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If there’s one question I get asked often, it’s this one. And I understand why. Anyone who knows me, and knows how obsessed I am with everything I do, knows there is one thing on earth I cherish more than anything else – my daughter.
Any of you reading this post who are parents know exactly what I’m talking about. My daughter, and I know the same is true for Gary with his boys, is one of the greatest driving forces behind us founding NuSI. Why?
Picture the United States as a cruise ship. Overall, it’s a wonderful place to be. We have so many things to be thankful for (as do many folks outside of the U.S.). But, there are icebergs out there. If we continue the course we’re on, our fate will be similar to that of the Titanic. Unlike the Titanic, though, we actually have several icebergs in our path. That is, there are many different forces in the world today that – if left unchecked – could easily disrupt our way of living. I won’t go into detail about what I think the list of potential threats to our economic and social freedoms are – pension overhead, national security, energy security, structural problems with education – but I’ll assert my opinion on the first problem we need to get a handle on. If we don’t figure out a way to curb the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, our healthcare spending alone will bankrupt us. No one can pinpoint the day this will happen, but if not in my lifetime, I’d bet anything it will be in my daughter’s lifetime. In other words, of all the icebergs we need to skirt past, this one is the closest to our vessel.
So, back to the question. While we wait a decade or so for NuSI to fund the type of science that will unambiguously resolve the jugular question — What should people eat to maximize their chances for greatest health? — what do we do? If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll certainly have a great idea for what I do, based on my interpretation of the data currently at our fingertips. But ambiguity remains, especially when asking an even more important question than what do I eat. Since my daughter (and presumably your children, for those of you with children) is infinitely more important to me than anything else, including myself, how do I interpret current data around what she should eat?
Principle 1: Excess sugar is not conducive to good health for anyone
I don’t think I need to spend any additional time reviewing the harm of sugar (e.g., sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, cane sugar, brown sugar). If you do want a quick refresher on this, you can read this post. If you can only make one intervention in the dietary pattern of your child, make it this one. Based on our experience and the experience I’ve had with clients, friends, and family, a trend has emerged. It seems the longer you wait to make changes in this area, the more difficult it can be. Not always, but often. Sugar is very habit forming, and from a neurochemical standpoint an addiction to sugar is not unlike an addiction to gambling, alcohol, or heroin. Yes, they all have nuanced differences, but each of these addictive patterns or behaviors results in stimulation of the dopaminergic pathways of the brain.
How do we translate this intent into practice? The easiest thing to do is to minimize the amount of sugar brought into the house. This means we don’t have soda, cookies, candies, cakes, cupcakes, and other similar nutritional weapons of mass destruction lying around. This doesn’t mean we never have them lying around. Invariably, a grandparent or neighbor will bring over a lollipop or some cookies, but this is an exception, not a rule.
Furthermore, we don’t have any juice in our house. Our daughter (who is 4) drinks whole milk and water. That’s it. Amazingly, she no longer finds sweet beverages enjoyable. Recently, at a birthday party, she was given one of those Capri Sun sugar-syrup drinks. She took one sip and asked for a bottle of water. It was actually too sweet for her.
As I explain below, she still gets some sugar in her diet, but it’s probably about 20% of what the average kid her age is consuming. And she gets plenty of fructose in the form of fruit. But when she eats fruit, it’s usually lower fructose fruits (e.g., raspberries, blueberries, strawberries) rather than higher fructose fruits (e.g., watermelon, banana).
Principle 2: The less processed the food is, the better the food probably is
As an extension of the first principle, if you always make trade-offs in favor of cooking your food, rather than pulling it out of a box or jar, you’ll win many of these day-to-day battles. At least half the week our daughter asks for cereal for breakfast (instead of bacon and eggs). Rather than dump her a bowl of sugar-laden cereal, my wife or I will make her steel-cut oatmeal, to which she’ll add milk and a few raisins and walnuts. Sure, it’s more carbs in one meal than I eat in 3 days, but it doesn’t contain sugar (beyond the fructose in the raisins).
When she wants spaghetti for dinner, we make her real sauce out of real tomatoes and garlic. No added sugar, of course.
This requires extra work, as you can imagine. It’s much easier to dump cereal out of a box or pasta sauce out of a jar. But if I need to sleep 15 minutes less or my wife needs to cut her run short 15 minutes to make it happen, is it worth it? For us, the answer is yes. But, it is a choice – of both time and money – every parent needs to make.
Principle 3: Insulin and insulin-like-growth-factor (IGF) are important for childhood development
This topic is highly complex. For anyone who has studied IGF-1, GH, IGF-BP3, STATb5, or any of the hundred other molecules involved in the highly regulated pathways of growth, don’t be offended. It would take another series the lengths of the cholesterol series to give this topic its fair shake. However, a few key points are worth noting. There is sufficient evidence, for me at least, that a growing child needs a modest dose of insulin to capture their genetic (vertical) growth potential. In fact, stunted growth is one of the documented side-effects of children on ketogenic diets, though there may be several factors accounting for that beyond the role of insulin and IGF (e.g., protein deficiency, caloric deficiency).
Ketogenic diets are a medically accepted treatment for recalcitrant seizures. About half the children whose seizures don’t respond to any medications almost immediately stop seizure activity once they are in ketosis. Some investigators, including Dr. Elizabeth Thiele, Director of the pediatric epilepsy program at Harvard’s Mass General Hospital, are investigating this approach in adults. I had breakfast with Dr. Thiele recently and had an amazing opportunity to learn from someone with enormous experience treating children with ketogenic diets (over bacon and eggs, of course). According to Dr. Thiele, who described some really amazing in vivo and in vitro research, the reason for the effectiveness is not entirely clear. That is, it’s not clear if the seizure activity is ameliorated by the presence of B-OHB (beta-hydroxyburyrate) or the stark reduction in glucose or the insulin, or some combination of these, or even something altogether different.
Of course, having too much insulin-like-growth factor is even worse. There are numerous medical reports that describe the opposite “growth” scenario – too much IGF-1, for example, being associated with increased childhood malignancy.
Everyone wants to know if my (non-epileptic) daughter is on a ketogenic diet. The answer is no. If I had to guess, she probably gets 40% of total calories in the form of carbohydrates, and very few of them are sugar. That said, she’s so used to seeing her daddy give himself “boo-boos” on his finger every day to check his ketone levels that I think she’s getting curious…but that will have to wait a long while.
Principle 4: Fat is fine
As much as you’ve heard me espouse the benefits of fat intake in adults, it’s equally or even more true in children. As the Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman points out, as we evolved from chimps to homo erectus about 1.5 million years ago, and to homo sapien about 200,000 years ago, we required an increase in our storage of body fat (from about 4-5% to 7-8% to 12-14%). Why? Most likely to support the requirements of our rapidly growing and developing brains. At no point in our development is this more necessary than as children.
My daughter certainly consumes less fat than I do, but she still gets about 35-40% of her total caloric intake via fats – saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. Perhaps her favorite breakfast of all is bacon and eggs with cream cheese. She likes to wrap a piece of cream cheese and scrambled eggs with a strip of bacon which she calls a “cooc-a-mooc.” Don’t ask me how she thought of that, but she loves them. She drinks whole milk (it’s always struck me as strange that the American College of Pediatrics recommends children switch from whole milk to skim milk abruptly at the age of 2), avocado by the truckload, and a wide variety of quality meats.
Principle 5: They are, after all, still children
My wife and I agreed a long time ago that we were not going to restrict our daughter’s eating when she was at birthday parties, on Easter egg hunts, out for Halloween, or on other “special” occasions. A few weeks ago we took her to Disneyland for her 4th birthday. (Anyone want to guess what it’s like for an ISTJ to spend 2 days at Disneyland? Were it not for the look on her face, I’m not sure I could have survived.) We decided, for these 2 days, she could eat whatever she wanted. The day started with a bag of cotton candy larger than her head. I couldn’t resist looking at the package to see that it contained 90 gm of sugar. I did the quick math on converting that dose of sugar from her weight (35 pounds) to mine (165 pounds) and realized it was like me eating 450 gm of pure sugar in 20 minutes – the length of time it took her to inhale it! That’s about 12 cans of soda. She went on to have pretzles and cookies for lunch and, of course, a cake for dessert after dinner.
The entire time I was watching her mainline sugar – more in one day than I consume in a year – I couldn’t help but chuckle. I sent pictures to my friends all day long. In the end, she was pretty sick of all the junk she consumed and welcomed her usual meals. But, for a couple of days she ate just like most any other 4-year-old would on her birthday.
Principle 6: No two kids are the same
As you’re reading this keep in mind, this is an anecdotal account of my life and my child. Yours will be different. What works for our child may not work for your child or children. Don’t worry about it! In the end you’ll be the best judge of what the optimal zone is. I really believe my daughter will live a healthier life because of the way she eats growing up. One day, of course, she’ll have to make her own choices. Will she completely rebel against everything we’ve tried to teach her? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I really believe that kids are the product of the example set by their parents.
I used to always wonder where my tendencies came from. Not surprisingly, much of who I am today is the result of the behaviors I observed in my parents. It’s my belief that if my daughter grows up in an environment where an emphasis is placed on eating well, it will become a natural extension of her behavior, too.
Photo by Foodie Factor on Unsplash
Our three kids are all pretty low carb. They eat vegetables with the dinner and sometimes at lunch. Their breakfast is nearly always a bacon and egg frittata that might include feta or mushrooms. Sugar is an absolute no go in our house, but they will occasionally enjoy a sugar free sweet (Xylitol) or some carb free baking that may have Xylitol in it also.
Generally they are becoming anti-sugar zealots like myself and my wife, but occasionally instinctively (or peered into it) reach for something with sugar in it without thinking about it. On the whole though they understand to avoid carbs and will instead grab some cheese or ham etc. They are doing pretty well at it though and it makes me very proud when I hear them tell some other kids or teacher etc that they don’t want something because it contains carbs or sugar.
We have noticed a huge difference in them since we cut out the carbs, particularly in my son who was suffering from very low energy, anaemia, tiredness and bad mood swings. These are a distant memory now and we are convinced that getting rid of sugar and most carbs has been the key to it. They have great appetites and never shy away from eating the good foods.
The main difference with how we bring them up and what you have written here Peter is that we do restrict foods when they are out and about…. where we have some level of control. If they are at parties etc, then they are more than likely to reject the standard kids party foods and we will either feed them up on the good stuff before they leave or take along food for them to eat. The inevitable candy bag that is handed out at the end of the party, they will end up throwing the rubbishy sweets into the bin when they get home and we will give them a sugar-free sweet in return. This is something they are now doing on their own also and there is no ‘expectation’ from them that they will be getting a swapped sweet.
Most of our friends and family are fully aware of the special diet that the kids are on and will make a point of checking with us the types of food they can have. In the event where we do not have control over what they consume, we do not get angry/upset with the kids over it so that we do not make out like it is something they have done wrong… although I get pretty grumpy on my own time. 🙂
Thanks for another insightful article Peter. Always good to see a new one come through and love the pics.
Thanks for piling on the good info. I think it’s awesome that other parents (most with far more experience than me) are sharing their stories, too. THANK YOU!
She’s adorable, Peter! I think she looks like you with long hair. Hey, which of your parents flipped tires?
Your approach makes perfect sense, and I love the fact that you and your wife let her have treats on special occasions. I don’t have kids…so I’m still staring at the scrambled egg and cream cheese sentence… I wonder what will happen when she goes to school. Do you remeber hearing how a child had the lunch her mother packed confiscated by the government inspector at school because it didn’t meet government nutrition standards? Wait til they see her lunchbox 🙂
She just got a bento box for school (pre-K), which starts next week. Should be hilarious. She’s already telling us what she wants in each section. In all seriousness I will need to update this post every year or so, based on our experience with her travels through the system. When I was in med school my sister was in grade school (we’re 13 years apart). I used to a heart dissection for her science class once a year. I have a feeling for my daughter they won’t be asking me to come in for a nutrition lecture…
Scrambled eggs and cream cheese isn’t just for kids, though! Beat the eggs with a respectable amount of heavy cream, pour them into a heated pan (heated with salt, butter, and olive oil). Then flatten some cream cheese and stick it on top. As you toss the eggs, the cream cheese gets really soft. The whole thing turns out fluffy and delicious. No toast required.
This is especially good with tomatoes, hot peppers. or scallions (the signature breakfast at a joint down the street from me is the “SCC” Scallion-Cream Cheese scramble–and it’s not on the kids’ menu!).
I’m 30, and I may just fix myself a cooc-a-mooc tomorrow morning.
Great article, Peter.
While my wife and I don’t have any kids (thank god), my two nieces and nephews via my older sister are almost surrogate children. Unfortunately, I am watching my brother-in-law force his SAD and anti-fat, calories in-calories out beliefs on them. The oldest, 10, already has a weight problem that is beginning to stress her out. He continues to blame it on calories and fat, which makes the situation worse. When the boy, 8, comes to our house and has breakfast, he nearly assaults my wife and I for bacon. He looks like a crack-addict fiending for a fix… when he is really just an emaciated kid whose brain is literally STARVING for saturated fat and cholesterol. I brought this up to my sister who told me, “yea, he never gets bacon at home”. ‘You know who’ won’t allow it. instead it’s more fiber-packed cereals, skim milk, fruit, and oatmeal.
to me this is borderline child abuse! i would love nothing more than to tell my brother-in-law that what he is doing (albeit out of love and desire to do what’s right) is having the opposite effect and hurting them in many different ways. Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance is a b*tch and he shuts down as soon as I bring up how good Gary Taubes WWGF book, Eating Academy, Paleo, Primal, or anything that tells him “what to do”. Even though he has watched me lose 25lbs over the course of a year blending grass-fed butter into my coffee, and happily devouring any lovely fat off the steak he meticulously cuts off. btw – his visceral pot belly continues to grow and i’d love to see his lipid profile!
anyway, it’s more of a tough social/relationship question than anything else. food is such a personal topic to so many people. personal diet decisions are obviously personal, but when it comes to controlling what one’s kids eat, there’s a lot of room for mixed emotion and conflict.
Adam, is there any way you can get your brother-in-law to think about the issues for himself, first? Then, perhaps, for his kids?
Hi Peter
Have you viewed the Recent BBC doc on you tube – Eat, Fast, live longer. It goes into depth about the effects of protein in IGF 1 and fasting as an antidote. It seems to suggest that reducing protein helps. Fasting also. Does ketones and higher fat counteract the effects of protein on IGF1 in your opinion?
Have not seen it, but it sounds like I should.
Dr. Attia,
Thank you so much for this post (as well as your series on cholesterol). This year my husband and I have been transitioning our family (us and a three year old daughter) to a paleo/primal type of diet, with much success (my cholesterol numbers are greatly improved!). We have been questioning if it makes sense to restrict our daughter’s carbohydrate intake, and this article will be very helpful in our discussions. Like you, we restrict bread, sweets, and juice, but allow virtually unlimited fruit, vegetables, meat, and whole-fat dairy. Our daughter’s favorite meal right now is plain Greek yogurt with blueberries and a touch of honey.
One challenge we face is from our caregivers, who ply her with doughnuts, fast food, and juice. At least she knows that when she’s home, she isn’t able to get that type of food from Mommy or Daddy!
Any chance you can ask said caregivers to play by your rules, instead?
Ah, ha, we have asked for them to play by our rules, but its difficult when the biggest rule-breaker is Grandmom (her house is filled with junk foods)!
My husband and I have decided to apply the 80/20 rule when it comes to this aspect of our daughter’s upbringing. As another poster has said, we believe that childrearing is about helping kids make good choices. We are heartened by the fact that she usually chooses spinach and broccoli over ice cream and cake (much to Grandmom’s shock), and that the teachers at her school always compliment us on how well she eats!
80/20 rules are a great way to be efficient.
H? Peter,
My two cents for NuSi: If you refer to the rest of the world (non LCHF diets), institutions and regular people as kids. You can implement your smart principles on them. It will be easier to make a change this way; the first principle for instance is a consensus for the majority of diets, low carb and low fat types. By starting with it, it is possible to gain immediate success, and getting the leg in the door.
NuSI is actually about something much different that advancing any particular diet…it’s about getting the science right before anything else.
Hello Peter Attia. Thank you for your posts and videos! I really appreciate the copious, factual, and clearly expressed information.
The fact that epileptic kids who are treated with a ketogenic diet suffer stunted growth should really not make you worry about any keto diet your daughter might do in the future. The diet that those epileptic kids get is radically different from any diet that you would ever consider giving your daughter, starting with the fact that it is a semi-starvation diet!
Almost all of the kids who are put on a ketogenic diet for epilepsy are also put on calorie restriction and protein restriction. The standard practice was (and is) to figure out what the child’s calorie needs are, by some combination of keeping a food diary before beginning the diet and using the USRDA of calories for that child’s height and weight, and then giving them only 75% of the calories they need! Similarly the child is deliberately supplied the child with only a bare minimum of protein (starting at 1 g/kg/day).
See for example ¹, which mentions this as being standard practice. (They also often practice *water* restriction!)
I’ve not yet found any research that even *attempts* to tease apart the impact of this calorie and protein restriction from the effects on IGF-1, insulin, ketosis, or other effects. If you have, please share. Citation ¹ looks at a correlation between stuntedness, reduced IGF-1, and ketonemia. My brilliant wife Amber pointed out to me that if the stuntedness is caused by protein deficiency, and if protein intake correlates inversely with ketonemia, then that might explain some of the observed correlation.
[Please mentally insert here an outraged rant about how unhealthy and how unjustified this semi-starvation is and about the fact that experimentation with full-calorie alternatives (Modified Atkins Diet for epilepsy) has begun only in the last few years, e.g. ².]
(By the way, the kids who suffer stunted growth while on the anti-epilepsy diet and then later go off of the diet experience catch-up growth and end up, on average, no shorter than their peers who didn’t do the diet.)
Also, keep in mind that a standard component of a keto diet is KetoCal™. Check out the ingredients (from ³):
“Water, Refined Vegetable Oil (High Oleic Sunflower, Soya, Palm Oil), Sodium Caseinate (Milk), Whey Protein Concentrate (Milk), Soy Fiber, Resistant Corn Starch, …”
Those are probably unlike the ingredients your daughter would eat.
Finally, the components of the typical epilepsy diet which are *not* KetoCal™ are still often things you wouldn’t put on your menu at home. Not the meat-oriented, natural approach that you and I would naturally imagine. I don’t have Kossoff’s “How To” book on keto for epilepsy at hand, but the “Suggested Menus” section of that book was kind of eye-opening. It looked like they tried to pack in as much sugar and artificial sweetener as they could within the macronutrient limits, presumably to increase compliance.
In sum: of course it is possible that a healthy, full-fat, full-calorie, meaty keto diet would stunt the growth of a child, but the evidence from the epileptic kids can’t be used to prove it. Anyway, I kind of doubt that it would be a real problem. Our keto baby is 2 years, 10 months, he’s eaten very little carbohydrate in his life so far, and he’s built like a bull — a cute little fat, strong bull baby. I think he weighs about 40 lbs.
Regards,
Zooko
¹ Spulber-2009-“Growth dependence on insulin-like growth factor-1 during the ketogenic diet”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1528-1167.2008.01769.x/pdf
² Porta-2009-“Comparison of seizure reduction and serum fatty acid levels after receiving the ketogenic and modified Atkins diet”
https://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/1059-1311/PIIS1059131109000053.pdf
³ https://www.myketocal.com/product.html
Yes, great points Zooko. I sort of responded to this effect to a previous question, but you’ve done so much more eloquently. Thank you!
Great information, perfect for me – particularly Principle 3. I have been VLC for 8 months, down 20 lbs — and more importantly, feeling better than I have felt in years. Your website has been a great source of information and inspiration to me. My 12yo daughter is being treated with growth hormone for her short stature. We have had success with the GH treatment — so all her pediatric endocrinologist can worry about is that her BMI is too high (25.8). We have made changes to her diet this summer, no sugar (except for special occasions) and she has adopted many of my eating habits (she prefers the food I eat, she is a protein lover). Unlike her mother, though, she will still eat small portions of pasta, rice, and potatoes at dinner. I am always tempted to restrict those carbs further to see if we can get her BMI down, but this post is a great reminder that although she looks like a mini-me, she is not. She needs some carbs in her life. Thanks Peter.
Nice way of putting it! Fortunately, my daughter doesn’t look like a mini-me!
We have a 9 yr old boy and a soon to be 8 yr old boy – the 9 yr old does not handle grain well at all – so we keep him on a grain free diet and he gets his carbs from veggies and fruit – our younger son eats grain free at home but for lunch at school he gets the junk food they slop (pancake on a stick with a side of corn some fruit soaked in HFCS and a cookie becuz its america and heaven forbid we dont give the kids a dessert. ) I really want to start sending his lunch like his brother- i try to keep myself (T1 diabetic) in ketosis
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for this awesome post. My husband and I love your blog (along with Gary Taubes’ books and Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt’s blog.) We have a 10 month old daughter and it has been difficult to find information about how we should feed her. It is especially hard when all you get from the pediatrician is to fill her full of rice cereal and other Moms trying to convince me she needs teething cookies (biscuits), lots of whole grains and goldfish. Instead she gets an egg yolk and yogurt (full fat) smoothie with strawberries and blueberries and a bit of banana for breakfast and meat or fish source with a bit of fruit and veggies (with grass-fed butter) for lunch and dinner. And she is still breast-fed. Your post makes me feel better about how we are feeding her and I really appreciate you sharing. Thanks for doing what you do and good luck with NuSI!! I cannot wait to see what information you guys come up with over the years to come!
Holly, so glad you found it helpful. By the way (and completely unrelated) I did an interview with Andreas in Boston last week and I think he posted it today.
Yes! I saw that earlier today and was very excited to watch it. Great Interview Dr. Attia!! As a triathlete and marathon runner I am very curious to see how my winter marathon season goes with this new diet so I loved what you had to say about that. I also saw the guy who won the Western States 100 earlier this year is low-carb. He beat the record by like 21 minutes. All very exciting and interesting stuff. 24 hours and a 6 hour bike ride on water and sodium…impressive!! My goal is to do a marathon on the same in December so you have piqued my interest on the self-experimentation. Thank you!!
very nice post! The years of peer pressure are yet to come, as well as the dreaded Freshman 15lb. At least you wiil have provided her with the tools to make her own decisions as she gets older- that is what parenting is suppose to be about, not control.
I guess it’s the best I can do for now.
We don’t keep wheat from our kids, though I’d like to, but I can limit the amount they eat by always preparing potatoes for meals (they’ve stopped asking for pasta), cooking bacon or black pudding for breakfast, and making dinners rich enough (stroganoff, lamb chops) that they’re not hungry afterwards. Any desert, rarely needed, is based around fruit and cream. But usually they are happy with a whole-milk cocoa. Water, milk, no juice in the fridge. Cheese and fruit always available for snacks as well as bread/toast and spreads, which are not usually big movers. In fact, not a lot of snacking goes on, and they often skip breakfast or lunch. No more than one spoonful of sugar per hot drink and only two of those a day.
So when family or holidays do dump rubbish on us, its effect is soon shaken off. I might get some multivitamins or kids probiotics at these times, but not usually. I recognise all the principles you have set out here as sound and sustainable. Since feeding them a higher-fat diet (and cooking with dripping and butter rather than oil) we see far fewer colds and allergies.
You might like this book: I know I did. It’s a very funny, very British take on Taubes, WAP, low-carb and Paleo.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2105132/Damn-low-fat-diet-How-reformed-vegan-John-Nicholson-gorges-foods-granny-enjoyed–felt-better.html
Thanks very much for sharing, George.
Thanks again for the post Peter! Daughter is beautiful! Boys will be the death of me, I have 2 daughters! The 15 year old is going to her first high-school football game.
For adults moderating IGF-1 is a good idea?
I don’t think so, Pierre.
Peter,
Awesome post; I follow each & every one and this is my favorite. I am an ISTJ and agree completely (which explains why we haven’t been to Disney yet with our 11, 9, 7 y/o). Our trip this summer was to Wash D.C.
We allow some of the “bad” food options in our home; however our kids are very aware of carbs/sugar and will often ask if a choice is good or bad… We give plenty of room for kids to make the easy choice and do our best to keep healthy options readily available (veggie platter for after school snacking). One of my proudest moments was listening to my son tell his friends that our pantry only had “healthy food”.
Another thank you! I just read this blog with my 11 year old and it sparked a good conversation. Keep sharing your experience; it’s making a difference!
Jeff
Jeff, thanks so much and thanks for the great pics of your family. That’s a beautiful family you have.
We are having a “weight of the state ” obesity conference in Virginia in the spring. I sure would like to submit you or Gary’s name as speakers.
What say you?
Yoda
Shirley, I can’t speak for Gary, but please contact us (separately) via our contact forms.
I’m posting under a different ID than usual, to protect the anonymity of my junior high-age son. He’s great with food in many ways- never has been a sugar hound, unlike many of his friends, and didn’t even like chocolate until he was probably 9 or 10?! He’s always been slim- higher on the height than weight growth curve, and naturally active… so I feel lucky. I switched him from low-fat to full-fat milk last year, after I discovered LCHF for myself, and he’s fine with that. I do give him more starch than I eat, for example I’ll stir-fry veggies and meat, and give him rice with it. My main dietary issue with him is that he kind of has a beef phobia. When he was in preschool, well-meaning parents of one of his best buddies told him about Mad Cow disease, and he really took it to heart. We’ve done desensitization (is that the correct term?), so now he can be around other people eating beef without freaking out, but he still doesn’t want to eat it. In the big scheme of life, it doesn’t seem worth it to try and battle and force him to eat beef, but it does limit my meal-planning choices more than I’d like. He’s a very logical, science-minded child in most ways, so if anyone has a good argument r.e. Mad Cow not being a huge worry, please let me know! I have told him that he’s probably much more likely to get struck by lightening, or to get salmonella from salad, than he is to get Mad Cow, but he’s still concerned. I will say that I do wish we had the option of purchasing beef from cows that were tested after slaughter and found to be negative for Mad Cow. My understanding is that the government has actually forbidden such testing from being used in marketing meat, which seems an unnecessary restriction.
Oh, about school, we were lucky in that his preschool forbid kids to bring any sweets (cookies, candy) in their lunches. He was there for 3 years, and when he started elementary school, he himself maintained the idea that he shouldn’t bring sweets in his lunch, even though other kids did. He also refused to eat the school lunches, as he found them disgusting! 🙂 On the other hand, especially in the earlier grades, some teachers used sweets as behavior incentives- i.e. behave well, get candy on Friday- which was annoying, but didn’t seem worth arguing about at the time- and of course in a class of 32 kids (California class size nowadays), birthdays with cupcakes etc are constantly happening!
Thanks so much for sharing.
You might find some good information about how to … lead … your son into reconsidering beef here: https://www.psandman.com/search/search.php?zoom_query=mad+cow
Peter Sandman and his wife (Dr. Jody Lanard) have done a lot of work on *communicating* about risk and cows and beef and health (among many many other hazards). Finding a source of ‘healthily-raised’ beef cows isn’t that hard; convincing your young fellow to re-address/reconsider the fright those parents gave him is probably harder. (Perhaps a discussion about SAD vs. healthy diets and how the impetus for them differs so dramatically? i.e., why you choose the healthy way…) (And letting him help FIND healthily raised beef — *doing* something to address the hazard — would help!)
Sandman’s ‘thing’ is that merely addressing “risk” (what he calls “hazard”: i.e., what the actual odds are that a hamburger might be contaminated) won’t suffice. A communicator must also address “outrage” — the feelings ABOUT the ‘hazard.’ His motto is “Risk equals Hazard plus outrage.” I love his stuff — eye-opening!
Maybe do some research together on mad cow. From a table I just glanced at it reported 3 cases of the disease in humans from the US (total not per year). He’s more likely to die this year from an auto accident (is he still going to ride in a car) or getting the flu virus.
Grass fed beef? Healthier animals with no animal by products reduces any miniscule risk.
Good luck!
I’ve been researching all of the “infectious prion encephalopathies” (mad cow,scrapie,cjd,chronic wasting) it seems the governments if UK & US lead us astray. The infectious proteins may not be so infectious (more like fictitious). All recent research points to a mineral imbalance in nervous tissue, specifically low copper & iron, and elevated manganese. Search pubmed.gov
May just give you one more reason to be mad at Gov’t.
Hi California mom,
Your son sounds very bright! Maybe you and he could do some research together about mad cow disease and visit a farm with grass-fed cattle? As somebody who’s pretty anxious myself, I would advise you to steer clear of comparing that risk to salmonella in salad or riding in cars…it might just encourage him to start thinking too much about the fragility of life. I didn’t eat commercially processed ground beef because of the mad cow disease. It’s my understanding that there really shouldn’t be risk from 100% grass-fed cattle–the problem was that cattle were being fed meat from cattle. Also the risk of a prion being in a hamburger is greater when the meat from so many individual animals is mixed together. Our local sources say that there’s likely to be meat from just one animal in a burger because of the way they process and package the beef. Because the neural tissue is where the danger is, pieces of meat like a pot roast or steaks–muscle tissue–aren’t risky. Automated gadgets that are used in extracting tissue from carcasses take some neural tissue (even though they aren’t supposed to) that gets mixed in to ground beef.
And I should have said, the neural tissue that has the prions that cause the mad cow disease is tissue from the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. Not all over the body. Anyway, maybe if you and he read about it together he would feel okay about eating steak or a roast. Or maybe the little guy would just get freaked out about animals being slaughtered and stop eating chicken & pork, too…you know him best!
That is so cool that he won’t eat the school lunches! Good luck with the beef!
Hi Elenor, Colleen, LP, and Jennifer,
Thanks for all the suggestions. We’re working on it!
Really interesting post. I’m pleased to see your approach to kids is similar to my own, I occasionally wonder if I should be more strict with them.
My wife is not as convinced as I am on low carbs, and is of the opinion that a short life with rice and noodles is better than a long one without, which would make it difficult to go lower carb anyway.
I try to minimise their sugar at home (get enough from grandparents and birthday parties). While I don’t stop them eating carbs, I don’t insist on it and try to offer options without carbs. My two sons (6 and 8) have very different preferences. The 6 year old loves rice and will happily eat a huge bowl of chicken rice for breakfast every day. The 8yo is quite happy to give rice a miss completely like me. Unfortunately the 8yo seems to be naturally very skinny and could probably get away with eating the carbs. The 6 yo has always had a large tummy and round face and I suspect takes after me and may have to watch what he eats more in future.
Another great example of individual variation. The good news is rice noodles are much easier to tolerate in a metabolically “fit” person than the opposite. So if rice noodles are essential, it’s that much important to avoid sugar.
Thanks for the post, Peter. Sometimes I feel I’m the only one around “forcing” my 2 daughters to eat whole foods as much as possible (continually swimming upstream against conventional wisdom).
However, I started studying the whole diet thing when my youngest developed asthma at 18 months old. At 3.5 years old now, on real food, and no asthma for a year. That’s some motivation.
I seem to be following pretty much the same principles as you do. What is your take on the wheat/gluten story? Do you allow foods containing these?
You’re not alone, Mark, though I know *exactly* how you feel when I take my daughter to pre-school lunches with other parents and watch what they let their kids eat. The tragedy, of course, is that each of these parents — I am 100% sure — wishes only the best for their children. But they are misled and highly confused. This is why NuSI needs to exist. We’ve got to put an end to this. What parent, even if they smoke, would encourage their child to do so? It’s a silly question. Not because it’s silly to smoke. Tobacco is addictive and for many it’s a coping strategy. But because we always want more for our children than we want for ourselves.
I love feedback from other parents as well. I’m trying to find a comfortable range for my kids, so great to see your approach. Thanks.
I have 3 and 7 year old daughters. The eldest loves pasta and the youngest has a sweet tooth. We’ve eliminated pasta from the house–it was too easy of a meal option when time was short–so that problem is gone now. The little one, though, is constantly bombarded with sweets (in Greece, the Grandparents see it as their life goal to stuff kids with sweets and they hand it out at daycare too!). So, she’s constantly looking/asking for her sugar fix in between meals. I’ve noticed that if I leave bowls of olives or macadamias or fruit or cheese lying around her usual haunts (or bring some outside when she and her sister are playing), she usually stuffs herself with those and that seems to take care of “the shakes.” LOL I’ve also included both of them in helping me cook and making treats. For example, they were going through a “popsicle” stage made with fruit juice.So instead I had them make popsicles with Greek yogurt, strawberries and a bit of honey (I slipped in some coconut cream for good measure too). They absolutely love them–either from the taste or from making them themselves. They also helped me make paleo pancakes over the weekend.
It’s a slow process, but it’s getting easier.
Thank you so much for the insight into how you handle your daughter’s diet! I also have enjoyed reading all the responses from other parents and getting multiple points of view. I have a 3 year old and have been slowly trying to wean him of his sugar/carb addiction since switching to the Paleo diet in February. I didn’t have the knowledge when he was younger that I do now, but have been making slow progress. Of course, I wish I had known about the Paleo diet when he was a baby and subsequently would not have progressed on the SAD way of eating, but as I cannot change the past I can certainly start my next child in a much healthier pattern of eating…
Which brings me to a question that has been burning in my mind since switching to a Paleo diet: What do you eat when you are pregnant?
My son had colic and would scream for about 3 hours a day for the first 4 months of his life and all I was ever told is that he would grow out of it. Since I began reading about diet and how it affects every aspect of our health, I firmly believe that my diet while pregnant played an unfortunate role in his early health! I didn’t eat poorly by conventional wisdom, of course, but I certainly followed the SAD, ate whole grains, the occasional fast food when I craved french fries and the usual over-processed non-foods. I didn’t gain much weight and I was looked at as very “healthy” compared with my other friends who were pregnant and used it as an excuse to eat what ever they wanted when ever they wanted it. I sorely wish I could go back and do it all over again, but as there’s no point in wishing for the impossible, I can certainly change what I do during my next pregnancy!
Which brings me back to: what do I eat? I will certainly stick to my current healthy way of eating, no processed foods, healthy oils and fats, no legumes, gluten-free, etc… but what about carbs and gluten-free grains?? I don’t want to unnecessarily cause harm to my growing child by eating less than 50g of carbs per day (what I currently eat). Any advise you can share will be greatly appreciated! I am not pregnant now, but hope to be in the next few months and I want to be on the right path from the get go!
Ahhh…important question, and one I plan to address in a separate post.
Hi,
I have read in Jay Wortman site, that his wife was on the diet he was on while she was pregnant. The latest blog is about that child, and what that child now eats.
https://www.drjaywortman.com/
Great find. I know Jay and think very highly of his work and insight.