A child's diet predicts their future health outcomes: it's a worthwhile reason to feed them well

A well-known and respected American physician, Joel Fuhrman, M.D., states in this book “Disease Proof Your Child” that “the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age”.  Seems a fairly harsh statement, but give yourself a minute to think about it, and what that actually means.  It’s a scary thought.

Being a mother to a now five year old, I’ve already seen the impact that the school system has on a child’s diet.  Before my son went to school, I restricted his intake of any processed foods, and shielded him from the lures of clever food marketing.  He had never tasted a jelly, and would shun even the idea of chocolate.  He looked at it, saw brown food, didn’t think it looked appealing, so happily refused if it was offered to him.  That’s not to say he was a kale and wakame eating child either, he just ate whole foods wherever possible, with very little sugar.  Enter the school system and suddenly he is offered a jelly every Friday leaving school and chocolate cake at least once a week to celebrate whichever child’s birthday it happened to be.  Fast forward nine months and at the end of the academic year I had a child who would happily eat a packet of jellies and would even request chocolate cookies if the chance arose. 

In reality it doesn’t need to be like that, and as adults, we are responsible for the realities of what this might mean for the future health of our children.  I have heard it said over and over again that children should not be rewarded with food, as this creates an association with food and success or praise.  Food is, and should be, functional.  We should enjoy what we eat, of course, but we should certainly not be trained to reward ourselves by eating sugary foods in order to boost our self-esteem.  Party food should be restricted to parties.  But if this is the case, why is it still acceptable that in a schooling system, the end of the week is signified with the offering of a jelly? Cheap, artificial and damaging to our children’s health.  A gold star would be just as rewarding for a young child.

When you think about the fundamentals of what is happening in this situation, you can start to understand how these reward pathways are set in our brains.  We want to feel good, we reward ourselves with food.  We want to spoil our children to show them we love them – we let them eat what they want.  That will make them happy, won’t it? In the short term, perhaps.  But long term, this is extremely damaging.  So instead of rewarding with food, could we not reward with our time? To stop the cycle of eating junk food because we think it might make us happy?

Children are actually more clued in when it comes to nutrition then we realise and it’s a wonderful time in their lives to introduce the associations between diet and health.  There are a few ways that I have approached this with my son, and to be honest, he is like a sponge – he laps it all up and loves to talk about the role that food plays in his own health.  We spend some meal times talking about how the food we are eating is going to help our bodies.  So, if we’re eating carrots and we talk about how they help us see, if we’re eating broccoli we talk about our bones, beetroot, we talk about our blood, nuts we talk about our brains.  You get the idea – and it is very simple notions but ones that children can understand and can empower them to want to eat the right foods for the right reasons.

Another way I’ve opened discussions about food with my son is to incorporate his love of superheroes.  I’ll start by asking him what his favourite food is – he will, without fail, say either pasta or avocado.   He is 5 after all.  So then I’ll ask him what he thinks Superman’s favourite food is.  I’ll usually say something like “I bet it’s sweet potato, because he needs lots of energy to chase bad guys” but we have different foods for different reasons for different super heroes, and it can be a fun game to play. 

Other days we play the colour game.  We will try to make a meal with all the colours of the rainbow included, or we have colour armies, and each colour has a different job to do when we eat it.  White foods might protect our bones, green foods for our tummies, brown foods for our hair.  It changes all the time, but the point is, it opens the conversation and makes meal times more fun.  You don’t have to have the right answers, it just allows children to begin to make associations between what they are eating and their own health and well-being.  And don’t underestimate the power this can have on a small child. 

Obesity levels in children is increasing, as is the incidence of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  Malnutrition caused by poor dietary choices is a real and present issue in Western diets, and it is said that the current generation of children will be the first ones to die before their parents due to diet related diseases.  This is a story that can be easily changed.  We can spend our money on bad food and doctor’s bills, or we can invest every single day in our children’s health with nutritious food.  It’s time to start thinking outside the box when to comes to feeding children.  Don’t be led by marketing or convenience.  At the end of the day, our children don’t know better until they are told.  It’s our job as parents to guide them in the right direction, and to take responsibility for the food they eat.  Until they are old enough to understand the implications of eating highly-processed foods, we should act on their behalf by assuming they want to make the right choices. 

It won’t always be easy, we won’t always get it right, be we can definitely try.