Health, Not Food = Love
"Eat! Eat! How often do I see you?"
Dr. P's grandma
Dr. P's grandma
"Food is love"
As a child I would visit my immigrant grandma and, just for me, she would have made her famous oily fried chicken and her lethal-dose mayonnaise potato salad and, of course, a generous supply of her might-as-well-just-directly-paste-them-onto-your-butt creamy cookies, "just like in the old country ".
Yum! I can still taste them to this day - a glorious childhood memory. And if I didn't ask for seconds (at least) or eat a dozen cookies, she was all over it, insisting, "Eat! Eat! How often do I see you?"
The truth is: food really is love.
A baby learns to associate the divine smell and taste of milk with warmth and cuddling and soft skin and gentle words and human interaction and nurturing and cozy love - a multi-sensory emotional feast.
As a child I would visit my immigrant grandma and, just for me, she would have made her famous oily fried chicken and her lethal-dose mayonnaise potato salad and, of course, a generous supply of her might-as-well-just-directly-paste-them-onto-your-butt creamy cookies, "just like in the old country ".
Yum! I can still taste them to this day - a glorious childhood memory. And if I didn't ask for seconds (at least) or eat a dozen cookies, she was all over it, insisting, "Eat! Eat! How often do I see you?"
The truth is: food really is love.
A baby learns to associate the divine smell and taste of milk with warmth and cuddling and soft skin and gentle words and human interaction and nurturing and cozy love - a multi-sensory emotional feast.
Plus, our brains are wired to love the taste of food (alas, the more fat and the more sugar the better!). How can we not then appreciate and love the vehicles who generously put it in our eager mouths? What better way to promote child-parent attachment? (When I collaborated with Dr. Spock and he recommended a milk-free diet, I was horrified by the thought of a childhood without ice cream!) As George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist, wrote, "There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
So too does food = love for parents. A woman's first official act and most solemn responsibility as a new parent is to nourish her infant. A "fat baby is a healthy baby" has long been a universal truism. A fat child is a sign of high social status in many cultures. We may not have nearly as much control of our kids' lives as we might want, but we can feed them 3 squares a day. It's an easy, "can't miss" way to demonstrate our love.
So where's the problem?
Am I just another killjoy puritan (defined by the American humorist H.L. Mencken as a person with "the desperate fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.")?
As I have written in a few previous blogs, the epidemic of childhood obesity - showing up at earlier and earlier ages - is a major 21st century health concern. And I've been honest in sharing my frustration as a pediatrician in successfully helping my patients and families deal with their overweight child.
So where's the problem?
Am I just another killjoy puritan (defined by the American humorist H.L. Mencken as a person with "the desperate fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.")?
As I have written in a few previous blogs, the epidemic of childhood obesity - showing up at earlier and earlier ages - is a major 21st century health concern. And I've been honest in sharing my frustration as a pediatrician in successfully helping my patients and families deal with their overweight child.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about why I can't seem to get anywhere with this problem, why parents' eyes lid over as they politely tune out my lecture about decreasing animal fat and junk food, why they show up in my office a few months later with a hangdog look on their face and a child with 5 new pounds of body weight.
For some reason, this old saw kept echoing in my brain: food is love, food is love. Remember that controversial and excruciating case a few years ago of the young, morbidly obese child who was taken away from her Latino parents on the grounds that continuing to feed her was a form of 'child abuse'?
For some reason, this old saw kept echoing in my brain: food is love, food is love. Remember that controversial and excruciating case a few years ago of the young, morbidly obese child who was taken away from her Latino parents on the grounds that continuing to feed her was a form of 'child abuse'?
For many parents of overweight children, asking them to cut down on calories, to deprive their child of one of his/her favorite things in life, to diminish this pure message of parental love and regard -- is simply asking too much, especially to prevent health concerns (like diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) that are not likely to show up for decades.
How can I do a better job helping overweight kids and their families?
How can I do a better job helping overweight kids and their families?
Some initial thoughts:
- Try to help parents change their awareness to "health, not food = love." Even if your child won't really appreciate it until much later, as a parent you can best show your love by having a healthy child. (And then launch into my usual healthy diet and exercise mantra.)
"Feed everyone much smaller portions." In 1760, a portly Benjamin Franklin wrote, "In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires." Why are the French (and their kids) skinny? It's not a mystery. Portion size. (Plus they don't snack between meals). A typical French meal is perhaps 1/2 the size of a stick-to-your-ribs supersized American meal. They even feed their babies less milk to avoid excessive baby fat (which I'm not recommending until more is known). - Admittedly, this is a tough sell in our culture, but "smaller portions have their advantages." There is not much deprivation in the type and wonderful variety and tastes of food you can eat. A nice small dessert is allowed. I'm convinced we have been programmed in childood not to be satisfied unless we are very full, instead of just a little hungry (or at least not stuffed) when we leave the table.
- "There are other ways to show your love." In the shorter time it takes to eat smaller meals, you can be with your child, do fun things together, interact in great ways. Yes, I'm talking about some extra quantity of quality time together as a way to supplant food as the best way to express your love.
As you can see, this is a work-in-progess I'm sharing with you. I'm getting desperate to figure out ways to inspire parents to follow sound nutritional advice. And I'm hoping to use my Blog to improve and refine my ability to improve outcomes for overweight kids and their families.
Help me (and my patients) out here, team. I'd love to hear from you! Tips, thoughts, suggestions...?
Related Topics: Quiz: How Healthy Is Your Diet?, Fast Food Choices
Technorati Tags: parenting, childhood obesity, diet and nutrition, fast food, portion control
Labels: childhood obesity
23 Comments:
Steven, I'd love to share with you the spiels I give to my families, if only I felt that you were actually reading your comments!
Chag Sameach!
Flea
I'm sorry if I have given the impression that I do not read and consider the comments to my posts, which I most certainly do. (Frankly, I'm always thrilled that someone has actually taken the time and effort to read it and respond with his/her thoughts!)
It takes me a lot of thinking, time and effort to try to write something that clearly reflects my thinking. Having said my piece - rightly or wrongly - thus far I have chosen to let the writing stand and not to participate in the discussions, leaving that to you all (although I'm open to changing that as my Blog experience evolves).
Once again, thanks to all of you who visit this site. I really do appreciate it!
I, too, worry that I'm teaching my daughter (like my mother taught me) that food is love. Yet at the same time, I hate being obsessive about food and weight -- I think it just leads to yo-yo dieting and having food consume your life.
One trick that I've read recently that I've been trying to integrate into my life is learning to evaluate fullness.
Think on a scale of 1 to 10. One is "I'm starving to death." 10 is "I'm stuffed." When you are at a 5 or 6, you are satisfied. Don't go up to an 8. (this is from Dr. Steven R. Hawks)
I think this goes along with your portion control perspective
I wish I could help you out but my toddler is partially tube fed so weight gain has been the issue for us rather than having him eat too much. I think if you tell new parents to never force food on the kids ( ie a clean plate is mandatory) they will naturally eat as much as they feel they need to and then later in life they will have that habbit fixed. Iwth my baby I am always offering him more than he can eat in his bottles so I never feel like I have to get him to finish a bottle.
I think we should also stop using food as a reward. Promising a child ice cream or a candy bar for being good doesn't help in promoting good health. I am fortunate that my children are not obese and not couch potatos. They are teenagers that enjoy junk food, but also like to eat fresh fruits and vegetables.
I'm more concerned about what I see as the zoo-animal lifestyle a lot of us lead--going from SUV to cubicle to living room to bed without much exercise in between. It also concerns me when I see parents pushing strollers containing children who are old enough to walk.
If you could help the parents learn, without a lecture or a point-by-point set of instructions, how to love themselves,how to feel love themselves when they are not being rewarded with their favorite foods, and how to create settings that feel like one is being fed (even when there is no physical food), then the parents will be able to teach the child what they know (once they've experienced it themselves), instead of trying to follow instructions that really do not resonate deeply with them. Only love truly heals. Guilt, either self-inflicted or inflicted upon parents by others, just feeds the parents' own sense of insecurity and increases their own need for nurturing and comfort from a nonjudgmental source. Food happens to be that source for so many people. It's a difficult task, but you sound like you're trying to teach love. How you teach it will make all the difference.
Unfortunately we are hounded so much in society and in the media that we need to eat wisley and stop eating bad foods; whether it is too much fat, cholesterol, sugar or carbohydrates. It can be so overwhelming to anyone-especially our young population. We need to live by moderation of all foods and not obscess over any one type of food. If we do, we might promote an eating disorder in our kids.
policy makers of governments pay more priority in production and manufacture of food items for human consumption so that unhealthy food items shoud not be made and sold in markets
Maybe if parents spent more time with their children they wouldn't feel as inclined to love by feeding. Kids want time, not calories. This is probably one of the undocumented costs of having both parents working.
Suggestion - through your contacts you can make contact with the food channel and try to get them to not only show wonderfully prepared options, but also healthy options for kid-sized portions and healthy adult and older adult portions, as they present to the public. If all the presenters agreed to work on this, a kind of pact inspired by national leaders working on this issue like Bill Clinton, the Naked Chef from England working on this over there, and others like you, they would agree to all be helping and not competing in this domain. Kids are watching - we know this.
Having just read the WebMD article on rhesus monkeys, activity, and weight loss, I think we should let kids eat whatever they please. What we should do is turn off the TV, computers, and other sources of sedentary entertainment, and get them outdoors playing. It's very easy to shovel food at kids to show love; it's harder to make the time to take them to playgrounds and have them walk instead of ride in strollers (as a previous reader wrote). Gosh, it's beautiful today on the East Coast, and I don't see one kid outside in my safe suburban neighborhood playing in backyards on the very expensive swings sets their parents have installed for them. By the time this generation is chained to their computers for work, it will be too hard to instill in them the joys and benefits of physical activity.
One thing that occurred to me when I was reading the blog post is that I don't think some parents KNOW how to express love in ways other than with food. There are some children who grow up in families where the only thing that feels nurturing in their lives is the food they get; this certainly describes my childhood. So, yes, Anonymous is right: you have to teach parents how to love. Easy, right? ;)
And, by the way, the amount of love or quality time with kids in a family is not determined by whether both parents have paying jobs. That assumption is a pet peeve of mine because my mother never worked outside the home, but neither she nor my father ever had any time, energy, or attention for their kids.
When I was 3 years old I walked in on my father beating my mother in the kitchen. He had broken her nose with a coffee mug and there was blood all over her face. I had nightmares and trouble getting to sleep after that, and my father started promising me and my sister "night-night" snacks if we would be good and go to bed. Hostess Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, and Little Debbie snacks every night. I guess it helped assuage his guilt.
Oh, how I wished I had been encouraged to snack on healthier foods as a kid! Actually my mom was home with us when we were in grade school, then she worked outside the home when we got older. She made excellent nutritious meals for us every day, but then junkfood and snack foods loaded with chemicals and preservatives became popular for its convenience in our teen years. It has now become the norm for many people raising children. I see this as the bane of existence for many children in this country! As a former drive-thru queen who just completed breast cancer surgery followed by chemo therapy and then radiation less than one year ago, I'm living proof that absolutely NOTHING beats well-balanced meals comprised of small portions coupled with daily exercise. So it's back to square one for me as far as exercise and meals. I have learned my lesson. I will be feeding my children plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks, not chips, cookies and soda!!!
As a former primary care physician who was since changed my practice to full time weight management, I've found it much easier to get children excited about healthy eating than their parents! Often parents assume that children "just won't eat healthy food", but when I give concrete examples of healthy tasty snacks and easy meals, the kids immediately want to take their parents shopping! In the past, as a family practice physician, I found that advising people with broad generalizations about healthy eating and exercise yielded very poor results. I now have a full time nutritionist who sits with families, and literally shows them examples of healthy convenience items (she uses empty packages of food we actually eat), as well as recipes and lists of easy healthy items, to educate people on what to do in the real world. The concrete, individualized, time-intensive advice makes a world of difference. There is no easy or quick way to do this, but it is an effective method. And of course we advise people to keep TV to a max of 1-2 hours per day, and sell their gameboys and Playstations (unless they are using the interactive Dance-Dance Revolution). Parents NEED to be active participants, setting examples of healthy eating and activity. Everyone in the house should be eating and exercising in the same way, no matter what their weight (skinny kids should not eat junk food because they can "get away with it" - its unhealthy for them too.) As far as limiting portion sizes and stopping eating by monitoring fullness - great ideas, but they usually aren't kept up for the long term. Better to get into the habit of filling up on high fiber, relatively high protein, and "good fat" foods - and getting ALL the junk out of the house. Not to say you can't eat ice cream or chips -just substitute low cal/fat ice cream and Soy crisps - then kids (and adults) don't feel deprived! If the junk isn't there - you can't eat it! And if kids complain at first -they'll get over it - I promise they won't go on a food strike forever, and they'll get used to (and even love) the new healthier foods. My own early teen girls were developing weight problems until we switched to this way of eating. Now all their friends come to our house, and go home and ask their parents to buy some of the new foods.
-JLWarren, MD
Portion control is really key, and it's not that difficult people! I am always being asked how I stay so thin. I am 5'9" and between 125 and 130 lbs. My husband is 5'8" and I think about 160. (We don't have scale). The answer is small portions. We eat what we like; we just don't eat alot of it. For example if we go to our neighborhood diner for a burger and fries (maybe once a week?), we order one and split it! We may each order a cup of soup to go with it. It's more than enough! We stay slim and we save alot of money! We also don't snack between meals. We do eat desserts, but if package of cookies says that 3 is a serving we eat only 3, not 6.
I work in a hospital and am convinced that most of the problems I see are the result of poor eating habits, and that simple lifestyle changes would prevent so much needless suffering.
In reference to the comments from parents concerned about instilling healthy habits in their children for fear that they will develop eating disorders: You are the PARENT, and as such you do not have to worry about explaining to your kids why they do not get to eat chocolate/icecream etc.
Simply set up your home environment so that it is conducive to health. If you do not buy rubbish such as processed biscuits, lollies, chocolate, chips, ice-cream and sweet cereal bar type foods, you don't have to worry about depriving your child of them- because there will be nothing to deprive them of.
Fruits such as grapes, nectarines, plums etc will become for them 'lollies of the earth'- as they were intended to be, and snacks such as seeds, unsalted nuts and low fat yogurt will actually be appreciated rather than rejected- as their taste buds will be attuned to expect nothing else.
When you spoil children with processed foods their taste buds become accoustomed to this- so that they crave these foods when they are not there and have less of an appreciation for the natural foods that are essential for good health. Processed foods also set children up for a lifetime of bad eating habits.
We need to activel remember that, nature has provided us with all the things our bodies essentially need to attain and maintain good health. Any deviation from nature- no matter how slight, is going to be a slight down-grade in health status. The more unprocessed a food- the better it is for you and for your child.
If your children ever ask why they do not get to eat a particular type of food- do not focus on the fat/calorie/diet aspect of the food- but rather the health/unhealthy aspects of a food. Rather than saying, "no you can't have any lollies because lollies make you fat"- say something more like, "Mummy does not buy lollies because lollies upset your tummy and other organs so that they do not work as well. Eating too many lollies can make people sick."
Such is the case with childhood obestity and diabetes- an illness caused by parents feeding and allowing and most importantly, 'buying' junky, sweet processed foods.
Janelle Leach.
Weight loss consultant.
Hi. Lately Iv been really worried about my childs weight.
Im not sure if shes Over weigh.
Shes 150cm tall and wieghts 40 Kilos.
Is this Normal???
Thankyou,
Ling
OK, I'm not a major authority on the human psyche, but I'm an artist, a teacher, presently working on my ND, and a homeschooling parent. Obesity in young children is a frightening turn of events for our youth and our future health care system--of that there is no doubt. It does start at home and it starts with our parents and our schools.
Equating food with love is part of nurturing and nurishing our children--this is engrained in us. Where I see it going wrong is with our modern "conveniences" or "inconveniences"--at least in these cases. Too much and not enough so to speak. As a whole we don't practice moderation and we don't understand that our bodies are a part of the whole picture of a healthy education. Our emphasis in modern culture hangs on our belief that excess is synonymous with wealth and prestige. Just ask the children's sports or music idols. These children are the result of excess and are paying for it with their health. We often want them to have more than we had and they often do--more computer games, more TV, more school and less exercise and often for the overworked parent--A Happy meal sounds like a quick fix for supper. Our children are endoctrinated by the fast food commercials as soon as they can sit up. Physical education is almost non-existent. The school lunches are full of "mashed potatoes" and something they call "salsbury steak" with "gravy". The green stuff is thrown into the trash in school cafeterias across the nation 180 days a year and Coke has a machine at almost every school. I won't even mention what I think and others think the chemicals in certain pre-prepared foods and drinks probably do to your health.
Yes it starts at home and it starts with our beliefs. We have to take a stance for our children's health and decide what we will tolerate from our food industry, our educational system and our modern influences and excesses. For the young child before it gets out of hand we have to keep trying to educate the parents--even if it seems to fall on deaf ears. This is tough but well worth the fight.
Thank-you.
Wow. Littleraven comes pretty close to nailing it. In America, we now can eat whatever we want, without burning many calories to get it. On top of this, there is no shortage of commercial messages to tell us what food we should want and suggest that we have it now! Social drinking, social eating. Nothing fills a meeting hall (or gets kids’ attention) faster than free food.
Parents, kids, and teachers are so overwhelmed with disinformation about food that they need to be retrained and then maintain basic food-awareness for life. On our home computer, in the family room, the Internet browser has a food search engine (powered by CalorieKing). Even the kids now type in a food after they see a ridiculous TV food commercial. It has been a discussion starter.
Our 3 year old grandson is 40 inches tall and weighs 40 pounds. His pediatrician says he is off the height and weight charts. For breakfast he eats a chocolate chip granola bar and a go-gurt. As soon as breakfast is over he is handed a bowl of Cheese-It crackers and a sippy cup of juice. He walks around with these and when they are empty they are immediately refilled by his mother. His bowl is never empty for long. For lunch he is served 3 chicken nuggets and a bowl of macaroni and cheese. He eats a half of one chicken nugget and two bites of macaroni and cheese and then goes back to eating Cheese-It crackers and juice. He is given popsicles, as many as 4 a day in between meals. He will not eat meals with the family and his mother doesn't make him. His parents ponder why he won't eat "real" food when everyone else can see that the little boy is full of crackers and juice. He never has a chance to become hungry because he always has a bowl of crackers and juice within his reach. How can we convince them that he is not eating healthy and that they are setting bad eating habits for him at an early age??? This is not just a phase that he is going thru, this has gone on for well over a year now.
Food can and should mean love in healthy families, where it is kept in its proportional place. I believe that the related societal problem is "fed" by the concurrent lack of other forms of expression in many families, making food literally the ONLY known expression of love for them.
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