Healthy Eating for Kids - Avoid Childhood ObesityWhy Do We Eat What We Eat? - The Psychology of EatingThursday 16 July 2009
There are two key areas to look at here: Why we eat what we eat; our natural tendencies to like certain foods and dislike others, and the psychological effects food and eating can have on us. Instinctive Comfort Eating For very young children, eating is obviously a very natural survival instinct. One of our very first experiences in life after popping out of the womb is to jump straight onto mum's breast for a bit of extremely nutritious colostrum. This is an instinctive, pre-programmed mechanism that has evolved within human beings, and most other mammals, to ensure a healthy start to life. Ironic perhaps that our very first experience of 'comfort eating' should prove to be so perfectly healthy. Colostrum is produced in the breasts during pregnancy and continues through the first few weeks of breast feeding. Easy to digest and low in fat, it is the perfect combination of carbohydrates, proteins and anti-bodies to give your baby the best possible start in life. This is followed by regular breast milk for several years. Breast feeding is such an important and huge topic all by itself that we won't go into it in any depth in this book, suffice to say that if you can breast feed, then you should breast feed. It's probably the healthiest way to feed your child . But that's not to say that breast feeding is easy or even possible for everyone. Breast is Best (it really is!) Supplementing your breast milk with man made supplements is a good way to replace any shortfalls but should not be viewed as 'Just as good for baby' because it simply isn't. Breast is best, no doubt about it but there are plenty of caveats and everybody's experience is different. Some people don't produce enough milk, some people have babies that are simply too hungry to satisfy and need supplemental help. That's OK - Just as long as you're doing the best your body will allow you to do then baby is going to be doing well nutritionally. It's such a shame then that after such a good nutritional start to life that it only takes a few years before fatty, salty foods start creeping onto the plates and into the minds of so many children - starting them down the sad road to obesity and it's associated health risks. We need to identify and eliminate the reasons for this before it starts for little ones and look for effective strategies that work for those kids already on the path to obesity. Navigating the Food Jungle So why do we chose the foods that we do as we move forward through life? Food choice is as complex a behaviour as any other in the human experience. Governed primarily by good old fashioned hunger, it is also affected by the sensory properties of food such as taste, scent or appearance. Our food choices are also motivated by social, emotional and cognitive factors such as personal preferences, how you feel about diet and health, habit or social context, marriage status, whether or not you can cook and all sorts of individual experiences, perceptions and attitudes towards food (animal welfare, GM or organic, etc). We are also quite often conditioned by cultural or religious factors and constrained and dictated to by budgets and price, availability of certain food types and our general education. With so many elements at play it's easy to see why we can be such a fussy bunch and why there can never really be a perfect 'one size fits all' diet. We have to navigate all of this as adults and apply a sensible set of rules to our own diets that will suit our own situations. Our kids need to be prepared to navigate this food jungle themselves and the good food choices we help them to make today will mean good food choices they will make for themselves for the rest of their lives.
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