Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (30 page)

Take them to the store, shop in the vegetable aisle, let them help you prepare food, get them involved in the process.—
Dr. Emily Senay

It has to be a family affair. I think Jim and I are doing a pretty good job exposing our girls to healthy eating. We are certainly trying to shape their attitudes toward food and expand the horizons of their taste buds by training them to enjoy fruits and vegetables.

The girls are more aware of good and bad food than I ever was. We discuss it a lot in our household, and they generally lead the discussion. I tend to hang back, because I don’t want to add to the pressure already imposed on them from my job and my issues with body image. I’m sure they think that is just as well—teenage girls don’t need to hear their mother tell them how to eat every second of the day!

But they do need guidance, and I am grateful that Jim takes an active part in these discussions and does a lot of our grocery shopping. He’ll buy organic peanut butter for Amelia because she runs track, and we give the girls a steak once a week because they are still developing and need protein and iron. Jim and I don’t eat red meat so we’ll have a different meal, but that’s part of the conversation, too. And we get tons of broccoli rabe and Brussels sprouts, which all of us share.

When I was their age, I was like a runaway beer truck around food. One of my issues growing up was that I wanted to eat American food, and I wonder if that made me feel like I was missing out on something. In my household now, we have an all-American diet, but it’s a healthy one. And I don’t think my children feel the kind of lack that I did.

I don’t think they feel denied. Ours is not a “Food Nazi’s” household, but we do shop carefully and we don’t buy food that we don’t want them to eat. We don’t keep commercial cupcakes or sugary cereal around, but we do have granola without a lot of extra sugar, we have almonds, we have whole-wheat crackers. We even have windmill cookies, which have a certain amount of fat in them, but they’re just not over the top. We don’t buy potato chips and dip, but we do eat baked corn and whole-grain chips, and we enjoy salsa with them. We have all sorts of juices, but none of them are the processed sugar-filled ones in boxes. They don’t have added sugar and they are organic.

One place we are strict is with soda. There is absolutely none of it in my house. None. As far as I’m concerned, if you wipe all soda off the face of the earth, this would be a better place. I don’t see any reason why anyone should serve soda to their kids. It’s like letting them drink candy. It’s nothing more than liquid sugar, and as we’ve seen, sugar is poison.

Guess what I get out of that attitude? One kid who never drinks soda, and one who always orders it at the restaurant. I can live with that, for now. It shows that parents can’t influence all of their kids’ behavior (as if we didn’t know that), but without soda in our home, I know they are drinking a lot less of it.

Two studies back up my strong feelings here. In a Boston study, 224 overweight or obese high school students were given either the sugary beverages they usually drank or sugar-free drinks, including bottled water.
¹
That was the only difference between them; they got no nutritional advice, and they did not change their exercise habits. After a year, the kids in the sugar-free group weighed an average of four pounds less than the soda drinkers.

“I know of no other single food product whose elimination can produce this degree of weight change,” said Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study.

Similar results came in from a study in the Netherlands that involved more than 650 children, ages four through twelve. During their morning break at school, some kept drinking their usual sweet beverage and others were given sugar-free drinks instead. Eighteen months later, the children drinking the sugary drink weighed an average of two pounds more.
²

Even with our crazy schedules, Jim and I try to have a sit-down family dinner with the girls at least a few times a week. It’s not always easy to do, especially since I really want the meals to be home cooked as often as possible, but the research I’ve examined is too strong to ignore: eating dinner together is a good tool for helping kids avoid obesity and eating disorders.
³
Family dinners don’t happen often enough in many homes, says Margo Maine. “Sometimes when a family comes into my office and I ask them about family mealtime, they say, ‘We don’t eat together’ or ‘The last time we ate together was the last holiday.’” That’s especially troubling given the research that’s out there to suggest that kids whose families ate dinner together three to four times a week may be more resilient against substance abuse.

“When you’re not sitting down, parents aren’t really feeding their kids. Everybody has to fend for themselves,” says Margo. In that situation kids aren’t likely to get a well-balanced
meal, especially if they come home late after a game or another activity. “They’re just going to eat something high in fat and sugar. That’s what we’re drawn to when we’re really, really hungry.”

Dr. Nancy Snyderman says it is not only a matter of
what
we eat, but
how
we eat it. “All of those subtle things about how we learn to eat—manners, conversation, portion control, cooking together—those things have been lost in our generation because we no longer sit down and have dinner,” she says. “Even if you do drive through and pick up the food, please take it home and put it on a plate. You eat slower, you eat better, and you’re more cognizant about what you put in your mouth.”

Even if you do drive through and pick up the food, please take it home and put it on a plate. You eat slower, you eat better, and you’re more cognizant about what you put in your mouth.

—
Nancy Snyderman

But I want to see families cooking together again, instead of relying mostly on takeout and prepared foods. That’s the only way to have personal quality control. Our kids ought to see us cook and help us cook, because we all learn so much when we buy food, handle food, and cook food together. That whole transaction has been lost for many families. Kids should learn how much oil goes into a recipe, and what good healthy ingredients are.

That’s the idea behind Big Chef, Little Chef, a program created by chef Lorena Garcia. I’m a big fan because it gets parents and kids together to learn how to cook healthy foods and take
back control over what they eat. “They end up loving being in the kitchen,” says Lorena.

I know it saves time to let someone else do the cooking, and it’s hard to make different choices with both parents working. But as Dr. Senay says, it can be done. “You’ve got to think carefully, you’ve got to plan, and you’ve got to continually push out the toxic stuff.” I just don’t think we should be passing on responsibility for what goes into our kids’ bodies to someone else. To someone who doesn’t care. To someone who will add tons of butter and fat and salt and sugar to a dish to make it taste good so that you’ll buy it.

Maggie Murphy, who edits
Parade
magazine and
Dash
, a food magazine, agrees with us. She is on a campaign to get more kids and parents making meals together, and her magazines provide simple and healthy recipes to help. “I think there’s some connection between childhood obesity and the fact that people have become very disconnected from cooking,” she says. “My mother was too busy working to teach me to cook, and I think our generation has lost something. We’d have more family dinners if we could simplify cooking so we could fit it into our busy, busy lives.”

If someone as busy as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand can do her own food shopping and find ways to interest her two young boys in nutrition, I don’t think the rest of us have a good excuse not to do the same.

The senator talks a lot to them about what their bodies need to grow. “When I ask them what they want to drink, I always say, ‘Well, milk helps you grow, would you like some milk?’ Henry always says, ‘Yes, Mommy, I’d like milk because it helps me grow.’”

The senator also gets four-year-old Henry to see how many colors he can put on his plate, giving him blueberries, red and green apples, and other colorful produce. “It really helps the kids understand that the more colors they have on their plate, the more vitamins and minerals they have on their plate.”

Senator Gillibrand also invented a point system that has helped her older son, Theo, understand the quality of different food choices. “We’d rate foods from zero to ten based on their quality. So candy would be a zero, and chicken broth and broccoli would be a ten,” she explains. “When he would ask me for foods that had very little nutritional value, I would often tell him, ‘Well, you can have those potato chips, if you pick something that’s a ten to eat before you eat the chips.’”

I think she’s on the right track, because both her kids adore fruits and veggies.

Senator Gillibrand also looks for teaching moments. On Theo’s birthday, she allowed the boys to choose whatever they wanted for breakfast. Theo had cereal and fruit, and then took a cookie on his way out. Four-year-old Henry decided to just have sugar for breakfast: cookies, cake, and candy.

En route to school, Henry fell asleep on her shoulder, and couldn’t even walk into day care. “When he said, ‘Mommy, I’m so tired!’ I said, ‘Well, what did you have for breakfast?’” That gave her a chance to explain that he needed protein, not sugar at breakfast, and that he would feel tired without it. Now, “when Henry asks for anything other than a healthy breakfast, I say, ‘How did that sugar make you feel, Henry?’ And he says, ‘It made me feel tired.’”

Although I try hard to model a healthy attitude toward food, there is no hiding the truth about my own challenges from my kids, and I do worry about imposing an eating disorder on them.

I know that’s a real risk. “We do see a lot of families with multigenerational eating disorders,” says Margo. “That doesn’t mean genes. It means the shared heritable environment. That would include how the family related to food, weight, body image, and appearance. How did they tolerate or encourage emotions? What did they teach about perfectionism? And was that child ever allowed to feel ‘good enough’?”

Other risk factors for eating disorders are temperament, family history of depression, anxiety, addictions, and obsessive tendencies, according to Margo. Stressors, such as trauma, loss, or difficulty communicating, can also play a role. “It is the environmental influences that turn the tide; genetics are an indirect influence. In other words, nature needs nurture.”

Margo had already suggested that I channeled the high expectations of my family and my own concerns about fitting in into managing my body. That’s why I know it’s really important to give my daughters the words to talk about food and body image. “When kids have ways of expressing those feelings, they are less likely to do that,” Margo said.

I also need to be really careful about the messages that I send my girls, either consciously or unconsciously. “Mothers need to think about what they’re projecting, even without saying anything about their kids’ weight,” warns Emily Senay. “Constantly dieting or any sort of disordered eating in front of your own children is not going to help them. It’s going to hurt them. Women have to decide how they’re going to be comfortable with themselves before they can really engage their children.”

Lisa Powell agrees. “We live in a culture where thin is beautiful and mothers want their daughters and their sons to look a certain way. I think there’s a real need for acceptance of a range of body types and styles,” she says.

We live in a culture where thin is beautiful and mothers want their daughters and their sons to look a certain way. I think there’s a real need for acceptance of a range of body types and styles.

—
Lisa Powell

Parents also have to recognize that children have spurts in their height and weight, and we shouldn’t get too stressed about them. “Girls have to gain weight in order to go into puberty,” Margo reminded me. “Between the ages of ten and fourteen girls need to gain forty to fifty pounds and grow ten to twelve inches.