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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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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Andrea Beaman is one of the most sensible and kind voices out there on the topic of feeding and treating yourself right. What other health and nutrition guru would admit to smoking the occasional cigarette (but only after a couple of drinks!), and explain it in a way that shows us how to quit all our unhealthy addictions?

Andrea was FitFam's guest on the December Member Call. Listen online (60 min) or download the mp3 below to discover:

• several healthy holiday treats
• whether short fasts during the holiday season will make things better or worse
• the mindset shift that allows anyone to "find the time" to prepare healthy food every day
• three convenience foods that can turn anyone into a healthy short-order cook on a moment's notice
• how to quit smoking by not quitting smoking
• the secret to breaking food addictions without struggling or feeling deprived

Kathleen Melanson, Director of the University of Rhode Island's Energy Metabolism Laboratory, is conducting a series of brilliant and simple experiments about the connection between how fast we eat and how many calories we consume.

One experiment even got press in USA Today: 30 college-age women were asked to eat a meal of pasta and sauce with grated cheese, and a glass of water on two different occasions. One time they were asked to eat quickly, and were given a large spoon and bowl, and the other time they were asked to eat as slowly as possible, with a small spoon and bowl, and instructed to place their spoon down between bites.

The results: Keep Reading…

Hey, I like video games as much as the next guy… if the next guy is Mahatma Gandhi. Reuters (reported in The Age out of Australia) shared research on the cardiovascular effects of the video game "Dance Dance Revolution" on overweight kids. They found that while playing the game increased heart rate and burned more calories (than, for example, sitting on their butts watching other people dance on MTV), essentially, it made no difference to their weight or fitness.  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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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…

Connie Bennett, writer of the Sugar Shock blog, points to a Harvard study suggesting that Americans' rampant consumption of sugary beverages is contributing mightily to our collective enlargement and our stampede toward Type II Diabetes.

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