What’s Happening: Kid Food

What’s Happening: Kid Food

One of the biggest challenges for Paleo parents is fighting the culture of “kid food,” the idea that somehow kids “naturally want” nutritionally bankrupt junk food, and that it’s just our duty as parents to provide it for them. As if kids somehow didn’t eat before the advent of Cheerios and Fruit Leather! This week, a powerful letter from David Katz, a nutrition and health researcher at Yale, describes how humans are the only mammals who don’t try to teach our kids how to eat like adults, and instead sacrifice our children’s long-term health by creating an entire industry of sugar-based “kid food.” We wouldn’t build our houses or our cars out of junk – so why are we doing just that to our kids?

If you need a little more fuel on the fire of your rage against people trying to market junk to your kids, Michelle Simon takes on the good press McDonald’s has been getting about the chain’s promise to market healthier food to kids, and explains why it’s all actually a “super-sized lie.” (McDonald’s cares more about its profits than your health? Who would’ve thought!)

And to help you put that all into practice, this week the Whole9 blog published the first of a series on dealing with other people’s food (namely, what on earth do you do when Grandma tries to sabotage all your healthy-food efforts with triple fudge brownies?)

Enough kid news? Check out what else is going on this week:

• Is barbell dogma doing more harm than good? Mark Sisson challenges the superiority of the heavy squat.

• A big vote in favor of Paleo came from the NBA this week: Chris Kaman and Robert Sacre of the LA Lakers bought an entire grassfed cow, on the advice of their strength and conditioning coach. The players have apparently been noticing remarkable health benefits from eating traditional foods – chalk up one point to grass-fed beef as one of the healthiest things you can eat!

• If you need more than celebrity endorsements to steer clear of factory-farmed meat, try watching this video, which provides an eerie, worldess glimpse inside a CAFO meat processing plant. (Warning: parents, don’t show this to your kids unless you’ve watched it first. It’s not graphic in the blood-and-guts sense, but it is extremely disturbing in a more subtly creepy kind of way).

• A guest post at Robb Wolf’s blog explains why truly sustainable farming needs animals – and why it tends to skew in a pretty Paleo direction.

• From SCD lifestyle, 5 tips to stop cheating on your diet. Sometimes even the most dedicated of us need a few tips and tricks to make it through a rough spot!

• Dr. Briffa takes a critical look at the “high-calorie foods cause weight gain” theory, and discusses a new study on almonds that proves exactly the opposite.

What’s your favorite healthy high-calorie food? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!