goes unslathered (with sugary, spicy barbeque sauce).
Food choices can be life-threatening in the short or long run.  We are in the middle of a cancer epidemic, a 40% lifetime cancer rate in the general population.  FORTY PERCENT!!!  If you believe that agricultural chemicals are a cancer risk, do you let your child decide whether to eat the non-organic (but still tasty) food offered at his friend's house?  What if he feels "left out" and sad when others eat foods that are not immediately toxic, but very probably are in the long-term, chronic sense?  Are you abusing and confusing him by discouraging those foods?  Definitely, if done in punitive fashion.  But it's not the boundary itself that you draw, in this case, but the punitiveness which would be abusive.  Given the surety of some serious, negative long-term consequence(s) from eating factory foods, to participate in the sacrament of communally ingesting an array of risky chemicals is more confusing and damaging in the long run.  In other words, they'll get over feeling sad and left out; getting over cancer, if you even can do it, is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
It's a sticky situation—what do you say to a fellow parent who offers such food to your own child?—Is it organic?—No.—Well, I don't want my kid to get cancer….It's the truth, but downright insulting to say to someone gracious enough to offer to feed your kid.  So you settle on indulging in moderation, and foster your own child's awareness instead.  The way of letting the children themselves decide every time sidesteps all that, in the process sidestepping the stress of conflict, but I am not sure that such a parent is not out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Pay now or pay later? 
We cannot actually control our children, but we can create an environment in which making healthful long-term choices is more comfortable and natural.  Originally, Mother Nature created a bounty and variety of whole, organic foods for us to eat, and their presence—not to mention the absence of addictive, health-eroding foods—plus our hunger encouraged us to eat them.  In such a context, there were few bad-vs.-good choices for children to sort out, aside from the glaring exception of poisonous plants--which taste horrible, by the way.  And in that regard, I am quite sure that the parents of those times did not teach their children about poison hemlock or certain mushrooms by allowing them to decide for themselves whether to eat it, because a dead child would be no wiser for it.  Presumably, as naturalistic societies still do, they gave them information, they modeled avoidance, they actively prevented children too small to understand from eating their death. 
A pure environment is not at all the case today.  Less healthful, chemically laden and processed; yet visually attractive, sensually appealing and artificially tasty foods are literally the order of the day and nearly impossible to avoid entirely.  For typical country- and city-dwellers alike, the world which offered nothing but whole organic foods growing in deep, undisturbed soil is history, or rather pre-history.  Our only recourse, if we are to participate in the larger culture of schools and ballgames at all, is to make the home environment as pristine as ecosystems of yore, nutritionally speaking.  Also, we inform our children of the "new" poisonous foods in a matter-of-fact, non-controlling, and non-punishing way, so that they can hear us—and hopefully their own internal reactions to those foods—clearly.
Having said all that and being human, I don't think my little family has gone about this perfectly, but we've done pretty well….So, what's in the fridge?  Organic everything, basically: fresh veggies and fruit, goat yoghurt, home-fermented saurkraut (which which has yet to receive our son's stamp of approval), diluted fruit juice, nuts, eggs, some condiments including my wife's homemade spicy mustard.  In the freezer, local, mostly-organic meats, frozen fruits (much of which we picked ourselves) and veggies.  No ice cream, although on the boy's birthday it's a tradition to have Grandpa come and make some homemade.  In the cupboard we have some whole-grain products: oatmeal, granola, buckwheat flour, and such.
We usually present our boy with healthier versions of junk food, made of whole, organic ingredients in our home, following Michael Pollen's precept that, if you're going to eat treats, let it be whole-food and homemade.   Raw peanut butter, coconut oil, carob powder, stevia and frozen fruit makes "fudge".  A bowl of yoghurt with frozen berries qualifies easily as dessert, as does the old standby—an apple. The fact that there is no ice cream in the freeze means no I-scream, you-scream, we-all-scream going on—and in the case of our natural desserts, no suffering by comparison.
In a calm, loving environment which satisfies their hunger with whole, organic foods, children and parents alike have the best chance to clear-headedly balance wants and needs.  Basically free of addictive and unhealthful choices, the whole family can  wiegh pros and cons without losing the focus to a war between rigidity and rebellion.