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Strollerderby
Would you eat horse meat?
Per an AP report released yesterday, “Horses could soon be butchered in the U.S. for human consumption after Congress quietly lifted a 5-year-old ban on funding horse meat inspections, and activists say slaughterhouses could be up and running in as little as a month.”
Um, I’m sorry, what? Little girls love horses, but for dinner? Neigh. Way. Continue reading »
Getting creative with healthy food.
All of us, at one time or another, have professed that we are going to eat better.
No more nachos! No more sugary cereals! No more cookies.
How long did you make it? If you’re anything like me, you probably lasted two or three days, a week at the longest, and then you went back to the same old same old.
One family decided to go without junk food for 100 days. It’s been a year and they’re still going strong. Continue reading »
Your fetus can taste the carrots you eat!
To my pregnant friend who is all about sharing her favorite foods with the occupant of her womb: you are on the right track!
It’s never too early to share your favorite foods with your baby. Even in utero, the taste of strong flavors like garlic or mint is transmitted to the baby via amniotic fluid. After birth, you pass along the tastes of your own diet through your breastmilk.
A new study shows that not only do babies taste what their mothers eat, mom’s food preferences help shape baby’s food choices. Kids who were exposed to a flavor in utero ate more of it as babies, and appeared to like it more.
Bonding with your toddler may help prevent obesity.
The importance of a mother/child bond nearly goes without saying. And, as if you needed an excuse to be close to your child, new research finds insecure toddlers may have a greater risk of being obese before they even start kindergarten.
Researchers studied data from 6,650 American children born in 2001 who were evaluated at age 2 and 4. Hours were spent watching the 24-month-olds interact at home with their mothers. They wanted to find out if upset children could be comforted through contact with their mothers (duh) and if the children sought hugs and physical touch from their mothers.
Here were the results, as reported by TIME: Continue reading »
Before the recession, Corbyn Hightower was making six figures at her high powered sales job. Then her position was eliminated, leading to a spiral that left her family of five living below the poverty level. They found a cheaper, less comfortable home. They sold their car, and became the only people in their suburban town to use bicycles as transportation instead of recreation. They went from eating “the world’s most rarified smoothie out of acai and goji berries, frozen wheatgrass juice, hemp seeds, a three-dollar organic peach, and raw cacao nibs” to food stamps and dumpster diving.
In this economy, way too many of us are living without a financial cushion. Which makes Hightower’s story incredibly chilling. What stands between here and there, and what would it take to wash it away? But there is inspiration here. In Corbyn Hightower’s self-assured voice, it’s possible to see how a family could survive, even thrive, under the kinds of circumstances we try to pretend could never happen to us—and maybe feel more confident that should we find ourselves in the same bad boat, we might be able to handle it, too.
“Peering through a bag of rejected broccoli from the garbage for signs of brown or yellow patches is something I couldn’t have imagined doing just a few short years ago…
Bribery can make kids eat their greens
Good news, parents! Bribing kids to do what you want really does work.
With apologies to Alfie Kohn and the reams of research showing that incentives for good behavior can backfire, a new study claims that bribes can work.
In a large scale study of kids vs. veggies, giving a kid a sticker each time she’s offered a vegetable she doesn’t like boosts her consumption of the veggie, even when the stickers stop coming. Kids who are merely consistently offered the veggie but given no reward don’t eat more of it, so it’s not just getting used to a new taste that does the trick.
It would seem rewards really do work, as long as you use them right.
Parents don’t always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to their kids. In fact, some of us are pretty adept when it comes to lying in order to get our kids to do what we want them to do. And nowhere are our fibs more fantastic than at the dinner table. Whether we are trying to convince a picky eater to try a new food or to lay off a favorite one, breaking out the bogus is sometimes the easiest way to get our way. Continue reading »
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