FitFam.com Blog

What Babies Should Drink After Nursing

Howie — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:25:05 +0000

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.

A lot of research shows that our metabolism doesn't register the calories we consume in liquid form, unless there's a lot of fiber (as in a thick fruit smoothie with the whole fruit in it or a thick vegetable soup). The calories we eat get counted, but the ones we drink slip past like turnstyle jumpers on the New York City subway. So we can easily gain weight if we drink a lot of calories, because we'll reliably overeat by precisely that number of calories.

My friend Asher Wolf, a researcher in Chapel Hill, figured out the evolutionary reason for this, as I've mentioned in a previous blog post: if your great-great-great-great-etc. grandcavemother had just taken a big swig of river just as her hubby returned to camp with a big hunk of meat, she wouldn't want to feel sated by the drink. If she did, she'd undereat the meat and would be in danger of not having enough caloric reserves if that was the last good hunt for a while.

Now that humanity has developed liquids that provide energy as well as hydration, our bodies haven't adapted. We still think of all liquids as calorically-barren.

Babies are Human Too!

Until recently, there were no "baby foods" and "kids' menus" and "teen fare" - there was just food for people with teeth and food for people without.

So limit the fruit juices to the occasional popsicle on a hot day, or to add to cooking vegetables to sweeten them up. Avoid sodas and "smart" waters - they're either garbage or unnecessary.

Soy and rice and almond milks are OK as a smoothie base, but you'll be suprised and disappointed when you check the label at how much sugar and other processed stuff is crammed into a quart of those drinks. Not something to get your child hooked on. And there's justifiable concern at all the processed soy our vegetarian and vegan kids are getting. Processed anything is never as good as real human food, locally grown and eaten fresh, with minimal processing.

Whole-foods fruit smoothies (search for recipes on the site) and vegetable soups are fine. But basically, stick to water. You're doing your child a favor by not giving them a rampant sweet tooth that will have them craving junk food all their life. You're providing them with a nutrient - water - that most Westerners don't get enough of. And you're saving a lot of money, packaging, and cleanup.

Water - it does a body good!

Confessions of an Uncompromising Man

Howie — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:51:05 +0000

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…

My Life as a YIFA

Our friends Andy and Diane and their three kids visited us last month. We reminisced about our 10-year friendship, including a trip to the Jersey shore that was a ritual for them, and to which we tagged along one year. Andy reminded me about the tension in the air, due entirely to my failing efforts to get my wife and kids to eat healthy food, not junk food, on this trip.

I had just seen the food light, and was busy detoxing my own diet and struggling not to eat pizza and cookies every chance I got. My family was nowhere near my state of consciousness - how could they have been? All of a sudden I made a 180 degree turn and announced that cheese and yogurt, which I had told them was good, was bad. And that was one among many such revelations they were dealing with.

And like all YIFAs (Young Intolerant Fundamentalist A-holes, a term Bryan Todd and I coined in a different context), I was so insecure in my own beliefs that I needed to impose them on everyone I met.

Showdown in Jackson Township

So we stopped at a package store in Jackson Township, halfway to Long Beach Island, where Andy and Diane picked up their favorites: soda, chips, sub sandwiches with deli meat, and cookies. I was horrified to see my family come out with a 6-pack of Ginger Ale and two bags of Cheddar popcorn. LIke an early Church father, i railed against the lifestyle of the pagans, and exhorted my slipping kin to follow me to the light, toward salvation, away from the tortures of casein and refined sugar.

I lost that day.

We kind of had a lousy time, because I was being tough and judgmental about what they were eating and drinking.

And yet…

Several years later, we're eating healthy food. My kids hardly ever get sick. They're full of energy, lean and fit, strong and flexible. My wife is awesome; she cooks delicious garden-fresh meals with whole grains, and just became a certified Natural Trainer up at the Monkey Bar Gym in Madison, Wisconsin. All three of them now acknowledge that they've changed, that they're much happier and healthier and more fulfilled, even though they aren't eating junk food and dairy and stuff like that.

So it was worth it, right?

Two Ways to Be Kind - or Not

I often get emails from moms who don't know what do to about their obese kids. The emails are heart-wrenching. I want to swoop down in a cape and tights and defeat the food industry, and make eating safe again for these families. I want to give them the education and resources to instantly detox, and embrace fruit smoothies and veggie wraps and oatmeal for breakfast, and all the other strategies that fit families know and use.

Yet I don't want to be responsible for family conflict, for dinnertime battles, for engendering the same kind of fundamentalist intolerance that I displayed for months.

The longer I work on this, the fewer right answers I can find. Sometimes it works to be patient, and sometimes, as I was reminded, it pays to be uncompromising. In transition, as everywhere else in life, balance is key. My wish for my desperate email correspondents is that they act always out of love and greater awareness, whether the action is pliant or inflexible, permissive or uncompromising. And that we may all move, at all times, toward greater wellness and happiness.

Tough Love for an Obese Child

Howie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:41:35 +0000

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. I'm just going to quote your question, changing just a couple of words:

How do you convey to a child that you are not giving him the heroin he wants right now because it is not healthy (ideally without becoming the meany he would think I was)? The child is already extremely strung-out. He is sensitive to his sweating, nausea, dry mouth, vomiting and itching, so I sure wouldn't want to point out the connection about taking heroin and becoming even more uncomfortable, also to not make him feel bad about himself. I know when I want some drugs I wouldn't stop or even care now because of some consequences later. How do I get him to stop injecting heroin without ruining our relationship or his self-esteem?

After coming up with that horrible analogy, I have to defend it. Obviously, waffles and doughnuts are not the same as heroin in every respect. They're legal, for example, so you can get them inexpensively without risking imprisonment. What about addictive? A toxic diet comprised largely of sugar and fat and white flour is at least as addictive as refined drugs. After all, with drugs you can quit. You can't quit eating. You can shift the nature and quality of what you eat, but with toxic food universally celebrated and available everywhere we turn, the recovering food addict's life is a neverending struggle.

You write that your child is sensitive about his weight. Can you see a spiral in which his food addictions are fueled by bad feelings about his weight, leading to a vicious cycle? If the other children in his life aren't already making him feel bad about being fat, they will soon. Choices bring consequences, and it's not within your power to prevent those consequences for him. You can mask some of them, perhaps delay others, but outcomes suppressed have a way of emerging with a vengeance.

Let me ask you a few practical questions:

What are the limits of your power?
How much control do you have over your child's total environment? Is your partner with you, neutral, or against you?
How old is your child?
Is his toxic food addiction simply the result of habit, or are there underlying emotional issues he needs to address and resolve that are unrelated to food and weight?

This answer isn't so much about giving you advice on what to do; there's plenty of that in the rest of this blog, and in my upcoming book, Eating to Beat the Odds (write me if you'd like to look at a reviewer's copy, available in about two months), as well as other wonderful websites, including DrFuhrman Online, and Connie Bennett's excellent Sugar Shock Blog.

Rather, I want to reframe your hesitation to act. How motivated are you to making a difference in this child's life? The long-term consequences of heroin addiction are well known: collapsed veins, liver disease, weak immune system, respiratory failure, breathing difficulties, pneumonia, bacterial infections, infections of heart lining and valves, arthritis and other rheumatologic problems, risk of hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS from sharing needles.

The long-term consequences of a toxic diet are also well-known: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, MS, macular degeneration, IBS, gout, Alzheimer's, arthritis, weak immune system, bacterial and viral infections, liver disease, and many more.

Not so different…

You are limited by your motivation to act and your control over the situation. Somewhere, at the intersection of those two lines, you can act. Do it with love, only love. Not judgment. Only compassion; not disgust. Only in joy; not in constriction. Can you give the gift of responsibility without the baggage of blame? It's a fine line, and requires total clarity about your motives and your goals.

Practical Considerations

Get the toxic food out of the house. As long as you're in charge of shopping, you can simply eliminate 90% of all temptation by clearing out your fridge and pantry.
Don't force him to eat anything. Put out a selection of healthy foods, but don't insist on consumption. When he's hungry, he'll eat. He won't starve himself.
Engage him to design his own healthy menu. Go through cookbooks with him and see what appeals to him. Take him shopping. Make cooking together a fun activity.
Gradualize him from unhealthy to healthy versions of the same dishes. Examples:
- whole grain waffles
- artificial syrup to sauteed fruit topping
- 100% white rice to 90% white/10% brown, all the way to 100% brown rice
Check out the Recipes section of this blog for some kid-friendly healthy foods

Good luck!

4 Recipes for Very Picky Eaters

Howie — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:16:27 +0000

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. I'm revealing this phase in my family's life to show how dynamic the FitFam concept has to be. Just when you think you've nailed it, your kids change. You change. Your environment changes. And you're back to square one. Or if you're lucky, square two or three or seventeen.

I was reading a bit of Kabbalah yesterday, and the main point that got through my 6am half-awake brain was that the purpose of pain is to make us question its meaning. Only by increasing our consciousness can we grow from the inevitable slings and cupcakes of life. So I'm electing to grow, in two ways:

1. By recognizing that my son's food urges aren't about me, they're about him.

As much as I want to "look good" by being the model father, that egoistic attitude is itself a mark of failure. My son's for himself, not for me. If he grows up into a frightened vegan, always wanting to please Daddy, I've failed in more profound ways than if he drinks, smokes, eats like Henry VIII, yet lives an independent and fulfilling life.

2. By finding new recipes

Truth is, I've gotten a little stale in what I've been serving. You hit a routine, have some success, and then put that part of your life on autopilot so you can attend to the other nine burning buildings (or burning bushes). Yet when anything in my life is on autopilot, it starts crying out for attention. So I've begun to put more consciousness into finding foods that satisfy E's cravings and my nutritional standards.

So the culmination of this deep and mystical screed is… four recipes! They're quick, easy, and have made feeding my son a whole lot easier this past week. Enjoy!

1. Carrot Apple Salad

Ingredients:
1 apple, peeled
1 carrot, peeled
1 teaspoon lemon juice
walnuts
raisins
1 tablespoon shredded unsweetened coconut

Instructions:
Grate the apple and carrot into a bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and mix. Serve.

This dish makes a fine salad, main course, dessert, snack, etc. This amount will serve one or two. Play with the amounts - I didn't actually measure when I put this together - just threw ingredients in until it looked right.

2. Quinoa

Quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is a wonder-grain; high in protein and minerals. It's got more calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, manganese, and zinc than wheat, barley, or corn. It's gluten-free, and best of all, it cooks in 5 minutes and tastes great. You can find it at health food stores, specialty shops, and online.

Ingredients:
1 cup dry quinoa
1 cup chopped onion
2 cups water
2 tablespoons Vogue VegeBase or Dr Fuhrman's VegeZest

Instructions:
Add all ingredients to a 2-quart pot and bring to a boil. Turn down heat to low, cover, and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. (Expert chef's note: you need to remove the lid to stir :).

The quinoa should be moist and flavorful, the onion should be mild and almost unnoticeable, and the grains should be distinct but stick together slightly. We cooked this recipe for a community dinner on Sunday, and got a lot of positive comments from folks who had never tried quinoa before. Serve this the way you would any grain: as a base for vegetables, as a side for soup, or just on its own garnished with some parsley or cilantro.

3. Fruit Nut Bar

Ingredients:
1 cup raw almonds
1 cup raisins
1 cup dried and pitted medjool dates (not packed too tightly)
zest from one lemon (use a vegetable peeler to remove the shiny outer skin of the lemon)
1/4 cup ground flax seeds (flax meal) - grind your own in a coffee or spice grinder from whole flax seeds
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut

Instructions:
Put the almonds, raisins, dates, lemon zest and ground flax seeds in a food processor and process for about 3 minutes, or until the whole mixture sticks together and the almond pieces almost disappear.

Spread the shredded coconut on a plate or tray and put the fruit/nut mix on top, pressing it into a flat bar about half an inch thick. You can put more coconut on top to keep your hands from sticking.

Refrigerate for an hour and then cut into squares. You can store them in a ziploc bag, or just leave them out - they're be gone soon!

4. Sweet Potato Mush

Ingredients:
1 large or 2 small sweet potatoes
1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon tamari soy sauce or Bragg amino acids

Instructions:
Peel and chop sweet potatoes. Toss them a pot of cold water and bring to a boil. Cook until potatoes are soft enough to mush with a fork.

Drain the water, put sweet potatoes in a bowl and mush them with the olive oil and tamari. My kids enjoy this with a dollop (alright, a huge blob) of Annie's catsup, or any brand that doesn't have corn syrup in it. Good cold in a lunchbox as well.

Drop me a line (in the comments box below) when you try one of these recipes.

Be well and happy!

Accidental Invasions: Dispatches from the War on Sleep

Howie — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:56:35 +0000

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.

Pallets on the floor - no straw here, but expensive trundle beds, blow up mattresses, foldable futons, and luxurious down sleeping pillows - that started as ways for the kids to get closer to their parents without actually mimicking a can of sardines are now the second-to-last refuge of the parents themselves. Many moms and dads, of course, end up finding board in the almost-abandoned Harry Potter and Cinderella beds that were to have solved the problem.

And in a recent article, Tracie Rozhon reports on a new trend: his and hers bedrooms, sleeping nooks, or wings. A National Association of Home Builders survey predicts that 60% of custom built homes in 2015 will have two master bedrooms. Why?

In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.

Unlike the stalwart residents of Liechtenstein, American parents are fleeing the invasion of the sleep-snatchers.

I asked my wife what she thought was going on. Why is modern culture so hard on sleep?

"Huh?" she asked groggily.

"Sorry, did I wake you?"

"It's 2 in the morning, what did you think?"

"Oops, sorry."

When she was able to think coherently about the topic, she reminded me of three things:

For most of human history, the parents, the kids, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles all slept together. For warmth. For protection, For reassurance. Privacy and alone time were just not big on anyone's list most of the time.
In traditional cultures, people didn't routinely sleep through the night. At any nomadic fire, at least a few people were always up. They talked, they told stories, they tended the fire, they star-gazed, they ate, they had cosmic visions. When they were ready to sleep, they lay down. No big deal.
Most societies figured out a rhythm of eating, moving and resting that worked: Wake with the sun, light breakfast (or no breakfast), do the work for 5-6 hours, big meal after noon following by 3 hours of down time, a final push of activity, light supper, and bed when the sun went down. This worked biologically and socially, and is still the norm in cultures where they pay more attention to their bodies and the natural world than the FOREX exchange and the Blackberry.

We're paying the price for our alienation from natural rhythms. Most of us can't begin to function without drugging ourselves into a caffeinated buzz in the morning. We need sugar and caffeine breaks regularly during the work day. We fall asleep reading to our kids, who elbow us when we start drooling or verbally inserting our hallucinations into Goodnight Moon and Charlotte's Web. We lack focus and drive. We operate on half our cylinders. We curse the start of Daylight Savings Time because we get robbed of a precious 3600 seconds.

So what are we to do, stuck in a society that is more conflicted about sleep than it is even about sex? Sleep is for the weak, but sleep is the new sex. We learn to brag in college about pulling all-nighters, and we also long for one more hour, one more minute, one more slap of the snooze button.

How can we learn to beat the odds when it comes to a chronically fatigued society? Here are my recommendations for a first line of defense against the exhaustion invasion:

Learn to Meditate: for most of us, the exhausting part of our lives is the part between our ears. Twenty minutes a day can train us to waste less brain juice on worrying, judging, fearing, controlling, and berating. When you learn how to meditate, you need less sleep.

Exercise Hard: try to go to bed as physically exhausted as you are mentally fatigued. Even 10 minutes of hard exertion will help balance the racing mind with a racing body, so they can both gear down in tandem.

Stop Taking Wakeup Drugs: find out how energy bankrupt you are, stop borrowing boosts from a cookie or a mug. The interest rate is sleep, and the coffee break loan sharks are merciless. Make it a priority to find a week when you can withdraw from caffeine and deal with your true state of exhaustion. Don't make Lloyd Bridges mistake in Airplane: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines." Take charge of your health before it gives you no choice.

Relax: Take mini-breaks throughout the day. Get a watch that beeps on the hour and train yourself to take three slow, long, deep, smooth and even breaths - in and out - once every sixty minutes. In fact, do it right now. Close your eyes, relax your shoulders, loosen your hands, drop your jaw, bring the tongue to the front of the roof of your mouth, and take three deep breaths. Feel what you've been missing, and what's always just one breath away. Nourish yourself. Smile. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Get Less Busy: Easier said than done, but find one activity that costs more than its worth in terms of the time you spend and the results you get. Invest that time into gearing down. Look around for things to be thankful for. Have a good cry. Take a ten-minute nap in your kid's four-poster bed. You know you want to.

Reprogram Your Mind: pay attention to your thinking about sleep and rest, activity and inactivity. Catch yourself and challenge the societal assumptions we've been programmed with: more is better, sleep is for the weak, I should be doing something productive at all times, etc.

Challenge Your Dependencies

Howie — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:11:43 +0000

The merchants make money by selling us stuff. That's cool - we all have to eat. The question is, are the merchants selling you freedom or dependence?

Will that Weight Loss 3-meal a day delivery plan give you freedom from disease, or just dependence on an unhealthy regimen that makes it slightly easier to reduce your caloric intake?

Will that huge hunk of gym equipment in your basement allow you to exercise anywhere and anytime, or will it tie you to a lonely, dull regimented workout that leaves your body imbalanced and fundamentally unequipped to deal with real life?

Do you habitually gear down through recreational drugs, or TV; or do you know how to breathe and think to find inner balance under whatever circumstances life throws at you?

Once you take a single step toward freedom, you start seeing additional steps in every direction.

Here's a video that blew my mind a little bit. I'm no water-skier, so I see it as a metaphor for finding freedom by letting go of external crutches. See what you think. Oh, the guy in the video is a new friend, Lane "Dawg" Bowers, and he swears he can teach this to anyone. I haven't taken him up on his offer yet, but if you'd like to give his method a free test-drive, click here.

Enjoy!

"Help With My Daughter's Sweet Tooth"

Howie — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:41:02 +0000

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).

A: First, devour the Yummm! section of this website.

Second, check out Dr. Joel Fuhrman's excellent book, Disease-Proof Your Child, which will give you the scientific information and motivation you need to guide your daughters in a healthy direction.

And now, a couple of reframes:

Sweet Tooth Good

1. We are all predisposed to have a sweet tooth. It's how humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Sweet means more calories, and in our ancestral environment, calories were often in short supply. The urge to gorge on a honeycomb, and the ability to distinguish between ripe and not-quite-ripe fruit, often meant the difference between survival and starvation. Today, our sweet tooth translates into trouble in a world of chemical concoctions and very little real food.

But please don't see a sweet tooth as anything other than a sign of health. Many of the FitFam.com recipes for children target the sweet tooth in healthy ways - fruit smoothies, whole-foods cookies, etc.

Slow Metabolism Good

2. Similar the to the first reframe, a genetic predisposition to calorie storing is a good thing. Only in this crazy environment of pop-tarts and white pasta and trans-fats and soda has our ability to efficiently turn the sun's energy into our own energy reserves become a problem.

Be a Prius

Try this metaphor: think of your daughter as a car who has been engineered to get a high MPG. What does that mean? It means she doesn't need to fill up as often as the cars that rev and run faster and less efficiently. It means that she'll run longer, with a smaller environmental footprint, and that her engine will last longer because it's more efficient and isn't racking up the RPM.

If your daughter, like most of us, has been brought up eating nutrient-barren foods that add calories but few other nutrients, then she's overeating partly out of nutrient-starvation. Like eating a 2-pound bag of M&Ms looking for some fiber. We just ain't gonna find it, and as some sage said, "We can never have enough of what we don't need."

Most of us are addicted to nutritionally empty, body-compromising non-foods, so it takes some motivation and knowledge and family support to break that addiction and get us back to where all other animals are - eating what naturally pleases us out of the universe of real foods.

How to help kids deal with stress

Howie — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:40:06 +0000

Q: My daughter gets very worried and stressed about all sorts of things. I try telling her to calm down, but it doesn't help. How can I help her get more centered and calm when things aren't going her way?

A: It sure ain't easy being a kid these days. If TV and movies weren't bad enough, now reality itself is getting us down, with images of war and torture piped into our homes on a regular basis.

Plus, we're told the world is now flat, meaning globally hyper-competitive, so we pressure our kids into hyper-achievement so they don't have to work for remote managers in Bangalore and Bangkok when they grow up.

And that's on top of all the normal childhood angst about friendships and identity and why are my front teeth so bid, and so on.

Stressed yet?

Symptoms of Stress

Stress shows up in our kids in many forms. Stress can cause physical symptoms: headaches, stomach aches, joint pain, dry mouth, queasiness. That's right, your kid may not be faking sickness because of the upcoming math test. That test may actually cause thoughts that lead to illness.

Stress can also wig out our kids emotionally. Mood swings, depression, rage - these can baffle us when they seem unrelated or out of proportion to the immediate trigger.

Stress also takes a mental toll. Confusion, inability to remember the state capitals and to put their dirty clothes in the hamper, and general mental sluggishness can result when the body is in the grip of fight or flight.

What is Stress?

Stress is a physiological system in the body that exists to prevent us from becoming lion food. When we sense danger, we have to do it quickly, before our big brains get a chance to go to town with defining and dissecting and all the stuff our big brains like to do. So we have a system that literally goes around the conscious mind and makes decisions based on very little evidence. Its motto: better safe than sorry. Anything that seems like a threat gets treated like a threat. Hit it or run away from it (fight or flight) and ask questions later (actually, never).

This system has worked well enough to get us alive from the Stone Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to whatever age we're in now (the "Post-Red Sox winning the world series age"?). But it comes with a cost, especially for us big-brains. You see, our brains are so imaginative, we can create threats just by thinking.

Try it now. Go with me for the next couple of sentences and see what happens:

Guess what - while you're reading this, you've completely forgotten about an important meeting with your boss! You're in trouble now!

Did you gasp? Did a rush of adrenaline flood your body? Did your heart start beating faster? Did your skin blanch? Do you like pina coladas?

We can take a concept (late for a meeting) and turn it into a saber toothed tiger. So our body, trusting our big brain (which after all can do impressive things like long division and sudoku and sexual fantasy), sends out the chemicals that turn us into a fight or flight machine.

Relaxation: The Antidote

Lucky for us, the fight or flight response isn't the only fast-acting system at our disposal. We also have a relaxation response, which instantly shuts off the stress response and makes us feel all warm and fuzzy and cosmic. The trick to Stress Busting is to practice turning on the relaxation response when we're not stressed, so we can access it when we are.

The simplest way to access the relaxation response is to take a deep breath. Try it with me now. Come on, I don't care if you feel silly. It's not like I'm telling you to open your checkbook and write a check for $2500 to the Howie Jacobson Relaxation in Belize Fund. Just take a deep breath, in through the nose, feeling the cool air going in. As you inhale deeply, hunch up your shoulders and clench your fists. Now let go and exhale with a big sigh. Drop your shoulders and smile as you exhale warm air through your nose.

There. Now you're relaxing. No matter how stressed you were, your body shut off the stress response. When you hit the brakes, you automatically take your foot off the accelerator.

If you feel much better, you can keep going. When you're approaching blissfully swell, take out your checkbook and - ah, just kidding!

Resources for Kids

To help our kids Stress Bust, we have to give them two gifts: a mindset and a toolbox. The mindset is basically this: you can't always control what happens, but you can control your response to it. Things don't cause you stress. Your interpretation causes you stress.

CD: Peaceful Moments for Kids

A great teacher of mindset is my friend and teacher Greg Lynn Weaver, spiritual director of the PeaceWeavers. I drove up to the PeaceWeaver retreat sanctuary in Bath NY, which, if you Google Map it (product placement opportunity there, Mapquest!), is 12 hours away from my home in Durham NC, just to record Greg Lynn's "Peaceful Thoughts for Kids" onto CD. It's not a classic "meditation CD" - rather it's short reflections, very conversational, that guide kids into calmness and balance.

It's called "Peaceful Moments" because each track focuses on a specific moment in your child's day: waking up, brushing teeth, eating, taking a bath, getting ready for bed, etc. Some of the moments are related to feelings rather than events - how to have a peaceful moment when you're scared, angry, sad, happy, grateful, etc. Greg Lynn uses events and emotions as triggers to breathe and focus on our own wellness and happiness.

Here are three sample tracks for you to listen to or download to your kid's iPod. (What? Your kid doesn't have their own iPod? No wonder they're stressed.)

Introduction

Brushing our teeth

Feeling angry

If you like what you hear, you can buy Peaceful Moments for Kids here:

Computer Game: Journey to the Wild Divine

We gave this to my daughter last year for her 10th birthday. It's a beautiful game, with gorgeous music and lush graphics, and it kept her (and her friends, and her brother, and her parents) interested for a long time. I'm not a big computer gamer - in fact, Wild Divine is the only computer game we own that doesn't teach the times table or something equally sad - but in this case, I'm 100% in favor of the technology and its function.

Instead of controlling the game with a joystick or keystrokes or a flailing Wii console that's about to crash through your 48" plasma TV (try staying centered and focused when that happens!), players achieve desired outcomes through biofeedback. Three finger-thingies (that's a technical term) gently connect to your fingertips and measure skin conductance and heart rate variability. By breathing and relaxing, you can juggle balls, affect the flight of birds, and levitate stones.

If you've never tried biofeedback, you're in for a real treat. We may accept the concept that our thoughts are real and can impact the world, but when you're magically floating a boulder and you think of something unpleasant and the boulder plummets, it's eye-opening. I'm so glad that my kids have gotten that experience. I'm also thrilled that they're learning skills of relaxation, including breathing, awareness and thought control.

Journey to the Wild Divine is available here.

Hope this helps!

Health, Prophecy, Prayer and Choice

Howie — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:47:10 +0000

Actually, I'm as wacky as the next guy, so it's kind of surprising that I didn't really get into a book called The Isaiah Effect, which combines ancient Essene prophecies with modern quantum physics to explain how we can rediscover the lost arts of prophesy and prayer to avoid global destruction and instead usher in an era of peace and love.

Probably I'm down on the book because the author, Gregg Braden, was unshaven in the photo on the back cover, and he looked pretty good. Me, when I don't shave for a day or two, I could audition for "third hoodlum" in a Jackie Chan movie.

Anyway, the book came at a good time for me. Since the publication of my last newsletter on the link between poor nutrition and cancer, I've been struggling to find the right language for the connection. On the one hand, the research clearly and uncompromisingly shows that consumption of animal protein is closely linked with cancer. On the other hand, it's not a direct causal relationship, and people with cancer certainly don't need to be told, in the midst of their fear and uncertainty, that they brought this disease on themselves.

Braden's book offers three concepts that have given me a different way to talk about the link between our behavior and the health outcomes we live:

Prophecy: the ability to predict future consequences of current thoughts and actions
Prayer: the ability to change our thinking and actions to bring about the prophecy we desire
Choice Points: any time before the prophecy comes to pass where we have a chance to change it through our thoughts and actions

Prophecy

The scientific research laid out in Colin Campbell's The China Study links poor nutrition to cancer. Specifically, the vast preponderance of the evidence shows that too much animal protein (greater than 10% of calories) causes cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes in humans. So, if you are a human, that's a relevant prophecy. It s not a fixed prediction, like something Nostradamus would say ("Two nations will go to war, and one of them will win," as quoted by Woody Allen).

It's simply trend analysis, of the same kind carried about by Isaiah and Jeremiah and the other biblical prophets. "Keep doing X, and Y will happen." For example:

"30 days more (of evil behavior), and Nineveh will be destroyed" (Jonah).
"If you keep doing the rituals while ignoring my commandments, the land shall be desolate and yucky" (Isaiah).
"If you don't like my apples, don't shake my tree" (Def Leppard).

They aren't foretelling the future, they're just connecting present actions to an undesirable future in an attempt to change behavior.

Prayer

Let's define prayer as a mode of thinking that seeks to connect with Ultimate Reality and act in accordance with the highest good. I'm no theologian, Thor knows, but I do have photos of my Bar Mitzvah from 1978, so I feel equipped to speak as an expert on the subject of prayer. All through my Bar Mitzvah, for example, I was fervently praying, "Lord, don't let my voice crack with Heidi Siegal sitting there in the 5th row."

When we connect with reality, we see how our actions partly determine our future. Once we have deep understanding, action becomes easier. The Ghost of Christmas Future achieved some serious leverage with Scrooge by showing him a nasty future. Many of us are jolted into improving our health after someone close to us gets sick.

Prayer is also mindful acceptance of the present moment. Try mindfully eating a Big Mac, and you'll also connect with the reality that this substance has no place in your body.

Prayer, in a religious sense, is a way of reminding ourselves that everything is holy, including ourselves. As Seattle, Chief of the Supersonics said, "What we do to the web, we do to ourselves."

Colin Campbell has always argued that nutrition is a holistic process. Focusing on individual nutrients as good or bad misses the point, and causes us to eat badly while consuming useless pills and powders. But Campbell means more than that these days. In a speech he gave last summer, he waxed almost spiritual about the process of nutrition. It's a beautiful, incredibly complex symphony, involving not just our food and our bodies, but the air, water, soil, sun - all of life works together to produce the food that all of life consumes.

Which means that, like pregnant women everywhere, we're not just "eating for one." What we eat affects global prophecies as well as individual ones.

The prophet Al-Goremiah recently showed us that Global Warming is a threat to the environment on which we depend for our very lives. Yet his movie, and the global anti-Global Warming movement in general, misses the point when they focus on light bulbs and cars. According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, the greenhouse gas methane, produced by cow farts, is a bigger problem than carbon dioxide.

Methane Fact #1: Methane traps 23 times more heat than carbon dioxide
Methane Fact #2: Methane has a half-life of 8 years in the atmosphere, compared to 23 years for carbon dioxide. Meaning, if we stop producing cattle today, we can reverse global warming quickly, before Greenland turns green and New York City and Calcutta become coral reefs.

In other words, when you shift to a plant-based diet, you're not only significantly reducing your risk of cancer (potentially eliminating it entirely, actually), you're also acting to prevent the global disaster that many of us have seen premonitions of first-hand this so-called "winter."

As a species, we need to cultivate a mindset that connects our actions with the highest good. It's hard to see the big picture when we're so busy with daily details.

Last summer, I attended a fantastic festival put on by my local river association. Great music, crafts, storytelling, environmental advocacy and education, canoeing and kayaking, zero litter - even the forks and spoons were biodegradable. You couldn't find a more ecologically responsible group of people anywhere. And yet…

The food court served corn dogs, funnel cakes, half-gallon flagons of cola, mystery meat on a stick, and all manner of things fried, dead, and dripping with cheese or sugar. All around me, "environmentalists" who protest the pollution of the external environment were polluting their internal environments with abandon. If I had tried dumping what they were eating into the river, they would have tackled me.

It's a striking parallel to the people of Isaiah's time, who followed the rituals but ignored the realities. Just to drive home the point about meat eating in an eerily biblical fashion, let's see how Isaiah has God talk about the empty rituals:

What do I care for the multitude of your sacrifices? saith the Lord,
I have had My fill of the burnt offerings of rams,
And the fat of fed beasts;
And I take no delight in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats…
Bring Me no more vain oblations; Incense is an abomination unto Me; —
And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you;
Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear;
Your hands are full of blood.
(Isaiah 1:11-15)

Our hands are full of blood. And all the biodegradable forks in the world aren't going to heal the environment until we realize that we, ourselves, are part of the environment we're trying to save. Until we stop gorging on "the fat of fed beasts," we're just slowly boiling ourselves in a cauldron of our own making.

Choice Points

Since prophecy is not set in stone, we can change the future by embracing different choices. Prayer - heightened consciousness leading to right action - is effective when the future is in flux. Both cancer and global warming are examples of futures in flux.

Cancer, as Colin Campbell has shown, is not a "thing" you get one day, like a paper cut or a traffic ticket. It's a normal bodily process that we all experience, all the time. Cells mutate, and our body deals with it. At every moment, our cancers are either growing or shrinking. Tending toward wellness or disease. The green smoothie pushes the outcome in a healthier direction, the Chicken McNuggets in another.

Every moment is a choice point, until we run out of time. When the cancer is big enough to cause us discomfort, we're in for a tough fight. Winnable in many cases, if we reverse the causes through different choices, but it's not the point at which I'd recommend taking action. Even when the lump is big enough to be seen by medical instruments, it's late in the game. Our future outcomes are more and more determined the longer we wait.

That's why the concept of the choice point is so powerful. If I could show you two visions of your child's wedding, one of them with you dancing and laughing and toasting, and the other with you absent, your child sadly remembering you and wishing you could be there to share the day, and told you that the future hinged on your choice right now, in this moment…

The first line of the Bible that I chanted at my Bar Mitzvah went like this:

"Behold, I set before you today, a blessing and a curse" (Deuteronomy 11:26).

We can't determine our future precisely, but we can act in accordance with the odds. We can eat in a way that will bless us or curse us. We need not fear the results of the mammogram or the Papp test as the random wrath of a distant diety. We can study for them. We just can't pull all-nighters.

Nothing is fixed, not until we ignore too many warmings - er, warnings. At a certain point, climatologists say, global warming will produce feedback mechanisms that we'll be powerless to combat. At that point, consciousness and choice become irrelevant. That's the time to hope for miracles. I'm not saying miracles don't occur, but I'd rather bet on things in my control. Like the joke about the guy on the roof of his house in a floor, praying to God for salvation, turning away the rowboat and the motorboat and the helicopter because he's waiting for a miracle.

It seems to me, non-theologian that I am, that expecting miracles while avoiding actual responsibility is a pretty lousy way to treat a diety.

Near the end of his bestselling book, Moses reminds them of the blessing and the curse, and suggests that they take the blessing, "Choose life, that you and your offspring may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19). It's a long-term choice - "you and your offspring." And when should they make this choice? The first three verses of the weekly Torah reading give a clue: the phrase "this day" is repeated five times.

That's our choice point. This day. This moment. This meal.

The good news? It's not too late. While there's life, we get to choose life. The blessing is still available to us. The earth is in the balance, but hasn't tipped yet. Our environment still gives us holy oxygen, sacred water, and life-bestowing foods. If we're sick, we still have access to the divine medicines that can make us well.

And it's all connected.

What we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

We can choose today, blessing or curse, life or death.

Let's get out there and choose some life!

Health Effects of Wheatgrass

Howie — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:56:19 +0000

Q: What are your thoughts on wheatgrass juice? The stuff I have read is pretty powerful, but it's hard to know who to believe, as you know.

A: Two things about wheatgrass:

1. It's good stuff. Lots of phytonutrients, shown to be effective in some clinical trials (ulcerative colitis, increasing iron in blood cells in cancer patients, liver cancer, burns, wounds). Tons of anecdotal evidence as well, about 75 years worth.

If you grow it yourself and juice it fresh cut, you're getting a lot more nutrients than from a head of broccoli trucked across the country from California.

2. It's a plant, and should be thought of as a food, not a "treatment." If we think of most diseases (cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes, MS, etc.) as normal bodily processes that spiral out of control in the absence of proper nutrition, then wheatgrass, as part of a nutrient-dense diet including lots of fresh green vegetables and other types of fresh, frozen and cooked produce, will have an impact on that process. Study after study has shown that good nutrition can stop and even reverse disease.

There are a lot of people in the "alternative" health community who think of wheatgrass as a supplement, rather than part of a healthy diet. Stay away from "wonder substances," like Noni, that are touted to have miraculous properties. If they do "give us energy" or suddenly "detoxify" us, it's almost certainly our body's response to toxins in the substance that we work hard to flush.

We can ingest all the miracles we need from fresh fruits and vegetables.