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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In today's Disease-Proof Blog, Gerald Pugliese writes in a sad and amazed tone about the American love affair with fried food:
America is obsessed with fried food! And you don’t need to be a health expert to see it. Fried and deep-fried foods are all around us, from French fries to deep-fried Twinkies, Oreos, and Coca-Cola—like drinking it isn’t bad enough. Yes America, we’ve got a frying fetish!
Never is it more evident than at local carnivals and state fairs.
Well, your intrepid FitFam blogger has done the unthinkable: I went undercover to the North Carolina State Fair last month, and managed to capture these exclusive photos of ACTUAL signs advertising ACTUAL fried foods that I could smell, see, and get that tickling feeling in the back of my throat that preceeds an urgent need to vomit.
I'm no Morgan Spurlock, willing to actually put it into my body, but I still think it took a lot of intestinal fortitude (literally!) to take these pictures. Gerald, please sit down before viewing… Keep Reading…
I recently pointed out in a forum, "… oil of any kind is so concentrated with calories and so devoid of nutrients that it has little place in a healthful diet." Someone took issue with that statement, reminding readers that fats are essential to life.
Quite so, but there's a difference between fats and oils. Oils are highly processed foods, especially these days with the chemical methods of extraction and the need to preserve them to keep them from going rancid, and add nothing but empty, fiber-less calories to your diet.
So how do you get by without oil? Here are some strategies: Keep Reading…
Peter Bregman and I spent 3 days last week working on the premise of our diet book. As eagle-eyed, elephant-memoried FitFam blog readers will recall, the title changes almost daily (I wish the blog changed daily!).
The concept we (well, all right, mostly Peter) came up with was the idea of "Eating Against the Odds." There's a giant system out there that makes it easy and OK for us to eat junk, and feed junk to our kids. Keep Reading…
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…
For those of you unable to attend the North Carolina State Fair this week, your intrepid fitness reporter brings you the latest in culinary suicide: Fried Coke. 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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Brian Wansink's new book, Mindless Eating, is due out in a few days. The Cornell professor has conducted fascinating experiments looking our how much we eat, and why most of us seem to be eating way more than we need.
His conclusions are fascinating, and they speak to the large topic of mindlessness. For example, moviegoers in Chicago were given buckets of 5-day-old popcorn to eat as they entered the theater. Those given large buckets ended up eating 53% more stale popcorn than those with smaller buckets. And they didn't even enjoy it! Keep Reading…
Are you ever confused about what makes up a healthy diet?
Have you ever heard mixed messages from doctors, from experts, from the media?
This confusion is no accident – it's exactly what is intended by the sickness profiteers – the people whose economic fortunes depend on your inability to tell healthy from unhealthy food.
I've written an article that sheds a lot of light on the subject, and explains the truth about one particularly horrible illness: cancer. It contains information that you will have a very hard time finding in the mainstream media, and shows you how to make yourself and your kids virtually cancer-proof.
Download the article by right-clicking here.
The New York City Board of Health looks like its serious in its efforts to keep New York residents safe from trans fats, the synthetic oil and butter substitutes that do nasty things to our insides. They voted to limit the amount of trans fat per serving in the city's 20,000 restaurants.
Many restauranteurs are upset, of course, in the same way bar owners were ticked off when they weren't allowed to poison their staff with cigarettes, and the way car manufacturers were outraged when they were forced by the government to put in seat belts, air bags, and other life-saving technologies.
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