Protecting Your Kids from Junk food

If  you’re like most moms, not only are you the primary cook, but you’re also the family nutritionist. You watch over the health of your kids and hubbie and have probably had to educate yourself a bit to know what’s good for them. Whether you studied formally or just read a bunch of women’s magazines that tout the benefits of colorful vegetables and super foods – you have some ideas of what foods your family should be eating.

Then, you meet with reality. Junk food tastes good and if we’ve been eating it for awhile, healthy food has a hard time competing. The problem is that junk food is actually intense food – intensely sweet, salty, fatty or intensely dense with protein. Most of us have come to equate this food intensity as satisfying. It certainly satisfies cravings, but curiously, this kind of food is exactly what creates our cravings in the first place. This is the secret behind most food addictions.

Taste preferences get laid down with our first foods. My mom fed me a chocolate baby formula that was loaded with sugar and candy and ice cream were consumed every day. I grew up a sugar junkie and still have to fight those cravings. Now, that’s not saying that all sweets are bad. It’s just, compared to the super intense rush of ice cream, an apple doesn’t stand a chance. So, if your kids are still little, give them the apples 99% of the time and give their taste buds a chance to notice the more subtle satisfaction provided by healthier foods.

After cereals mixed with unsweetened applesauce, banana or plain yogurt, their first foods should be veggies blended with a bit of boiled potato or brown rice. Every vegetable has some unique appeal in texture, taste or even color and if it keeps showing up on their plate, eventually, they will try it. Let your babies teeth on cold carrots and raw zucchini sticks. The mild taste of most vegetables is easy to like when taste buds haven’t been corrupted.

However, if your kids are older and already addicted to certain intense tastes, it’s a matter of satisfying those tastes with healthier alternatives and gradually turning down the intensity dial, particularly on sweets. Try eliminating products where sugar or corn syrup is at the top of the list of ingredients. Satisfy sweet craving with a small amount of honey or maple syrup on their oatmeal or in a warm drink. Eventually, whole fruits, whole grains, baked yams, slow cooked beans or a handful of nuts will satisfy their desire for sweets. Slowing down and chewing more will also reveal the natural sweetness of everyday foods. When our family switched from rolled oats to steel cut oats, the chewier texture required that I slow down and chewed longer. The result was I was able to cut down my added natural sweetener dramatically. It tasted sweeter, the longer I chewed!

To satisfy salty cravings, try dill pickles, olives and different seaweeds. My kids grew up snacking on red dulce and had brown rice with vegies and spicy/sweet chutney rolled in nori as an after school snack almost daily. Because they were getting sweet, spicy and salty all in one nutrient packed dish, they really never developed unhealthy cravings. Given the choice of a candy bar or a nori roll they would hands down choose the roll.

Cravings for fat are best met with dairy, lean meats and fish. I try to serve wild salmon once a week and we take fish oil supplements daily. Pickled herring, sardines and tuna are great foods that provide high quality omega oils that our bodies need and a little bit goes a long way. Not all families can digest dairy and there is a lot of controversy about whether it’s the essential food that it has been presented as. Milk does provide superior protein, calcium and other nutrients at a very affordable price. However, if you or your child have trouble digesting it, then you can get all your needs for these nutrients elsewhere from vegetable sources – or try goat milk and cheeses which are often more digestible and quite delicious.

If your kids (or husband) are seriously vegie adverse, there are lots of tricks to sneak them into their regular meals. I make  a soup that is loaded with spinach, carrots, celery and some cubed potato and when I blend it, add some butter, salt and pepper, it’s happily slurped down. I found that my kids would eat almost any vegie I made if I grated a little cheese on top. Cauliflower got mashed into their potatoes with no one the wiser. Raw veggies including jicama, daikon radish, carrots, cucumbers and red peppers were almost always available for snacking on with a home made tahini (sesame) dip – very high in calcium. Bean dishes always had some peppers, onions, and often some tofu added. They could be served over rice with a sprinkle of cheese on top or mashed up for bean burritos – another family favorite.

Smoothies with yogurt, milk or fruit juice and super soy or green supplements can be a quick breakfast alternative or mid afternoon snack for the family. There really are so many ways to sneak high quality nutrition into your families diet and the best part is that the longer you do it, the less you have to sneak it because eventually, they will be craving your healthy meals.

One favorite recipe of mine is this super healthy version of pancakes. I like that it’s easy to digest, nutrient dense and you can add fruit or even veggies to it for an easy meal.

Oatmeal Pancakes

1 ½  cups oats

½ cup whole wheat pastry flour or unbleached flour of your choice.

2 cups kefir, buttermilk or plain yogurt

2 eggs

2 T sweetener (optional)

2 tsp. natural vanilla

¼ cup melted coconut oil or butter

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. nutmeg

Mix oats, flour, kefir in a bowl and cover and leave in a warm place over night or about 12 hours. In the morning, add the rest of the ingredients and stir. Makes a super easily digested and nutritious family breakfast. Cook the whole batch as these pancakes can be reheated easily or rolled with fruit jam as a snack for later.

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