Eating Mindfully: How to keep kids from getting fat by turning on to better food

Jul 22, 2009 by Anna Migeon

American parents today have just two main choices today: go gourmet or go unhealthy. You might be both, but you pretty much have to be one or the other.

Feeding kids is not for the faint of heart or uncommitted today.

If we home cooks serve our families foods that are healthy but that have nothing else to offer, we are going to fail. Healthy foods have to be as engaging as the tastily manipulated and temptingly marketed junk food in today’s battlefield for our tastes. We have to beat our opponents at their own game.

Processed foods today are engineered with salt, fat and sugar to be as seductive and addictive as possible, what food industry folks call “eatertainment,” according to David Kessler, in The End of Overeating. Lab rats’ brains, he claims, respond to these sweet, salty, fatty foods like an addict’s to cocaine.

How can our kids resist this stuff ? By our replacing it with something better.

“The substitute for rewarding food,” Kessler writes, “is often other rewarding food.”

Now is no time for feeble, indecisive attempts. It’s an all-out battle, if we hope to win our child’s heart with healthy foods. Don’t expect kids to resist all the bad food stimuli around them if all you’re offering is the occassional steamed broccoli and fat-free lettuce, sans flavor, sans variety, sans interest, sans everything.

We’ve got to bring out all our guns. A generous variety of Real Foods, well prepared, interesting, flavorful, colorful, surprising and unusual is your best weaponry. Strive every day to make healthy food delicious and mealtime enjoyable.

If we as cooks remain plain, clean and virtuous, like a woman who, au naturelle, makes no efforts to be attractive to her man in the arts of shape, color, texture and scent, we are hiding our light under a bushel. We are expecting a lot of our man if we think that being predictable and withdrawn, disdaining enhancements as shallow, is going to cut it. Do we think he shouldn’t be moved by the tricks of our opponent, who is aggressively presenting her assets in every possible favorable light?

There’s no shame in making what’s good look good, taste good, smell good, in making good more attractive than evil.

Such efforts aren’t burdensome. They’re really pretty exciting.