[Ed Note: Back in the summer I trumpeted my discovery of Dina Rose's blog, It's Not About Nutrition. Dina is a mom with a PhD in sociology from Duke University who teaches workshops and provides private counseling on kid and food issues. The blog covers “the art and science of teaching kids to eat right," and Dina has been kind enough to let me reprint here a recent post that caught my attention.]
Feeding Future Adults
When you shoot your kids from the cannon, what eating trajectory will they be on?
- If your kids have the same eating habits as adults as they have today, will you think they have learned to eat right? Or
- Do you hope your kids change how they eat as they get older?
You know how Oprah talks about “Aha Moments?” Well here’s one to consider: I once asked a friend why she doled out carrots (or other veggies) with lunch every day. She said it was because she wanted to teach her kids the habit of daily vegetable-eating. Why, I asked her, did she also give them chips every day? I saw the lightbulb go off.
We start teaching lifetime habits in childhood. Your kids aren’t actually kids. They’re really future adults.
Of course, the job isn’t just about the future; we’ve got to take care of the little buggers today too. But if you think about it, the parenting imperative is really to teach kids the stuff they’ll need to survive, if not actually thrive, when we launch them into the worlds on their own.
If you have been thinking that it doesn’t matter so much what your toddler eats because there’s time for improvement, I’ve got news for you: bad eating habits don’t get better.
The news is grim. A recent study of 2-18 year olds found that close to 40% of the calories consumed by kids come from empty calories. In other words, our kids are consuming a lot of foods that have virtually no nutritional value.
Half of those empty calories come from just 6 foods:
- Soda
- Sugary Fruit Drinks
- Grain desserts, such as cake, cookies and donuts
- Dairy desserts, such as ice cream
- Pizza
- Whole milk
I know it is hard to think of milk calories as empty. It is milk, after all. But compared to skim, whole milk is loaded with fat (and not the good kind of fat either). Read When Calories Don’t Count. Also check out Coke Beats Juice.
If anything, eating habits get worse.
Look at how Whole Milk and Fruit Juice turn into Soda and Pizza as the top 2 sources of calories:
- Children age 2-3 — #1 Source=Whole Milk; #2 Source=100% Fruit Juice
- Children age 4-8 — #1 Source=Grain Desserts; #2 Source=Yeast Breads
- Children age 9-13 — #1 Source=Grain Desserts; #2 Source=Pizza
- Children age 14-18 — #1 Source=Soda; #2 Source=Pizza
The researchers also discovered…
- 2-3 year olds get 13% of their calories from added sugars, and kids 4 and up get almost one fifth (18%) of their calories from added sugars.
- 2-3 year olds get most of their fat from milk and meat, but 14-18 year olds get most of theirs from pizza and pie (and cookies, cakes and other grain desserts).
These habits carry on into adulthood. Read Why Adults Eat Poorly.
The solution is simple: THINK BIG!
It’s hard to imagine that changing the way you think will change the way your kids eat, but it will. Ask yourself what eating habits you want your children to have when they’re grown and then feed accordingly.
Kids who start out consuming empty calories, tend to stay the course. After all, change is hard to achieve.
Read Think Big! Habits for a Lifetime.
It is easy to lose sight of the future when it comes to feeding kids because immediate nourishment is so important.
Plus, no one really expects kids to eat right. (Even pediatricians frequently tell parents to wait it out.)
Taste preferences and food choices, though, are more nurture than nature. How else can we explain the simple truth that Indian kids like curry and American kids like chicken nuggets?
The foods your kids eat early in life have a long-term influence on their eating habits. Do your kids a favor: Feed them the way you hope they’ll eat when they’re grown… and save them from a future struggle.
* * *
While for many of you, Dina is preaching to the choir, I personally appreciated her wake-up call. My kids’ diet is no doubt much better than the national norm, but there are certainly times when I let expediency rule the day. The best (worst) example in my case is the afterschool snack eaten on the run (between school and piano lessons, for example). It’s just so much easier to toss into the car some prepackaged snacks (from Whole Foods, sure, but little better nutritionally than Goldfish crackers) and a Honest Kids juice pouch than it is to come up with something better, but maybe more labor intensive, like sliced fruit or a homemade muffin. There’s nothing wrong with those foods per se, but I can attest to the fact that those “oh, just this once” moments can really add up if you’re not careful, and that kids quickly become accustomed to certain less-than-ideal foods and then are loathe to give them up.
Let me know what you think of Dina’s post.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent choice to have Dina Rose guest blog! I adore her factual and logical approach to explaining the whys and hows of child nutrition. I have referenced her writing pieces several times when I needed to support a point with administrators or school food chefs. Check out Dina’s piece on chocolate milk. It’s great!: http://itsnotaboutnutrition.squarespace.com/home/2010/7/27/the-chocolate-milk-mistake.html
Lisa – Yes! I really like her incisive commentary on so many topics. Glad to see you here, too! – Bettina
hehe – thanks, Bettina! Keep rockin’ it, lady! This blog is the best!
i agree that parents should make available the kinds of food they want their kids to eat as an adult from a young age. BUT, I don’t agree that eating habits don’t or can’t improve. i wouldn’t want an article like this to provide no hope to the parent who does have an 8 yr old or teenager with a poor diet, saying “sorry it’s too late. your child is doomed to eat horribly forever. ”
is it easier and optimal to teach a toddler to love wholesome food untainted by nasty additives. yes. just like it’s easier to teach a 5 yr old to read than an 12 yr old or a 43 year old. older kids and adults can learn to adopt wholesome foods. granted as age increases there are more obstacles to remove before progress is made.
i would say that — childhood eating habits carry on into adulthood, “unless they are changed with deliberate and focused effort” my mission is to help folks understand that it is never too late, and to bust the myth that kids (and adults) are incapable of embracing wholesome nourishing food. when discussing healthier eating habits, so many nutritionists, parents, doctors, school food directors, cafeteria managers think “they don’t like it, they won’t eat it.” they might not like it YET, but they can!
i have this message for parents –believe in your kids. they learned to read. they learned to swim and ride a bike. they CAN learn to eat real food no matter how many bad habits they’ve already picked up. it won’t as simple as putting wholesome food on the table and watching kids devour it. but it can be done.
it is sobering to see that the main source of calories for 2-3 yr olds are liquids. water is perfectly fine for toddlers ( kids/adults), and with less liquids taking up precious real estate in the tummy, tots have more interest in eating food.
LOVE the notion of considering kids to be future adults rather than fragile creatures incapable of enjoying healthy “adult” foods. A friend of mine adopted an 18-mo. girl from China. While she and her husband were in China for the adoption, they took their new daughter out to eat with the worker who had had primary responsibility for her care at the orphanage. My friend loves to tell the story of how her daughter sat at the table very happily munching spicy green beans. Neither she nor her husband eat anything the least bit spicy and they barely know what a vegetable is. They are otherwise wonderful parents, but sadly, their daughter’s diet today consists almost exclusively of dinosaur-shaped frozen chicken nuggets, Annie’s mac & cheese (excessively salty, acrid in fact, to my taste buds), and juice boxes. She’s also becoming increasingly overweight with time. I’m tempted to slip the future adult a spicy green bean just to see if the spark is still there.