Healthy Eating

In January, we had a Naturopathic Physician come speak to our Mom's group at church. He's actually the husband of one of our moms. Now I know the difference between healthy foods and non-healthy foods, but I walked away from that meeting having learned several things about nutrition and feeling convicted about what I have been feeding my children and the long term effects that what I feed them now will affect their health for the rest of their life. As the one in our family who does all the grocery shopping and cooking, I have a huge responsibility to make sure that what I feed my family is good and healthy and will improve their life- and not the reverse.

I knew before that sugar has absolutely no nutritional value and rots your teeth. What I learned, though, is how much damage sugar does to your immune system. Anything you eat or drink that has sugar in it weakens your immune system which in turn makes you more susceptible to getting sick.

Here are some of the changes I have made:

1. No more sugary cereals. I was really worried about this one because the kids loved them. Surprisingly, they love the healthy cereals, too. Noah usually eats Multi Grain Cheerios. I also bought a Kashi cereal that has lots of nuts and crunchy things in it and he loves that too.

2. No more sugary juice drinks and soda. They only drink milk, orange juice or water. I started buying the pure orange juice (not the from concentrate stuff). Once in a while I buy an organic milk. But it's so expensive, so unfortunately, I can't do it very often.

3. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Noah loves the fruit especially strawberries, blackberries and bananas. He's not a big fan of the vegetables yet, but I am working on him. Emily loves berries, melons, apples and peaches. She is usually a great vegetable eater, too. Once in a while I set out some raw veggies with a dip while I am cooking and she will eat them up.

4. Avoiding processed foods with tons of chemicals and preservatives. I have started actually reading the labels in the grocery store. If I pick something up and it has a huge list of ingredients many of which I cannot pronounce, I put the product back on the shelf.

5. My kids inherited my sweet tooth. We love sweets! I don't want to deprive them completely of these things because they love them so much, as do I. So, I think as long as they have something once in a while in moderation is okay. They love ice cream, so I will usually give them the Breyer's brand which has very few ingredients. Usually on the weekends, I will make a special dessert. This is in lieu of having packaged sweets in the pantry that they would snack on all the time. I also started making a fun appetizer on the weekends for the family to enjoy instead of buying processed snack foods. Some dry snacks I give them are pretzels and a goldfish cracker that is made with whole wheat.

6. Whole grain wheat bread with no high fructose corn syrup instead of white. Emily does not like this as well as the white bread, but she will still eat a ton of the whole wheat.

7. I have stopped making my super sweet iced tea which Emily was addicted to unless we have company over. Emily kept asking for this over and over every day, but now she has stopped asking.

8. No more deli meat or hot dogs that have msg and nitrites. There is an Oscar Meyer healthy turkey with no nitrites that I have been buying. There are also some organic brands of healthy deli meat available. I've noticed that the expiration date for these products comes up very quickly I guess because there are no preservatives in them. I also found an Oscar Meyer hot dog that has no nitrites. Of course, it is more expensive and there are only 6 hot dogs in the package, but I feel better about giving this to them once in a while instead of the alternative.

Since making these changes, my children have not been sick. For several months before this, they were getting sick constantly. Now, Noah did have a runny nose for a few hours the other day, but it went away as quickly as it came. Emily started coughing one night, but a little while later it was gone completely. I have not had to give them any kind of Tylenol or pain reliever since before Christmas. I know it is inevitable that at some point they will get some type of virus and get sick, but this is huge progress for us. It has been great not having to keep taking them to the doctor.