A reader asks: "I'm preparing to weaning my 14-month old in the coming months.  My initial thoughts are being influenced by mainstream, conventional directives to move to cow's milk as the drink of choice.  But it just seems really odd to me now to think of giving my child the food that is created for baby cows.  What is a healthy staple drink for my child once he's weaned?"

You're absolutely right, pasteurized cow's milk is right up there with soda and lead paint in the top 10 harmful foods for kids (of all ages). So that's not really an option once you have the information. For more information about the dangers of milk, check out www.notmilk.com and Colin Campbell's The China Study.

The question of what beverage to replace it with is easy, as long as you feed your child a health-promoting diet full of vegetables and fruits, grains, and raw nuts and seeds. The only beverage human beings had access to for tens of thousands of years: water.

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For my 40th birthday, my then-9-year-old daughter gave me a little book of daily meditations for men, from the Touchstone series. She didn't realize, not did I until I read the preface, that it was for men in 12-step programs, working through their additions and coming to clarity about themselves and their worth.

For all that, it was humbling to realize that just about every piece of advice, every insight, and every affirmation in the book applied to me pretty much to a tee, despite the fact that I have never participated in a 12-step program and don't really consider myself an addict (not even to blogging, which was a worry of my wife's early on).

My practice is to take a minute a day to read that day's thought and meditation, and consider how I can go through my day in heightened awareness and kindness and joy and courage based on that reminder.

A Challenge from Dietrich

One day the meditation began with a quote by the Luther theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whose last name is pronounced as if U2's Bono had hooked up with J Lo), as follows:

There are things for which an uncompromising stance is worthwhile.

This is a guy, a German theologician, who decided to publish articles critical of the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, engaged in dangerous efforts to rescue Jews in the 1940s, and was killed by the Nazis in 1945. Possibly someone with an understanding of worthwhile causes and the toll they can take on a person.

I write mostly (in this blog, at least) about family health and fitness; what can parents learn and apply from a man whose life and death were so far removed from our mundane "Eat your vegetables" and "No, you can't have a cookie, how about a piece of fruit?" existence?

I've written many times about not turning the dinner table into a battleground. About being reasonable, understanding, and non-fanatical. About taking the slow road of education and leading by example. Turns out I have a hole in my memory the size of 6 months…

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Q: How do you convey to a child that you are not serving the food he wants right now because it is not healthy (ideally without becoming the meany he would think I was)? In this example, he wanted waffles (with lots of syrup) or pancakes or doughnuts. The child is already extremely obese. He is sensitive to his weight, so I sure wouldn't want to point out the connection about eating this and becoming even fatter, also to not make him feel bad about himself. I know when I want some dessert (that's what I call waffles and doughnuts), I wouldn't stop or even care now because of some consequences later. How do I get him to eat healthy without ruining our relationship or his self-esteem?

A: You're not going to like me for this answer. Keep Reading…

Golly gee, it's happened to me! My son, E, age 7, has turned into a pasta-craving picky eater. Fruits are fine, but bread products are preferred. Vegetables look to him like 4-inch hypodermic needles poised to pierce his skin. And everywhere we go, he notices the desserts. Life has become a never-ending negotiation about how much of this he has to eat before he gets some of that.

I tell you this not to brag (yeah, right), but so you will think, "Ha! Howie goes telling everyone else how to feed their kids and here he can't even do it right in his own home. What a fraud!"

No, wait. That's not right either. Keep Reading…

Weird night in Europe recently, according to the New York Times:

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

Juxtaposed against that black comedy in the paper's Most Emailed list was the story of another kind of invasion: the nightly encroachment of the "family bed babies" into mommy and daddy's sheets and blankets. For some reason, the article relates, the 1990s were the dawn of the co-sleeping era, when exhausted parents bought a few hours of sleep by sharing their beds, their warmth, and their heartbeats with their babies. The price – no more sex for the parents – was deemed a steep but fair deal.

Now, we're told, as those co-sleeping kids grow into large, gangly collections of limbs, they still insist upon invading their parents' beds nightly. And parental defenses appear inadequate: buying fancy Harry Potter-inspired 4-posters and Cinderella beds may delight the kids while the sun's up, but at night the family bed is the only hot spot in town.

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Q: I'm trying to get my girls to develop healthy eating habits, but one of them has a very strong sweet tooth and, I suspect, a genetic tendency toward a calorie-storing body type).

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Q: My kids visit me (the dad) pretty much every weekend, and I'm committed to feeding them nutritious food and teaching them about being healthy. But their mom, who's responsible for them during the week, lets them eat whatever they want. I don't want their visits with me to turn into "food fights" – any advice on how to handle this situation? Keep Reading…

Q: How do I get a kid to change from being used to eating junk food to healthy food?  Sugar and fat just make foods so much yummier and I imagine there's some major withdrawal from being used to sweet and fat foods.

A: Sugar and fat make foods yummy not because God hates us and wants us to look bad in bathing suits and spandex, but because these substances are chock full of easily digested calories. For most of history, living beings faced two big problems: getting a date on Saturday night, and getting enough food to stay alive during the famine. In those days, it made sense to load up on the calories you found in a big slab of animal fat or  hanging from an extremely ripe fruit tree, because who knew if that was the last food you'd see in a week.

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Students in England's state schools are up in arms over the government ban on junk food lunches, according to an article in today's New York Times:

Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.

The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?

“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader… “We didn’t get a choice,” he said of the school food. “They just told us we were having it.”

Goodness! What is this evil and draconian menu foisted upon the helpless children of the Empire?

The government’s regulations, which took effect in September, have banished from school cafeterias the cheap, instantly gratifying meals that children love by default: the hamburgers, the French fries, the breaded, deep-fried processed meat, the sugary drinks.

Now schools have to provide at least two portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day for each child, serve fish at least once a week, remove salt from lunchroom tables, limit fried foods to two servings a week and cut out candy, soda and potato chips altogether.

Why is this so objectionable? Two reasons:  Keep Reading…

It's coming…! For many parents who commit to transition to a healthy family lifestyle, Halloween is the first big challenge that seems bigger than they are.

Let’s get a little ridiculous for a moment and compare junk food to heroin. Both are harmful (the larger the quantity, the more harmful, but even small amounts are bad for you) and both are addictive. And both junk food junkies and heroin addicts tend to move around in environments where consuming the substance in question is considered normal.

So you manage to break free of the addiction. You make major strides in getting your kids off the stuff too. Then comes a ritual where they and all their friends are going door to door, holding out bags and getting large amounts of it for almost no effort. The ritual is reflected in school, in the media, in conversations with friends, and a lot of it is really fun. Dressing up, being creative, meeting the neighbors; it’s a mostly positive experience, except for the addictive and harmful substance at its core.

What do you do?

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