What Other People Feed Your Kids

Every summer my daughters go to visit my parents and extended family in Virginia. My mom has 8 brothers and sisters, and my dad has 3 brothers, and most of them have kids and grandkids. I'm blessed enough to still have both of my grandmothers and many great-aunts and uncles alive and well. My parents live out in the country and the girls can run to a cousin's house, an aunt's house, or a great-grandparents house without crossing a road. Blackberries grow in the backyards, and some of the old folks still have gardens. It's a little piece of heaven, except for the heat.

This year my older daughter is off working in a research program, so my Little Ray of Sunshine is going on her own. And what do you think has me worried? Not the solo plane flight, not the climbing of trees, or the inevitable arguments with her boy cousins.

I'm worried about the food! Ray literally gets ill if she eats too far away from our normal diet. My parents recognize her food allergies, but they're still likely to give in to a grandchild's pleas for junk. And even though my mom, step-dad, and step-mom are all diabetic, there's always plenty of junk to be had. Even their "healthy" meals are a far cry from what we eat in our home.

Ray's in love with lots of delicious things that are actually good for her: green juices, green smoothies, marinated kale, fresh saldas with her own secret-ingredient dressing, coconut water and meat, and much more. In Virginia, she won't have access to most of these things.

It's only 9 days. I'll send my sister to the grocery store with a short list of real foods to have on hand. I'll make some specific requests of things to limit and things to encourage, but that's about as much as I can do. I have to let her go enjoy her family and a bit of country living. But I don't have to like this part of it.

Day 56 on Juice --Juicy Weight Loss

Pesticides Linked to ADHD

Organic produce costs more than conventional, and sometimes it's easy to forget why we pay that extra money. Pesticides and fungicides have been linked to several negative effects, especially in children.

One of the latest links is between the use of pesticides on crops and ADHD in children. (See the bottom of the post for footnotes that link to more sources of information.)

Other negative effects linked to the junk that's regularly sprayed on produce:

• deficits in memory and motor skills
• behavioral problems
• childhood leukemia
• other cancers
• unhealthy weight gain

Remember the Dirty Dozen are the common fruits and vegetables that are most often heavily contaminated with chemicals, and make it a priority to purchase organic options for those on the dirty list.

Visit my juice feast blog, Candice on Juice, for a discussion of Managing Emotions and how food and juice play into that.

Giving Up (Sort of)

Melina, my oldest, arrived home from college a little over a week ago. While she's a veggie, dorm life has affected her eating habits. It saddened me to hear her talk about how she missed certain foods and food products that are clearly detrimental to her health. It was harder still to listen to what she ate when she met a friend for dinner. Let's just say deep frying was involved.

While raising Melina, my idea of good nutrition evolved from a low-fat version of the Standard American Diet to a High Raw, High Vegan pursuit of excellent health. For the last few years, it's made her happy to know meat won't be served in our meals, and she's embraced everything from green smoothies, to wheatgrass shots, to marinated veggies on big salads with homemade dressings. Still, she may have forgotten how different our eating-style really is.

The second day she complained to her sister. "I can't eat only fruit. I feel sick from all this healthy food." I told her that was a little thing called detox and reminded her that she'd consumed lots of healthy foods that weren't fruits. I spent hours trying to figure out how to get her all the way back to my end of the eating spectrum before she leaves at the end of the month to complete her summer research internship.

The thing is that she's enjoyed every one of the three meals a day I've made since she came home. And she'd happily indulged in smoothies blended up by her little sis. I'm juice feasting, which has it's own challenges, so I decided to give up the teen diet fight. I didn't give up on setting an example, or providing the best possible foods, or teaching her about why we eat the way we do. I gave up on the idea of control.

I've given her as much knowledge as I could. She enjoys the best foods on earth, and she knows how to prepare many of them to make a tasty and healthy meal. Her mind is open to new things, and she recognizes the connection between food and health. When she's away from me, she'll eat a slightly better version of the diet eaten by lots of college kids. That's the way it is. I'm trusting that as she matures and grows she'll let go of the junk and come home to real food.