Three Bad Tips for Feeding Hypersensitive, Orally Defensive or Sensory Processing Disordered Children

Nov 23, 2010 by

Amy, age 8, will only eat a few things: little beyond a certain brand of macaroni and cheese, bean and cheese tacos, very smooth mashed potatoes and apple sauce put through the blender again.

As a baby Amy had trouble sucking. She grew slowly. She finds most foods too salty, spicy, lumpy or gritty, or even too hot or cold. She abhors all toothpaste. Once she threw up when she licked a sticker. She screams at the dentist. If she tries something she can’t swallow, it triggers a higher level of resistance, even to what she would normally eat.

Diagnosed as “hypersensitive to oral input,”  or “orally defensive,” Amy isn’t your run-of the-mill picky eater. It’s not her parents’ fault. It’s not all in her…

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Six Lessons from English School Lunches

Nov 14, 2010 by

In England, it was recently discovered that picky kids were less picky when they ate school lunches than they were at home. The benefits carried over to home, with many kids coming home and asking for the same foods they were getting at school. It happens that in England, home-packed lunches were found to be generally higher in sugar, fat and salt than the school lunches there. So encouraging parents to let kids eat school food instead of mom’s home-packed lunches seems to be getting them to eat more healthy at school as well as at home.

There are several probable reasons for this reduction in pickiness at school.

But today’s…

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Why some kids in England ate at school but not at home

Nov 12, 2010 by

Why some kids in England ate at school but not at home

An English mom, Donna Lovett of Norwich, recently started her “fussy” son, Connor, on school lunches, sure that he wouldn’t eat a thing. She was surprised to see that he loved the school food. He even got into fish and vegetables, she noted. It’s opened the way to serving foods at home she didn’t think were “possible” before.

A recent report from The Food Trust in England has revealed that four out of five kids who ate school lunches there started trying new foods at school that they would never have eaten at home. Half of those children also asked their parents to make some of the dishes that they’d tried at school.

This study came out to encourage parents to have their kids eat at the school cafeteria, following an earlier study that revealed that many parents were packing unhealthy lunches for their children, “because they worry that they…

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Interview with Paul Gratkowski: Picky eater grows up to go from obesity to fitness, learning to like veggies along the way

Nov 4, 2010 by

Interview with Paul Gratkowski: Picky eater grows up to go from obesity to fitness, learning to like veggies along the way

This year will be the third year in a row that Paul Gratkowski, 44, will bike over 10,000 miles.  Today, he’s obviously in great shape. He also now loves eating healthy. But Paul grew up as a picky eater, and ten years ago, he was “on the road to an early grave,” as his doctor told him.

He started out young, biking a lot, and made some epic bike trips in his 20s, including going from Los Angles to Boston in 42 days, averaging 82 miles a day. But he couldn’t keep it up once he hit his 30s.

“I had to come to terms with the fact that my body would not allow me to continue to smoke and drink and to eat poorly, and to exercise at that level,” he said. “The booze, bad food, and cigarettes took over and I ballooned up to just under 300 pounds.”

I asked…

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