No, ahhhhhhhhhhh actually! At least here, at Fellini’s
White Pizza is multiple white cheeses including ricotta and the traditional mozzarella and TONS of garlic. I get one slice and have them add fresh tomato slices and spinach. YUM!
It was nice to read the thread and see the overwhelming voice of moderation. I will never forget Matthew. He was about a year or so younger than my daughter and lived in our neighborhood. His mom decided NO sweets would ever pass his lips and although we all discussed this with her when we met in the park, etc we all steered clear of judging her. He was healthy and nutritionally sound, mind you, this was just what she had decided would be best. Then when he was about 2 years old he started getting invited to the birthday parties. At first his mom declined for him because of the dreaded cake and ice cream. Then her desire for he son to participate in the toddler social scene overrode her desire for nutritional nirvana so she brought him to a party. All the kiddies were seated around the dining room table with the requisite slice of cake and bowl of ice cream, as well as little paper cup of M & Ms. After singing “Happy Birthday” most of the children started eating and still yelling and talking and carrying on with each other. Matthew just ate. With both hands as fast as he could. He literally inhaled his sweets. And then started reaching for his friends cake and M & Ms. It was the biggest lesson in the value of moderation I have ever witnessed.
I know this isn’t exactly what the OP was about totally. But it did turn into a thread about feeding or kids. I think moderation is about the best thing we can teach them. (And enjoying that occasional can of Chef Boy R Dee isn’t so bad either!)
I’ve gotta admit, I’m pretty liberal about what my kid eats. No, I don’t let her live on candy (and we almost never have soda in the house). If she wants some chocolate, though, and she’s eaten real food throughout the day, sure, why not.
I am not going to raise a kid to grow up and see foods as “good” or “bad,” and I’d better not ever hear her say “I ate a piece of pie, I was bad!” Too many women are out there running around basing their self esteem on whether or not they were “good” in the kitchen today, I’m not letting my daughter go there.
Heh. lowercase {two and a half} spits out chocolate, but eats pickles and olives whole, and wants mustard and tomato sauce on everything. Someday I’m going to take him to the local shopping mall and feed him whole pickles in public, just to see the looks on people’s faces.
Moving on: I don’t think that small pieces of a chocolate bar over the course of a day is such a great idea.
Surely a mouthful of chocolate will be plenty to get the plaque bacteria going, attacking your teeth. It takes something like 45 mins for the acidity levels in the mouth to return to normal and reduce the bacteria activity to some kind of dormancy.
So if the kid has a little piece every now and then, it’s teeth will be under attack for much longer overall than if it just ate the whole thing at once.
From the point of view of your teeth, one mouthful does as much damage as a whole bar at one go.
I would only give my kid chocolate as a dessert after a nutritious meal. Your teeth will alreay be under attack and you can use it to encourage the kid to eat its greens.
Don’t have cites for this but I got it from a government nutrition advice thing a few years ago. Seems logical at least.
/hates vegetables
//drinking a hot chocolate right now, but my office is COLD damnit
Yeah, my wife has a reputation as a medical wizard with a couple of neighbor families. Their 2 or 3 year old darlings were hyperactive and completely uncontrollable except when they visited out house. The parents were actually trying to get one of the kids on some kind of ADHD medicine, Ritalin or whatever.
Her advice to them: “Stop giving them all those soft drinks. Especially Mountain Dew, Coke and Pepsi. Make them drink juice, or milk, or (God forbid!) even just water.”
The kids are actually a pleasure to be around now.
We only give our kids water and milk to drink. They only have had juice on a couple of occasions.
They eat tons of fruit. My son can demolish an entire apple for a snack. I mentioned already how much they like prunes. They like lots of varieties of dried fruit.
Canned fruit has a bad reputation with some parents, but we have no issue with it. Most varieties of fruit can be bought juice-packed, with no heavy syrups or added sugar. And even if you get a can with light syrup, we feel it’s better to give the kids the fruit rather than juice. The cans and dried fruit make it easy to keep a good variety of fruit on hand, without worrying about spoilage.
Canned fruit also makes a great baby food, since it’s already sterilized and softened. All you have to do is run it through the blender with a little water. Beats hands down those silly little baby food jars.
Little I Am is 20 months old. We chose to keep refined sugar away from her for as long as we could reasonably do it. We wanted her to have a full appreciation for unsweetened food, and know what a healthy diet feels like. For us this has worked out; she eats an amazing variety of foods, and now that she is gradually discovering sugar she has no taste for it. She will take an experimental bite of a cookie, or other sweet food, and spit it out. Then go back to her cheese and vegetables.
This is exactly what I am hoping to do and why, for me personally, giving a two-year-old an entire candy bar would be a Bad Thing. I want my 9 month old daughter to have solid healthy-food habits and I think the best way to do that is to keep her away from the candy, soda, junk food, McDonalds, etc., as long as possible. I want her to like vegetables and to enjoy fruit and to grow up in an environment where healthy eating is just the way it is - once she’s got a solid foundation, then I’m hoping that the candy, cookies, soda, etc. will remain “just a treat” and something to do once in a while instead of a way of life.
Now, I do think it’s a fine line -I don’t want her to be the toddler mentioned a few posts up that inhaled candy and cake when first exposed to it. And I like a good Big Mac as much as the next person - but not all the time as a regular part of my diet. So I think that, even assuming the rest of her diet is very healthy, giving an entire chocolate bar to a two-year old is too much.
I guess I’m kind of opposed to this whole turning what your kid eats into a status symbol. I think it’s great when people provide a healthy diet for their kids, but I also recognize that giving a kid a candy bar is just giving a kid food. It’s perhaps not the best choice, but sugar, carbs, caffeine, fat or whatever are not poison. Giving them to a kid (as long as you aren’t creating nutritional defficiencies- which is tought in America) isn’t child abuse.
I would be hesitant to give a toddler caffeine with any amount of regularity, whether it’s in chocolate, cola, espresso, Red Bull, or whatever. It is poison. (Wonderful, life-sustaining poison, but poison.)
Apart from the practical downsides of feeding a kid an addictive central nervous system stimulant, caffeine affects small children more profoundly and for longer periods than it does adults, since it takes longer for them to metabolize it. It also interferes with the absorbtion of calcium, which can’t be good for growing children.
Of course, a bit of chocolate as an occasional treat is fine, but giving an entire chocolate bar to a two-year-old, or including chocolate or caffeinated bevvies as part of a regular diet for growing children does seem pretty crazy to me.
And yet I’ve heard of people giving kids with Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity) caffienated drinks- it supposedly has the opposite effect and helps them focus. I don’t know if this is true or not, but Ritalin and it’s ilk are stimulants.
I don’t think it has anything to do with being a status symbol (maybe it is for some parents, but certainly not for most) and I certainly don’t equate it to child abuse (unless that’s all the child eats, which isn’t what you said). But I do think a lot of candy, McDonalds, soda and junk food is a bad thing for a baby/young child. I want to make sure my daughter has healthy habits - and it’s my husband’s and my job to teach her those habits. Part of learning good habits is not eating a lot of “Bad Stuff.” Does that mean that Nothing Bad Shall Ever Pass Her Lips? Does it mean that she won’t be allowed to go Trick-or-Treating because of all that candy or that she won’t know what McDonalds is until she’s 35? No, of course not (though I am going to keep her away from McDonalds as long as I am able).
I just think that you are, perhaps, the exception to the rule (I’m referring to your earlier post where you described what you ate as a child and what you eat now). I do think that most children who grow up eating more than a little candy and soda from a very early age or who eat candy and soda as part of a regular (even otherwise healthy) diet will be in the habit of reaching for those things first later on. Maybe I’m naive, but I hope that if she’s taught to reach for the water or milk now, she won’t get the soda habit later on (like my husband has - soda is the only thing he’ll drink though at least it’s diet). And if she learns to reach for a carrot stick or piece of fruit now, she won’t immediately reach for the chocolate later on. And when she does reach for the candy, soda and junk food, she’ll only need/want a little bit.
To me it is all about moderation, that’s all. But moderation after she’s learned to eat and enjoy the healthy stuff.
While that sounds fine, I tend to have little room in my head for “healthy” cookbooks/ advice books/etc that proudly proclaim “No refined sugar” while loading up recipies with honey/molasis/fruit juice/etc. None of which, when you get down to it, are really any “healthier” than refined sugar, and all of which still drive cravings for sweets.
