Will kids find their own way if we cut them kids loose in a
world of packaged crap?
It's a nice thought: let
our children wander alone into today's world of nutritionally diluted, toxin-rich food,
and they will find their own way. If we
just let them alone, they will spontaneously "eat healthy".
For some kids, this works better than for others. 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 them
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 ubiquity 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 mention that shame and guilt trips on the part of
parents are to be avoided as rigorously as monosodium glutamate or chemically
altered meat laden. 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 dog,
thinking it was a plate of golden noodles.
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?
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 and a relatively earlier 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 more psychological: if unpressured, they will spontaneously make better
choices in the main. But for others,
whose metabolisms more closely resemble those of our ancestors, who ate lots of
protein and 2 lbs. of low-starch veggies daily, and to whom even whole fruits
were available only seasonably, eating modern 'foods' will be an addictive,
unhealthful experience—a vicious, cycling roller coaster which they won't
willingly leave behind.
I think of the bears of Yellowstone National Park: 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 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. They also went back to bingeing on nutritious
berries—in order to gain weight meant only to be lost as it feeds them through
hibernation.
Everywhere you go, at parties and play dates and school,
etc., people, even strangers, 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 handfuls 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) and 6)
artificial fertilizers. The sinister six. No one knows exactly what long-term effects
they have individually, much less as a combination 1-2-3-4-5-6 punch. And your child won't taste them, even if the food
on their plate is not slathered with sugary 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 negative
long-term consequence(s) from eating factory food, perhaps allowing them to eat
it, to participate in the culturally-sanctioned sacrament of communally
ingesting an array of risky chemicals, is more confusing and damaging in the
long run.
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 plead 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,
anyone?
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. 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, inorganic, processed,
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 sauerkraut
(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 fresh/frozen fruit, mixed and left in the freezer
for a bit, makes "frozen 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 have the best chance to be clear-headed
enough in the first place to balance wants and needs, and consider the
information supplied to them without undue rebellion.
