I often see articles about new ways to stuff our kids with the many required daily servings of nutritionally different foods. Just as often, I read articles about our increasingly obese, bulimic, and anorexic children. We’re raising fat children obsessed with thinness. This is a very American problem.
Pressured by the food industry, we promulgate impossible-to-use nutritional guidelines advising ridiculous daily diets, as if we can’t be trusted to eat a little bit of banana one day and some apple slices the next? A little meat or cheese or soy once or twice a week and a changing daily vegetable? A handful of nuts and grains here and there? Tell us that we need a healthful variety of foods weekly or monthly and we’ll offer our families inexpensive, logistically possible, non-fattening meals.
Our poor confused young mothers think if they don’t offer their kids snacks on demand, they’re child abusers. Why do we let opportunistic advertisers badger us into confusing a reasonable demand for a little food-discipline and postponement of gratification, with starvation and cruelty?
In my childhood home, we were offered as much as we cared to eat, three times a day, of a healthful, balanced meal, along with as many snacks as we might want in between meals—so long as those snacks were apples or whole-wheat bread (both so available as to be boringly unappealing; we ate them only when we were really hungry. Well. Duh?) Did we get enough to eat? Hmmmm. I do recall a time or two arriving at the next meal absolutely voracious, polishing off whatever was on my plate, and asking for more. This was a problem? My parents raised four slim, healthy, active daughters.
My father’s rather original hypothesis was that our long evolution as hunter-gatherers generated babies and children who were hard-wired to distinguish early and instantly which foods were unsafe–by attentively watching others eat. Armed with this theory, my parents made a good show of enthusiastically exclaiming, smiling, and smacking their lips delightedly over healthful food. They also led the family in joyful, admiring cheers whenever one of us bravely ate her required three teensy bites of unfamiliar food. Nowadays parents only give their children attention for not eating. This makes sense?
My parents offered no sweets or desserts except on birthdays and holidays, so their hungry girls learned to enjoy all kinds of veggies, fruits, meats, nuts, and grains, along with a diversity of ethnic foods. Although I learned (after I left home) to put my foot down over eating obvious body parts like eyeballs and tentacles, I still gobble up with gusto anything disguised and unnamed.
Raising my own young family, I breast-fed on demand and offered watered-down juice and ground-up baby food from my plate. I worked hard to keep my daughters cheerfully occupied while gradually stretching out times between meals. I didn’t offer quick carbs or sweets, so sugar crashes weren’t a problem–and even then, there was always that ubiquitous apple…. We limited ourselves to a few hours of public television a day, so food advertising was not a problem. I am proud to have raised two slim daughters.
We’re a nation of fat people for good reason: we don’t trust our own common sense, but instead let ourselves be over-influenced by those who stand to gain from our choosing unwise and unhealthful approaches. Our children are doubly victimized: by our bad examples, and by media temptations and modern fears which preclude their free play outdoors. Sensible media regulation, along with a solid public media campaign re-introducing such old-fashioned concepts as gluttony and common sense might make a dent in our national waistline. Until then, we are certainly the laughing stock of the rest of the world, which sees Americans as pigs greedily ruining our own health while ignoring the malnutrition and starvation of others. Or at least, they would be laughing, if the whole thing weren’t just so damned tragic.