Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Parents Confused by Childhood Obesity Issues

Pat Hartman July 16, 2019 No Comments

“It’s because of this.” “No, it’s because of that.” Every week someone has a new take on the cause of childhood obesity, or on what should be done about it. Consequently, parents sometimes just want to shut down and stop listening.

Why is childhood obesity such a tough nut to crack? For one thing, we all want a nice obvious vector between cause and effect, but this picture is a mess. Obesity is ubiquitous, and who can keep up with the constant flood of news about purported causes? There are so many ingredients in the multifactorial stew, a truly determined researcher could match up obesity with just about anything.

Can’t process any more information

To become educated about the putative origins of the obesity epidemic, eclectic knowledge is key. We need to study up on the ramifications of certain political agendas when applied to food policy. Just to understand the high fructose corn syrup problem, for example, a person has to learn about agricultural policy, farm subsidies, international trade agreements, and a whole lot of other complicated matters.

Can’t handle any more controversy

If food addiction turns out to be as real as alcohol or drug addiction, we have to grasp the far-reaching repercussions in such areas as health insurance and eligibility for government medical care programs. And once the discussion impinges on such areas as race and class, the atmosphere can become very polluted. Is it any wonder that parents turn away in despair, and spend their energy addressing other problems?

It’s so easy to do the wrong thing

Even the most concerned parents are caught in an unrelenting push-pull dynamic. For instance, numerous authorities recommend that children participate in team sports or other athletic pursuits. Parents are urged to make use of every opportunity to promote physical activity.

Then, along comes somebody like health and wellness writer Steve Garrett, to say:

Don’t continually try to get overweight kids to join a sports team. They may feel intimidated about their size already, so competing in a sport that they don’t like and don’t feel competent playing is counter productive.

In fact, parents are told, don’t draw a child’s attention to weight in any manner. In which case, it’s a little difficult to explain why we we are not having lunch at a fast-food joint, or why we must visit the doctor.

Obesity is the least of their worries

Is the kid shooting meth into his veins, or using the webcam to do something naughty? Is the kid refusing to go to church any more, or flunking out of school, or pregnant, or stealing cars? When a child is in any kind of immediate trouble, needing bail today or expecting a baby in five months, it is difficult to focus on the long-term risk of developing heart disease in 20 years.

Admittedly, compared to the obstacles and dilemmas that some parents cope with, obesity, and even the risk of food addiction, are pretty far down the list of things they lose sleep over. This laissez-faire attitude is of course very destructive. A 16-year-old girl once wrote to Dr. Pretlow’s Weigh2Rock website,

A teen who does drugs or smokes would get in trouble if their parents found out. But no one’s going to ground you for eating, which can be equally as damaging, and is equally as difficult to stop.

International food authority Jamie Oliver has been quoted as heavily blaming parents:

It’s harsh to say, but these parents, when they’ve been to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Healthy Weight Loss For Kids,” EzineArticles.com, 04/24/10
Source: “Is Michelle Obama about to take on Big Food?,” Grist.org, 10/15/09
Photo credit: e-magic on Visualhunt/CC BY-ND

The Snackification of America

Pat Hartman July 15, 2019 No Comments

Soccer parents are sometimes dads, but usually moms. And actually, “soccer mom” is a generic term that applies to baseball, gymnastics, dance, track, or whatever team activity that mom’s child happens to be involved in. The supportive parent provides transportation and hearty cheers, and signs up for the refreshment rota.

Therein lies the first dilemma. Even parents who do not believe that kids need numerous feedings throughout the day are forced to be part of the problem. An outsider might think the answer is simple — just bring water. But no, says Eileen O’Connor in describing the fate of the week’s designated snack mom. “You’re only as good as your snacks.”

Apparently, certain communities would regard water as a grave insult, a sign not of advanced consciousness, but of cheapness. Parents who tried to get away with it would be looked at sideways, and their children would bear the brunt of teasing. Kids want stuff like name-brand cookies and soda, so on top of the bad health message, it can be quite an investment. O’Connor warns of another danger:

You better know every kid on that team and their medical history… You’ll end up buying ten different snacks to accommodate everyone’s dietary needs. Allergies. Gluten. Red dye number 40.

Diana Cuy Castellanos, a registered dietitian and assistant professor at the University of Dayton, observes that while our society may talk the talk about preventing child obesity, we seldom walk the walk. She cautions the reader that for purposes of her article, she defines healthful food as “anything that has little to no added sugar or fat, and limited to no processing.”

It is important to talk with other grownups and gather endorsements for the simplicity principle. While some parents insist that kids will not accept simple fruit and vegetable munchies, Castellanos believes that with patience and persistence, healthful snacks could become the norm.

She urges the team coach to assume responsibility for creating a snack policy, thereby removing the onus from parents. There is a list, and the snack parent of the week chooses something from the list and brings it.

As for parents, if the healthful snack revolution has not yet hit their locality, she urges them to be pioneers and boldly make some cookies with whole wheat flour, minimal sweetening, and alternative fat sources. Or make trail mix. Bring whole bananas or apples, or carrot sticks with cheese or peanut butter. Or cups of low-fat yogurt and fresh blueberries. For liquid refreshment, supply 100 percent fruit juice, or (gasp!) water.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “No One Wants to Be Snack Mom — No One,” HuffingtonPost,com, 10/26/15
Source: “Can we please make after-game snacks healthy?,” DaytonDailyNews.com, 05/04/15
Photo credit: Maria Eklind on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

The Chain of Inheritance

Pat Hartman July 12, 2019 No Comments

The previous Childhood Obesity News post addressed the theory advanced by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind, that there are three basic parenting styles, which she identified as authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. We also mentioned Julie Lythcott-Haims, an educator who is quoted as saying, “Authoritarian types are mean, heartless, and cruel, and just have a bunch of rules.”

Rules in themselves are not bad, and in fact the best kind of parent, the authoritative kind, establishes rules. The difference is, the authoritarian has only rules and nothing but rules. The authoritarian parent (or boss, teacher, public official, etc.) basks in the certainty of rightness, so that can be a problem when undertaking any kind of reform.

Even when authoritarian parents can be convinced to seek help from counseling or a parenting course, they are likely to shop around for a program that will reinforce their ingrained proclivities. A University of Illinois research team, curious about the excessive consumption of junk food, undertook a study that focused on 497 parents (or primary caregivers) of two-year-olds.

Vanishree Bhatt reported,

The subjects were asked questions related to the nature of their relationship with the children and how they dealt with the children’s negative emotions. They were also asked to rate themselves on a scale that measured depression and anxiety.

Needless to say, any study that relies on self-reporting starts out with a serious liability. First, there must be the assumption of a certain amount of self-awareness on the part of the subject. Some would call that a big ask.

The authors speak of insecure parents, or parents with insecure attachment. These people are “more likely to be distressed by their children’s negative emotions when punished.” What parents should be, is emotionally available, and able to teach kids how to handle such negative emotions as disappointment, anger, and so on.

The obstacle is easily seen. Most adults can’t handle their own negative emotions. How are they supposed to teach the younger generation to cope with stress by mobilizing healthy responses, rather than diving into the vicious cycle of comfort eating, obesity, depression, and more comfort eating?

Can adults really be blamed? Some of us have put in the work, trying to parent within the golden mean. Most of us grew up with abysmally poor examples, and we just don’t know how to act. And people, including experts, give conflicting advice. This idea is a useful one: When trying to turn the family on to something new it helps to first have a nice hard think about what you are really trying to do, and whether there might be a better way to do it.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “A former Stanford dean explains the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting,” BusinessInsider.com, 10/27/16
Source: “4 Parenting Styles — Characteristics And Effects [Infographic], ParentingForBrain.com, undated
Source: “Poor Parenting Linked to Childhood Obesity: Study,” ScienceWorldReport.com, 02/11/14
Photo credit: Beesnest McClain on Visualhunt/CC BY

An Unholy Trinity

Pat Hartman July 11, 2019 No Comments

In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind noticed that behaviorally, preschool children could be sorted into three predominant categories. She reverse-engineered this observation into definitions of the three major parenting styles.

The first two are authoritative and authoritarian. It is unfortunate that Baumrind did not pick a different descriptor for one of those, because they sound confusingly alike. Her third category of parenting was permissive, and colleagues of hers have added a fourth classification: neglectful.

Baumrind’s trio

Authoritative parents have high expectations, and pay high dividends. This style produces kids with well-developed social skills, who tend to be non-violent. They have more self-esteem and independence, less mental illness, higher academic performance, and lower delinquency rates.

Authoritarianism also asks a lot, but gives back little. The kids are less independent, have lower self-esteem, and don’t do as well in school. Children of authoritarian parents may have well-honed social skills that tend more toward manipulation than diplomacy. This parenting mode increases the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse, and delinquency.

With the permissive style, you get egocentric, impulsive kids with poor social skills, and from there it’s really a spectrum into neglect. Broadly speaking, the permissive parent cares very much, but implements that feeling in counterproductive ways. The neglectful parent just plain doesn’t care. The outcomes are impulsivity and delinquency, along with probable substance abuse and possible suicide.

Julie Lythcott-Haims explains these styles in her book How to Raise an Adult, concluding:

The authoritative parenting style is what we need to be aiming for. That’s highly demanding, high expectations, and highly responsive to our kids’ needs and concerns.

Childhood Obesity News recently quoted Dr. Pretlow on the role of stress as a destabilizing influence in a young life, and as a contributor to the onset of eating disorders. Similarly, within her decade of service as Stanford University’s dean of freshmen, Lythcott-Haims found that a lot of kids had issues stemming from unpreparedness for autonomy.

This is not surprising. Many 18-year-olds are shockingly unprepared for real life. In previous centuries, people embarked on adulthood at much younger ages, and somehow figured it out. But in the present-day Western world, very few of us arrive at nominal maturity with solid training for a wide range of life contingencies.

We all seem to be making it up as we go along. We don’t have the life skills to cope with staying healthy and fit, because all our energy goes into coping with a hundred other things we are not ready for.

Meanwhile, the 14-year-olds are thinking, “I can’t wait to be a grownup and do whatever I want, anything at all, every day.” The joke is on them.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

ANNOUNCEMENT

If you have a child between the ages of 14 and 18 years that is overweight and can read English, you may be eligible for a clinical research study at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) that is currently recruiting participants. Please visit http://bit.ly/CHLA-Study for more information.

Source: “4 Parenting Styles — Characteristics And Effects [Infographic],” ParentingForBrain.com, undated
Source: “A former Stanford dean explains the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting,” BusinessInsider.com, 10/27/16
Photo credit: dynamosquito on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Why Did My Parents Do This to Me?

Pat Hartman July 10, 2019 No Comments

Many sectors of Reddit.com serve the same purpose for grownups that Dr. Pretlow’s Weigh2Rock website serves for the young — a place to connect with like-minded overweight and obese people. It is useful to compare experiences, blow off steam, and empathize with others who face the same struggles and ask the same questions. Adults have the extra advantage of retrospect. We look back with dismay or horror on our upbringings and wonder, “What the heck was that all about?”

Consider a post from a 22-year old woman going by the alias “spooky_tricks,” who at the time of writing weighed close to 238 pounds. At 16, she had been over 300 pounds or, in her words, “incredibly obese.” As a child, she was unable to run or jump, and predictably developed terrible eating habits. As a teen, she was very depressed, and ready to meet death at least halfway. Her entire young live was “absolutely destroyed”:

I thought I was the most hideous, disgusting, disfigured person on earth and it was all because my grandmother “loved me so much she had to feed me”, and because my parents accepted this and didn’t try to change it…

I’m doing well losing weight but it is a big struggle sometimes. I can lose all this weight but the stretchmarks and loose skin my caretakers forced me to develop will stay on my body forever.

Thinking back to her school days, spooky_tricks recalls overhearing one classmate say to another, “How did her parents let her get that big?” Later on, she asked herself similar questions:

Why did my parents let me eat so much? Why did my grandmother feed me so much? They must’ve been able to see that it’s not normal, they’re not blind or dumb. They must’ve seen how miserable being morbidly obese as a child made me.

Parents of overweight and obese children will immediately spot the fallacy inherent in these questions, however anguished. Sometimes the kids are just intractable. Short of locking up all the food there’s nothing you can do at home, and short of locking them in the house you can’t prevent them from slurping up sugar-sweetened beverages and a hundred other horrible things outside.

But for concerned parents who really want to help, another set of rules and warnings comes into play, as exemplified by Jacquelin Burt Cote’s title, “Telling Your Daughter She’s Fat is Not Your Job.”

This writer also carries a grudge, and for the opposite reason:

I was 8 years old when my well-meaning mother told me I was getting a little “chubby” and maybe it would be “fun” if we went on a diet together. Yes, fun! If by “fun” she meant that I’d be saddled with an at times severe case of anorexia for the next couple of decades, then sure!

I know that my mother thought she was doing me a favor by putting me on a diet, but all she did was make me feel unworthy of anyone’s love, particularly hers.

In other words, to a parent, it often seems like you can’t win for losing. Cote quotes Dr. Rick Kausman, who states that talking to a child about her or his weight is inevitably harmful, saying, “Nothing good can come from it.” The author regrets the years she spent obsessing over the number on the scale, and the self-debilitating practices that starved her into unproductive delirium.

Basically, one of the worst things a parent can do is buy into the societal myth that being fat is a fate worse than death or leprosy.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “There are no excuses,” Reddit.com, 2018
Source: “Telling Your Daughter She’s ‘Fat’ Is Not Your Job,” CafeMom.com, 02/10/15
Photo on Visualhunt

Parents and the Long Game

Pat Hartman July 9, 2019 No Comments

In the previous Childhood Obesity News post, we talked about how parents have a much greater chance of success when they remember that it’s all about the Long Game. Sometimes it takes a while for people to process things. However, ideas can change when their emotional roots are probed.

An individual’s food attitudes can evolve, and when the number of individuals reaches critical mass, societal changes are inevitable. It is possible that food insecurity could be ended by a couple of generations of the right kind of education, along with a massive amount of therapy.

We mentioned Abby Ellin, author of Teenage Waistland, and former fat camp client, whose grandmother would not allow her to visit because she was too fat. Interviewer Mindy Bond quotes Ellin:

[P]arents expect that the kid is going to lose weight and that’ll be that. They go away, they lose their 20 pounds or 30 pounds, whatever they lose, and they’re never gonna have a weight problem again. That’s not true. It’s one thing to lose weight; it’s a totally different thing to maintain it.

One reviewer of Ellin’s book remarked about parents,

What they don’t know is how to effectively help an often discouraged, often reluctant kid on what will be a difficult, life-long journey.

How is a family to cope with that long span of time affectionately known as “forever”?

Micro-improvements

Self-improvement writer Thomas Oppong has quite a few ideas about small daily gains, long-term habit formation, and behavioral change that sticks. This is only a taste:

One mistake people make over and over when they want to get more do or achieve a goal is trying to do too much all at once… But 1% a day makes every habit work… Improving by just 1 percent isn’t noticeable but it makes the most difference.

A micro-habit is a small, simple action that doesn’t require much motivation, but will help you build up to a larger goal habit.

Important warning

There are things a child or teenager is probably not going to do, and one of those things is to say, “Mom, Dad, you were right all along, thank you, thank you!” Dear parent, if you have tried for years to instill good eating habits, and all of a sudden your kid catches on, just give thanks silently. Forget about stroking your own ego.

There is no need to mention how correct you have always been, and how wrong, up until now, your offspring has always been. The words “I told you so” must be expunged from your vocabulary and even from your thoughts.

If a kid suddenly develops a higher consciousness about eating, whether because of athletic ambitions, or hoping to look better in clothes, or whatever, just be grateful, and be quiet. This is no time for mutterings about how the kid has now decided to listen to the coach or to some enlightened friend, even though she or he never listened to you, and blah blah blah.

Even if it takes every ounce of willpower — unless your secret intention is to wipe out progress and undo any good that has been done — exercise self-restraint. Just bite your tongue and accept the positive change.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Abby Ellin, author Teenage Waistland,” Gothamist.com, 08/05/05
Source: “Teenage Waistland,” Google.com, 01/09/07
Source: “Small Wins, Marginal Gains: That’s How You Change Behavior in The Long Term,” Medium.com, 06/09/18
Photo on Visualhunt

Time Constraints and Healthy Food Choices

Pat Hartman July 8, 2019 No Comments

As previously mentioned by Childhood Obesity News, time is often a factor. Even with a healthfully-stocked and affordable grocery store nearby, working parents just don’t have time to shop, prepare, and cook.

It’s easy to say, “Surely they have some free time. Couldn’t a family prepare a really healthful meal together at least once a week, just to set a precedent and maybe provide a foothold for change?”

It’s not always that simple. Dr. Pretlow has said,

Defining stress leads to the definition of conflict, which may be conflict over fear. It’s the economic and psychological status of poor people and the underlying stress and depression of living in a poor neighborhood and that must be improved.

Time is hard to effectively manage in a chaotic environment where the actions of neighbors, strangers, and even family members present constant demands. Dealing with unplanned emergencies is a huge energy drain. The well-to-do have no idea how stressful it is to be poor. There could be a board game, the opposite of Monopoly, where the challenges and pitfalls are overflowing toilets and tickets for parking on the wrong side of the street. People with money have garages or driveways, and more often than not, their toilets work.

The Long Game

What about another kind of time? Not just the moments and hours needed to cook and shop today, but the weeks, months, and years that humans seem to need to mull over and absorb ideas? People like what they are used to, what they grew up with. When circumstances change, nobody adapts overnight. Sometimes, a person’s mental resistance eventually wears down.

And change happens. Today, a lot of teens are quite familiar with seeing more nutritious foods emphasized at the point of sale. Even if they don’t yet accustom themselves to loving nutritious food, they are used to seeing it around. It probably makes a difference.

The whole big, complicated food desert issue is a textbook example of the problems inherent in trying to improve the world by fiat. An approach is suggested, tried, and debunked in the blink of an eye. Except under a dictatorship, governmental administrations don’t generally last long enough for real organic change to take hold.

Should we ban substance A? Restrict substance B? Insist that certain kinds of retail outlets not be located near certain institutions? Nobody can deduce what really works and anyway, the people in charge are elected officials, whose concern for outcomes rarely extends to 10 years down the road. Their attention is focused broadly on the next election cycle, but mostly on the current headlines and social media verdicts. The public demands results now, so the politician must bow.

The four essential ears

If Dr. Pretlow has said this once, he has said it a hundred times: adults need to listen to kids. Messages on the Weigh2Rock website confirm this repeatedly. For instance, he quotes a 12-year-old who weighs 186 pounds:

If parents would just take the time to listen to their kids, less kids would go to the fridge when depressed.

Abby Ellin, author of Teenage Waistland, told interviewer Mindy Bond,

[N]o one is talking to the parents of kids and no one is talking to the kids themselves.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Abby Ellin, author Teenage Waistland,” Gothamist.com, 08/05/05
Photo on Visualhunt

Junk Food and Triggers

Pat Hartman July 5, 2019 No Comments

Dr. Pretlow compares fast food outlets and stores that are rife with junk food to triggers. This hypothesis can be verified by riding along a major street with the parents of a small child who erupts at every appearance of a large yellow M. Reliably, each sighting triggers either repulsive begging or even the run-up to a tantrum, and it is too heartbreaking to be funny.

Even worse is the knowledge that far too many grownups carry around that shrill, demanding voice inside of ourselves. We see the M sign, or the logo of our favorite fizzy drink, and suddenly we are no longer in control of our destinies. Like organic automatons we reflexively obey, and eat or drink some vile concoction of deadly ingredients. And we call ourselves the adults!

For children, whose brains are yet unformed, the lure is even more irresistible. Would life be great if no one ever had to see one of those curvy yellow advertising symbols, especially near — or worse yet, inside — a school? Yes. Can a society do anything to eliminate constant triggering of the impulse to eat, eat, eat?

Rule Britannia

In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, fast food outlets increased by 34 percent in only eight years, and nearly 60 percent of food businesses in the city are fast food or takeaways. Also, three-quarters of the residents are overweight or obese.

The United Kingdom’s situation is not quite the same as America’s. England has lots and lots of tiny, independent takeaway outlets, which are just a step above food trucks, but located under roofs. Customers are not expected to go in and sit down, only to buy hot prepared food and eat it somewhere else. On a typical day, the average Brit encounters around 30 such establishments.

London, the capital, is trying. They made a new rule about how close to a school a fast-food restaurant could be — these are the yellow Ms and others of their ilk, where customers can opt to carry their food away, or to eat on the premises. The trouble is, all the approximately 8,000 fast-food joints that were already planted in the city, are “grandfathered in.” There is a new thing, too, that will not be affected — ordering online, straight from a “dark kitchen,” a kind of franchised insta-restaurant.

Making a Difference

London Food Link is the capital’s umbrella group, and coordinator of all kinds of change. Some activists teach people how to grow food; some try to influence government policy; others train the caterers who work for the public sector, to ensure that the taxpayers get their money’s worth. In some matters, there is discord:

Sustain’s London Food Link project has submitted a written statement to the examination of the draft London Plan welcoming a strategic policy covering hot food takeaways (and other food retail issues including markets). However, the policy is being challenged by major hot food takeaway companies.

While the mayor wants to ban takeaway food shops within 400 meters of any school, the aforementioned fast food restaurants would not be affected. Biochemist/chef Anthony Warner told the press,

I actually think it is an inherently racist policy… really about clearing out slightly unsightly businesses that people don’t like, like independently-owned chicken shops and takeaways. It was to kind of gentrify environments and I think it is a very problematic policy.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “More takeaways on high street despite anti-obesity push,” BBC.com, 10/23/18
Source: “London Food Link supports strategic planning policy to control Hot Food Takeaways,” SustainWeb.org, 03/06/19
Source: “Chef says ban on takeaways near schools is ‘inherently racist’,” TheGuardian.com, 05/03/19
Photo credit: s2art on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Happy Independence Day!

Pat Hartman July 4, 2019 No Comments

Happy Independence Day!

We will return with a regular post tomorrow.

Let’s celebrate our freedom to take control of our own destiny and resist holiday binge eating!

Let’s allow people to say “no” if they don’t want another helping of barbecued ribs or cake!

Let’s bring plenty of water to the picnic instead of soda!

Let’s celebrate the abundance that puts good, fresh, healthful food within the reach of so many of us!

AND let’s have fun! Enjoy your holiday!

Image by bhofack2/123RF Stock Photo

Taste and Training

Pat Hartman July 3, 2019 No Comments

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the development of thought around the subject of food deserts. First, there was what some regarded as a rush to judgment about their great harmfulness. Studies were done and money was spent, to not much avail. Then, there was a second wave, as critics attempted to discredit all the hard-won knowledge about the phenomenon.

Others saw this reassessment as too hasty. Of course, definitions are always a sticking point. Some people are negatively impacted by the 20-minute bus ride to a decent supermarket, especially if they are toting two or three kids along for the trip. But others are devastated by living 20 miles from the nearest grocery store, and the transmission on the truck is busted. People face all kinds of situations, and no matter how the food desert experience may be defined by academics or institutions, it can be highly subjective.

As First Lady, Michelle Obama used her energetic influence to bring more healthful stores to disadvantaged neighborhoods. When no dent was made in the nation’s child obesity problem, some Americans took special pleasure in blaming her. What was and is really going on?

Taste preferences? Good luck changing those!

Dr. Pretlow has wondered,

Why do people in poor neighborhoods prefer junk food? Because junk food tastes better, is more comforting, and is a better escape from the plight of living in a poor neighborhood. Do people in poorer neighborhoods thus become addicted to junk food?

But does junk food really taste better? Or is it the only thing we know? A famous experiment showed that a baby monkey will accept milk from a “mother” made of wire or, if given the choice, from a mother made of wire covered with cloth. Maybe this is why we think that only processed food laden with chemicals tastes good. It is our grotesque wire mommy, and we just don’t know any better.

(Incidentally, Harlow’s work mainly proved that when comfort is sought, touch is much preferred over food. Unfortunately, providing hug therapy for compulsive overeaters is far beyond what a government program can or will provide.)

Returning to taste, a reader says:

Way back in the 1970s, I was pretty much a junk food junkie. On a trip to the big city, I ate in my first health food restaurant — that’s what we called them. I think it was run by the Hare Krishnas. The salad dressing was so incredibly delicious, I still dream about it. If I could find that flavor again, I would eat salad three times a day.

Is junk more comforting than nutritionally sound food? Yes and no. Whatever a loving parent feeds a child can turn out to be comfort food, including grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches, and even shattered saltine crackers with milk and sugar poured over them. People tend to derive comfort from the foods that were served in their childhood. If more people ate healthful meals when young, no doubt more people would feel comforted by similar meals later on in life.

Sadly, far too many kids have been conditioned to cheeseburgers and fries. Happily, a movement has arisen to counteract that tendency. As just one example, Heather Tirado Gilligan described for Slate.com a radical cooking class in San Francisco. (Radical comes from the Latin word for root.)

Even in the glamorous Bay Area, underpaid and uninsured Americans are prone to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and all the other co-morbidities. The purpose of Soul Food is to demonstrate to low-income women how to preserve and prepare fresh local foods. Gilligan wrote:

Since 2004 there’s been a sharp spike in the number of programs like Soul Food that are aimed at reducing such health disparities by making fresh food more accessible to low-income people… And there are countless local and nonprofit programs, including cooking and nutrition classes (like Soul Food) designed to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into the lives of poor people.

This kind of positive action is worth more than the number, or even the types, of food outlets in a given area.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Harlow’s Monkey Experiment — The Bond between Infants and Mothers,” PsychologyNotesHQ.com, 03/10/18
Source: “Food Deserts Aren’t the Problem,” Slate.com, 02/10/14
Photo credit: marneejill on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Parents Confused by Childhood Obesity Issues

Can’t process any more information

Can’t handle any more controversy

It’s so easy to do the wrong thing

Obesity is the least of their worries

The Snackification of America

The Chain of Inheritance

An Unholy Trinity

Baumrind’s trio

ANNOUNCEMENT

Why Did My Parents Do This to Me?

Parents and the Long Game

Micro-improvements

Important warning

Time Constraints and Healthy Food Choices

The Long Game

The four essential ears

Junk Food and Triggers

Rule Britannia

Making a Difference

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day!

Taste and Training

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources