Strollerderby : healthy food

Hannah Montana's Gone Fruity

JeanneSager — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:16:00 GMT

I'm all for a brand using its sway with kids for good, but do we really need Hannah Montana bananas?

What about Mickey Mouse apples? High School Musical avocados?

Disney has gotten healthy to face the childhood obesity crisis head on, cutting ties with McDonald's (you'll notice there are no Disneyfied happy meals on your summer road trip this year) and slapping giant mouse ears on good, wholesome fare.

So, is it working? According to a look by the Washington Post, yes. When supermarket chain Winn-Dixie linked its bagged apples to High School Musical, sales spiked by forty-seven percent. The Disney Garden line is now appearing in eighteen of the top twenty mass and grocery retailers in the states, and sales grew seventy percent from 2007 to 2008.

I can admit I've fallen victim. My daughter needed a grab and go snack, and she saw Mickey apple slices on the shelves. She asked because they were Mickey. I bought because they were apples. With the same characters in a different aisle on sugar-packed "fruit" snacks, the real thing worked for me. We've also been known to pick up Princess soup because she begged for princesses, and my first introduction to Hannah Montana came in the supermarket when my daughter started shrieking about the pop star on her yogurt. Again, yogurt, much better than potato chips! Trust me - their branding is working on my impressionable three-year-old.

But I'm not sure how I feel about Disney selling health food to my kid. Is it better than peddling the junk? Sure. But does it have to be either or? I shy away from Sesame Street's organic pasta and breastfast offerings too, because as much as we all love Cookie Monster, he's not making me feel better about a processed box of waffles. And I'm not ready for the forecasted Mickey whole wheat chicken nuggets to replace the homemade version I make and freeze in my own kitchen.

Frankly, I'd prefer my kid make her food choices based on things like "amount of whole grains included" or "no trans-fats." I'd like to think she'd pick up an apple because we live in New York and have raised her on some of the nation's best apples, not because there's a cartoon character stamped on the flesh. Ditto avocados. They're fantastically flavorful and you can't have guacamole (yum) withouth them - so do we really need Zac Efron's mug to get them in my cart and on her plate?

Disney is such a powerful brand, I'm happy to see it inching back from the heart attack on a plate foodstuffs its traditionally backed. For parents who have had to measure just buying a requested item over the tantrum in the middle of the supermarket, it's definitely good news. Trust me, been there, heard the screeching. But I can't help wishing food would just go back to being food, no Hannah Montana, no Elmo, no Mickey. It's why I've fought the organic branding too.

Because in fifteen years, she won't be picking food because it has her favorite superhero printed on the front of the bag. She'll just have to go with her gut, and I'd like to think it's one filled with healthy choices.

Image: Washington Post

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Bait and Switch: When is Eating Healthy Unhealthy?

Shannon LC Cate — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Oh New York Times, you've spotted yet another parenting non-trend! This time, the Times tells us, mothers are giving their kids complexes about eating healthy food, which is, (ironically, of course!) unhealthy.

Who did the newspaper of record consult to get information on this trend? Why, specialists in eating disorders. That is, people who are exposed almost exclusively to unhealthy people obsessed in one way or another about food. A bit circular, don't you think?

Because in spite of the anecdotal evidence of the Times that kids whose mothers are careful with their diets--serving lots of organic vegetables, for example, or avoiding over-processed foods and transfats--are terrified at the prospect of eating an Oreo, or refuse to have a piece of cake at other children's (those with mothers who presumably have a healthy approach to transfat acceptance) birthday parties.

This article just irks me. Sure maybe people already inclined to eating disorders also have a fixation on the healthiness of their food. But most people could use some improvement in the food choice department. I take a great deal of care in feeding my children well. I'm a prime example of a mom who restricts her children to a nearly all-organic, all-whole-food diet. But my kids are not about to turn down cookies or birthday cake, given the chance. Not on your life. In fact, my philosophy is that if you keep your kids on the dietary straight and narrow 90% of the time, the occasional junk-food treats they enjoy will A) be a bigger, more fun deal and B) not hurt them a bit, given their overall health and nutritional intake.

Ah, but the food industry would love it if parents all decided that feeding kids healthy food--and teaching them to do the work of decoding package labeling, which is purposefully obscure--is the unhealthy approach.

Then maybe we'd all get back to buying Oreos like good little sheep.

They Say: Parents Pack Bad Lunches

JeanneSager — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:33:00 GMT

My daughter gets the kind of lunch kids dream about. Sandwich. Fruit. Snacks. Milk or juice. But is that good enough?

A new study says parents aren't packing nutrition in their kids' lunch pails. We're packing what we know our kids will eat.

Can you blame us? We don't want to hear from our daycare providers that our kid was the one throwing a fit at lunchtime. And we don't have time for the "sneak it in there" recipes in all the parenting magazines. So we cut corners. We pack a fruit cup rather than cutting up fresh fruit, because if we chuck in an apple our kids are going to moan about the peels and the teachers at daycare aren't likely to sit down and peel it for them. We pick up crackers with the processed cheese of our childhoods, and we close one eye so only the words "whole wheat crackers" register.

According to the study in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, seventy-one percent of packed lunches don't have enough fruits and vegetables. One in four preschool kids don't get enough milk with lunch.

Interviews with parents revealed more than sixty percent were packing foods they thought were nutritious - but not expecting their kids to eat them. More than sixty percent also packed foods they figured the kids WOULD eat.

So what's the trouble? It's hard to track what your kids are doing out of sight. You can balance how much "good" and how much "bad" they eat at home during dinnertime, but kids don't have that guidance at a daycare center. It sounds like parents are giving their kids too many choices. If you know they will overeat on snacks, don't pack them. Are we really afraid our kids will starve if we give them choices of healthy vs. nutritious?

It's their first shot at learning to eat well and make healthy choices outside of the home, but they're still little kids. They still need some guidance from Mom and Dad. When we're not there, that means making the tough choice for them.

Image: Family.Go

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NY Proposes Taxing Non-Diet Soda

Miriam Axel-Lute — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

OK Gov. Paterson: I know you've got a wicked budget hole, and we all have to "share the pain." I also know that this country has a severe health crisis with escalating rates of diabetes, heart disease, etc. and that soda and related sugar-water drinks (or, more specifically, high-fructose-corn-syrup drinks) are bad for us and our kids.

But can we work through a few of the logical problems with your proposed "obesity tax" here?

1. It only applies to "nondiet" sodas (and fake juice drinks), thereby giving the implicit healthy stamp of approval to "diet" drinks full of artificial sweeteners, which cause many people a wide range of health problems, from dizziness to migraines, while to others they just taste gross. They also interfere with efforts to adjust to a healthier, lower-sugar diet. Not to mention that carbonated diet sodas still are acidic enough to eat away at kids teeth and still don't hydrate like water or provide nutrients like milk. Remember also that soda—diet and nondiet—is also a major source of people's caffeine fixes (and young kids having caffeine worries me more than their having sugar, frankly).

Basically, this just shows the folly of trying to decide on high what's healthy for people: it varies. I have some extremely health-conscious friends whose son is super allergic to tons of things—so right now he's eating a lot of Fritos (all corn, no cross-contamination). If you tried to tax "junk food," for example, you'd be hitting them hard.

2. Like any sales tax, this going to fall most heavily on the poor, who buy a lot of soda often because it's what's sold at the corner store. Study after study has shown that living in a "food desert" is a primary cause of unhealthy eating choices. Without changing that, adding a tax is like raising the gas tax without investing in public transportaiton. (If the tax is high enough to make bodega owners stock healthier drinks instead, we might see some benefit, but I'm skeptical.)

3. Recent studies have shown that it's possible to be both fat and fit. You say you don't want to make kids feel bad for being overweight. So don't. Instead encourage the good stuff, which is what will really make the difference: access to healthy food and drink, enough sleep, and exercise (recess! later school start times! healthy foods in schools! walking and biking to school!). I know that won't balance the budget. I'm sorry.

Photo by Qfamily.

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When the Characters are INSIDE the Kids' Lunchboxes

JeanneSager — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:02:00 GMT

If you know a chef, you've probably heard the art of food is in the presentation. Which for me means cutting my daughter's PB&J into four triangles instead of two. If she's lucky I'll crimp the edges when I remove the crust. But Japanese mamas apparently have more Martha in one little finger than I have in my whole body. Either that or a lot more time on their hands.

Every day, Japanese moms are keeping alive a tradition begun at the latter end of the country's Kamakura Period (which officially came to a close in 1333) in their children's lunchboxes. It's a modern twist on charaben, short for character bento boxes, that sends average kids to school with a lunch styled to look like Piglet, Spiderman or Tinkerbell is popping out of their box.

The creations were profiled in Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes, a hardcover out earlier this year from Mark Batty Publishers. Author Christopher D. Salyers recalls talking to mothers who were embarrased by the notion that magazines would want to display their work. They do it, they told him, for the praise of their kids. He says it's evidence of deep "parent-to-child devotion," a value highly valued in Japanese society.

Salyers' rich photographs were paired with detailed ingredient lists. A spot on likeness of the Aristocats' Marie, for example, took sixteen different ingredients to create - including cucumber, fish cake, green beens and thinly sliced beef. Seaweed was lovingly sliced to craft a winking eye, whiskers and even supply eyelashes for the Disney feline.

Can you see your kid eating seaweed? What about fish cake? Mine either. But as "Western" food from McDonald's and Starbucks have come to dominate the Japanese eating habits the way they have our own, Salyers says charaben help moms keep their kids nutritional habits healthy. But the projects can take anywhere from half an hour to two hours, and it's all going to be eaten by lunchtime.

What do you think? Worth a try, or too much work? I'm impressed. . . but Martha's still out to lunch.

Images: FaceFoodBento, Christopher D. Salyers

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