Have Another Cookie…
I went home for the weekend to visit my family…at a party at my sister’s house I observed 4 children ages 6-10 starting at 3:00 eat two large cookies, drink frappuccino’s from Starbucks bottles and consume two soda pops a piece. Dinner was served at 5:30 and not one of them ate more than a quarter of their hamburgers and filled up on chips. Then the parents allowed another large cookie for dessert. My daughter asked me why my sister would allow such a thing. My reply was that it is much easier to allow children to eat that way then it is to insist upon real food.
There are weight issues starting with two of the children and they all have dark circles under their eyes. Their behavior was crazy and on top of it all they spent the rest of the day in front of the TV playing video games.
We were raised in a family of five children and my mom went out of her way to feed us real food. Soda pops were a true treat and sugared cereal was allowed very infrequently. She cooked every meal despite being a single parent and working as a math teacher at the nearby high school.
It is all too easy to be lazy and give in to the marketing geniuses that make you believe you are not a good parent if you aren’t giving your child Go-gurt, Fruit Roll-ups, Sugared cereal for breakfast, Pop Tarts, Soda Pop, Juice Boxes, flavored water, Doritos in their lunch, Snackables, micro waved dinners and all the things the commercials portray as “normal” for a mom to serve her family and a child should eat to be happy. I have observed the only one “happy”, the child who anticipates the junk food coming towards him and immediately after eating it. Any “happiness” after that is non-existent. The only response a body can have from the physiological viewpoint is a sugar crash approximately 20 minutes after eating what I refer to as “un-food.”
When a child or anyone for that matter is on a constant diet of “un-food,” it is literally impossible to get the metabolism working correctly. I don’t just mean weight problems, I mean behavior problems. Irritable, whiney, crying, no energy, hard to reason, doesn’t listen, and hitting just to name a few. This carries over into school and now you have a teacher telling you your child has “concentration problems”, “reading difficulties”, “behavior issues” and of course the recommendation is to do the strange action of putting the child on some drug to “make him better.”
I do understand the frustration of the whole situation especially as a working parent myself, but I took a look around and realized it begins and ends in [the home. I decided to feed my family the way my parents were fed. Real food, the kind that was real and not altered with sugars, additives, colors, and all the other things that make it “un-food.” Simple food that was recognizable instantly.
Start by feeding the child home cooked food for just two solid weeks. No sugars, no packaged foods, and nothing but water to drink. Make eggs for breakfast, cooked chicken, vegetable snacks and fruit for lunch, and a piece of meat, chicken or fish for dinner along with a vegetable. Observe the positive changes. The child is usually hungrier for real food, they are more alert, listening, sleeping better and in general, doing better. It does take a bit more time and of course more effort for the parent, but then you gain more than just time as a parent. You have a child that has a real chance to succeed because they are being fed real food and their bodies feel better because of it. Eating good food is not a luxury…it is a necessity!
By Dr. Julie Gatza, D.C.