What Should My Child Be Eating for Optimal health?

Understanding healthy eating has become a huge challenge in our society. Our ancestors living thousands of years ago did not have this challenge. They ate what grew and what they could catch. Before the advent of agriculture, people ate what was naturally supplied.

While I have been studying nutrition for 46 years, I am not an expert, since I am not a scientist and have not done my own research. What I share with you comes from my personal experience with my children and grandchildren.

Rather than laying out a specific way of eating, I am going to write about what I have learned about what NOT to eat.

Below is a partial list of things not to feed your children:

Sugar
Corn syrup
Glucose syrup
Wheat syrup
Rice syrup
Potato starch
Modified food starch
White foods - white bread, white rice, rice milk, white pastas, white wheat flour
Processed grains
French fries
Sodas
Trans-fats
Vegetable oils other than coconut and olive oil
Preservatives and food colorings - or anything that you can't pronounce!

You might not think you are feeding your children many of these, but if you look at the labels, you will find many of these non-foods in packaged and refined products. In fact, most refined foods will contain one or more of these items.

For your children to be healthy, they have to be eating foods that are nutrient dense. Not only do none of the above items have any nutrient value, they rob the body of nutrients, creating the weight and health problems that are endemic to our society.

What are the nutrient-dense foods? The most nutrient dense foods are organically grown vegetables. Next are fruits, followed by beans, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds - in moderation. If you are not a vegetarian, highly nutritious forms of animal protein are organically fed grass-finished beef and lamb (grain-finishing beef and lamb changes the composition of the fat and causes many health problems), free-range organic poultry, and organic free-range eggs. Mercury-free fish is very healthy, as the oil provides the important omega-3s.

Regarding dairy products: pasteurization kills the enzymes in dairy and can cause problems such as asthma and allergies. Pasteurization also causes milk and other dairy to become difficult to digest, also contributing to illness. Unless you can get very clean, raw organic milk and cheese from grass-finished cows, it is better to avoid dairy. Due to the difficulties in absorption of pasteurized dairy, it is not a good source of calcium - despite what the dairy industry claims. My children were brought up on raw Alta-Dena dairy products and did very well on them.

The right kinds of fats are also important. Cocoanut oil is the best to cook with and olive oil is the best in salad dressings.

How do get your children to eat like this? The only way I know of, which is what I did when my three children were growing up, is to eat this way yourself. I chose not to have anything in the house that I didn't want them to eat, so everything they ate was healthy while they were in the house. I never insisted that they eat. I just put the healthy food out and they ate as much or as little as they wanted to eat.

It is also important to determine you own and your children's metabolic type, which you can do by reading William Wolcott's "The Metabolic Typing Diet." This will help you to know if your child does better on animal protein or vegetable protein. While it is important to have healthy choices in the house, it is equally important not to insist that your child eat the way you do. You might be a rapid metabolizer who needs a lot of meat, while your child might be a slow metabolizer who needs more vegetable protein.

If you want to be healthy and have healthy children, the very best thing to do is read as much as you can about healthy eating, and then decide for yourself what you want to do for your family.