set of rules which are broken at the first deviation from theory. Believe me, it is designed to make life easier for those looking after children, not harder.
You will notice that this book is not presented as a ‘healthy-eating’ manual for children. There are no recommendations to switch your kids on to skimmed milk, lower-fat crisps or diet yogurt, or to read nutrition labels or count calories.
Why? Obviously, one of the main reasons most parents want their children to eat better is that this will make them healthier, but if we are overly concerned with health there is a danger of becoming almost hung up about what we eat. We stop eating certain things because they are ‘bad’ for us and food becomes all about prohibitions and ‘what is good for you’. Even for adults, this type of thinking is a pleasure-killer and for children that feeling is more intense.
What’s more, this thinking is pointless because children can learn to enjoy fresh, wholesome, healthy food when it is presented to them in a positive way, mainly because it smells and tastes good in a way that junky children’s food never can. So the main rationale we give children for eating natural, wholesome food as opposed to junk has to be that it tastes better, not because it is ‘good for you’.
The concept of healthy eating is also much abused and often reinforces the paralysing modern notion that parents do not know how to feed their children any longer and so need help from ‘experts’ who provide ‘special foods’. But often these ‘experts’ are backed by powerful industry interests whose ‘advice’ is highly suspect. A lot of junk and heavily processed food these days can be presented as ‘healthy’ simply because it is low fat, despite the fact that it contains almost no useful nutrition. Thus a diet cola drink can actually come over as a healthy alternative to regular cola. But no cola drink has a place in any common-sense understanding of a wholesome diet.
The philosophy behind this book is that if you give your children food prepared from fresh raw materials in their natural, nutritious, unprocessed form, and encourage them to eat a wide selection of foods from all the major food groups, they will be eating healthily – end of story.
Most modern children do not eat this way. Their diet is top-heavy with protein, fat, refined carbohydrates, salt and sugar – a consequence of their dependence on processed foods. Their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is almost invariably far too low. ‘Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables’ is the one positive food message on which most nutritionists can agree and it’s the only modern health message on which parents really need to focus. So this book provides plenty of positive and effective strategies for getting children to like fruit and vegetables and increase their consumption of them.
But that is as far as conscious ‘healthy-eating’ guidance goes. The typical unbalanced children’s diet is a consequence of feeding children on a separate range of highly processed foods, which have been manufactured for profit rather than to retain their nutritional integrity. By drastically reducing the processed foods given to children and replacing them with wholesome unprocessed ones, parents can embrace healthy eating without getting embroiled in often-contradictory nutritional guidance.
So if you follow the real-food approach described in Part Two, you won’t get bogged down in whether that margarine has 15 or 50 per cent polyunsaturates. Instead, you’ll be concentrating on stimulating your children’s palate so that they enjoy a wide variety of fresh, unprocessed food, where pride of place is given to fruit and vegetables. If you do that, then you can afford to be laid-back about ‘healthy eating’.
This book is organised so readers can home in on the sections they find most useful. Part One examines the nature of the general problem we have on our hands now that so many children live on junk. You may find that it makes disquieting reading. Skip it, by all means, if you prefer, and move on to the rest of the book. Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, explains the general strategy for getting children to eat well. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, is a troubleshooting section for when the general strategy doesn’t seem to work. Part Four explains how feeding babies can dovetail with this overall approach. Parts Five and Six offer practical strategies for sticky situations. Part Seven suggests ways of reinforcing your efforts, while Part Eight offers ideas to inspire you when you can’t see beyond the difficulties.
This book is an empowering one which offers parents the conviction that over time, and with a little bit of commitment, you can produce children who actively enjoy good wholesome food. Such a goal is both desirable and attainable. It will strengthen your resolve to trust your own common sense and good judgement and to be different from the pack, but it will also arm you with devices to cope with the ‘real world’ challenges faced by parents who want their children to eat well.
The motivation is not just the well-being of our children but the satisfaction that we parents can get from knowing that our children share with us a love of food and the pleasure of eating. When we are older and greyer, what a delight to drop in to a son or daughter for a home-cooked meal prepared from fresh, wholesome, unprocessed ingredients. And if there are grandchildren sitting around the table, too, all the better. If they learn, as their parents did, to appreciate real food, then our food chain will be so much safer in their hands.
Let’s look at those distinctive foods that have become the mainstay of the modern British children’s diet. It won’t take long, because they are so very limited.
The backbone foods and drinks of the very restricted diet and their shortcomings
BREAKFAST CEREAL AND MILK
The typical ‘children’s cereal’ favourites consist of highly processed and over-refined grains stuck together with sugar in one form or another, and many are also high in salt. Prominent added vitamins give an aura of health but are only an attempt to replace the goodness that has been refined out of the processed grain. These are overwhelmingly sugary foods. The nutritional goodness of the milk (protein, calcium and vitamins) can’t compensate for that.
BURGERS
Mass-produced burgers of the type aimed at children have a very different composition from ones you might make at home. They tend to contain much more fat, and include a number of chemical additives to improve flavour and consistency. They are generally made with meat that represents the lowest common legal denominator in terms of cuts allowed and the source of the animals.
SAUSAGES AND SAUSAGE ROLLS
Similar objections to burgers except that the amount of meat is often lower and there are more chemical additives. Sausage rolls have an additional layer of fatty pastry which makes them even less healthy. They are often served inadequately reheated from frozen and this, combined with the poor quality of the meat, makes them a likely food poisoning source.
POULTRY OR FISH IN BREADCRUMBS
Any food in breadcrumbs is automatically much fattier than its unbreaded equivalent because the coating holds fat, even when it is grilled rather than fried. Apart from whole fillets of poultry or fish, the minced poultry meat in products such as Kievs and nuggets represents a very low-grade mulch of intensively produced meat, held together with chemical additives. They seem cheap but they represent poor value for money given the ingredients used.
FISH FINGERS
Many contain just a fish and additive sludge. Some more expensive fish fingers do contain only fish fillets – even if this is at a vastly inflated price – but they are a less healthy alternative to a plain fillet because of the coating.
CHIPS