Watching kids eat these days is horrifying and it makes me cringe. Carbs and Sugar are everywhere – from pizza’s, candy, french fries, chips, muffins, sodas, juices, cereals. Kids these days have their insulin raised from the moment they eat their breakfast to the moment that they fall asleep. Their poor cells are being assaulted with insulin to get rid of sugars in the blood. But the cells can only take so much before they start to get resistant to the insulin and not working properly. This is how we become insulin sensitive and insulin resistant.  The pancreas has to produce more insulin to get rid of blood sugar. The thing about high insulin is that it STORES FAT! That is why insulin is called the fat storing hormone.

With this kind of high sugar and carb diet we are ensuring that our kids will battle weight gain in adolescence or adulthood. This is what happened to me. I was a skinny kid that ate sweets and carbs and as I reached adulthood the fat piled on. As an adult I was eating natural whole foods but still I gained weight.

Why do kids need special menus at restaurants made up of processed carbs? Why are crackers a staple in kids diets? Kids should not need to have juice boxes for lunch.  Limiting these foods would do your kids a great favour!

A lifetime struggle with chronic disease and overweight is hard! By limiting sugars and carbs you would be doing your kids a huge favour.  ADHD, allergies, behavioural problems, cavities, diabetes, obestity, cancers are just a few of the diseases that can be attributed to the above aforementioned foods.

We should be teaching our kids about living a healthy lifestyle and not how to treat disease.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

To your health and wellness,

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Let me tell you about the time when my daughter Aliena was a year and a half. She had a really hard time eating vegetables.  We were vegetarian at the time and I thought that a balanced diet should include veggies!

As hard as I tried and searched ways to be creative, nothing really worked. I blended veggies in sauces, made dips, pretended that broccoli were trees, made carrot muffins and zucchini bread. Veggies were not foreign in our house and were served on a regular basis. These were the foods that we would eat and that  she was growing up with and nothing new and unusual. I was determined to find a way to get my daughter to like them.

One thing that I did notice that was bothering me is that she loved carbohydrates. She craved her cereals and oatmeal, devoured her crackers, ate the bread instead of her whole sandwich, inhaled her pasta and rice. She just loved those carbs.

As it turned out she ended up having some health problems and we had to severely restrict her grain consumption. Taking away her favourite foods was very much like going through a withdrawal period when you are addicted to something. Not only was she a toddler and going through normal toddler phases and sickness but she was going through a carb addiction withdrawal. Who new that this could even happen? But she just screamed at the cupboards were here food normally was. It took her a while to get over it.

After a few weeks of this she started to experiment with veggies. To my surprise she started liking them. She started eating them without being prompted to and she was even eating salads and other green stuff! I no longer had to disguise them for her.

Since realizing how detrimental excessive carbs can be to children, I also restricted my second daughters carb intake. From the moment she tried solid food she was enjoying her veggies. She is more of a picky eater when it comes to dark green salads, I can still get them in her with a little bit of creative play.

I try not to give my kids more than one serving of sprouted or soaked grains a day. The sprouting and soaking of grain is necessary to neutralize anti-nutrients. So they enjoy Ezekiel Bread and on occasion soaked oatmeal. As side effect of limiting carbs my kids enjoy their greens in green smoothies, and Aliena eats kale salads and collard green wraps.

Having kids means that you enjoy the company of their friends. It is a shame to observe today’s children say stuff like “I hate veggies and I never eat them”, Or that when you serve veggies for snack that it does not get eaten. Children are becoming malnourished even though they are eating plenty of food. It is just not the right kind of food.

This has been my experience.

I would love to hear yours! How do you get your picky eater to eat their veggies and green salad?

To your health and wellness,

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Last week I took the kids and myself to the dentist. The kids normally have a checkup every six months, but I was a bit nervous about this appointment. You see I also made an appointment for myself. I have not seen a dentist since I was 12 years old – that was 20 years ago! Everything went well and no cavities in any of us so far.

My eldest daughter Aliena has had some issues though. When she was a small baby she developed small black pits in her front teeth and white discolourization in some others. I was concerned because she also was classified as failure to thrive and was losing weight. We were vegan at the time (due to milk and egg allergic skin reactions in Aliena) and I had a vegetarian pregnancy.  I was very concerned about her growth. [Read more →]

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