Sometimes Two are Better Than One! (Foods that are more powerful together!)

Sometimes when you put two people together they make each other better people than they are on their own. I believe when you discover someone who makes you a better person when you’re with him or her – that’s when you know you’ve found a friend, a partner, a spouse, a kindred spirit.

Did you know that there are certain foods that are make each other better too? In honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d share with you some foods that are more powerful when paired together.

In The Happiness Diet, Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey wrote about “food synergy.” Here are a few of my favorites –

Eggs & Cheese

I love my scrambled cheese eggs. They are a comfort, recovery, and energy-producing miracle. Here’s why – the vitamin D in eggs makes the calcium in dairy more available for your body, not just for your bones but for your heart. Ever wonder why milk is fortified with Vitamin D? Now you know.

Rosemary & Steak

Ah, one of my favorite tastes of summer. Rosemary is rich in antioxidants that can help neutralize carcinogenic compounds that form when steak reaches temperatures of 325 and higher. So before you toss that steak on the grill, marinate it or rub it in rosemary. (Rosemary is a key ingredient in my favorite homemade steak rub which I’ll share in an upcoming post!)

Tomatoes & Olive Oil

Centuries of eaters, the world over can’t be wrong. Tomatoes are loaded with cancer fighting compounds like lycopene, but those compounds are fat-soluble which means they’re more available to your body when you eat them with fats like olive oil (or mozzarella cheese). This is the reason you should not be putting fat-free dressing on any vegetable!

What's a Nature Box and Is It Worth My Time/Money/Promotion on Facebook

I’m experimenting with boxes. I’ve tried two – Conscious Box and Nature Box. These boxes are delivered to your door (free shipping) every month for a mere $19.95. I’m willing to gamble twenty bucks in the name of research and a blog post or two, so I signed up for both.

The Nature Box full of 5 bags of relatively healthy snacks arrived promptly. I wasn’t aware that you could choose which snacks you want in your box, so my first selection was randomly chosen by the Powers That Be at Nature Box.

Our box contained Cranberry Almond Bites, French Vanilla Almond Granola, Whole Wheat Blueberry Figgy Bars, Baked Peppery Potato Fries, and Flax Fortune Coins. The sales pitch claimed that these would be “full-size” bags of snacks. And they were. If you’re a toddler. My kids are teens, so each bag had about 2 servings (except the Flax Fortune Coins which may last us a month).

If you do the math, that’s $4 a bag. I suppose this is about the average price for gouchi all-natural snacks, which these definitely are. I’m sure you can find a knock-off of every one of them at Wegmans. These snacks contain no high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors, artificial colors, or trans fats. That’s all good. A few of them do have their fair share of sugar, but how else will you get kids to eat them? Sugar is the second ingredient listed on the Flax Fortune Coins but I’m the only one brave enough to eat them. This I attribute to their unfortunate name, but more about that later.

How To Get the Most out of your Fresh Food

I’ve canceled nearly every magazine I subscribed to in the name of sanity. It gets out of control, and really, who has time for that many magazines? It’s not as if my life is overflowing with downtime. Besides, they were piling up in the corner of my kitchen counter and nagging at my conscience. There is no way I could ever read them all, so slowly but surely I’ve stopped re-subscribing. I have to note, though, this does not stop the magazines from continuing to arrive each month with ever more alarming bright paper covers threatening, “THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE!” I wish there was someone I could call and say, “Relax, I’m okay with that.”

I still subscribe to a couple that I can’t resist. One of those magazines is Mother Earth News. Mother has

been around since 1970 and has always been ahead of the curve in terms of protecting the environment, sustainable living, and organic food. It’s filled with scientific research, calls to action, and DIY projects for people living in the suburbs of New Jersey to people living off the grid on a hillside in northern Montana. I get a kick out of reading the classifieds in the back too. They appeal to my hippie nature – advertisements for modern day communes, composting toilets, dome homes, and mealworms by the pound. Entertainment value aside, the magazine is chock full of information and directions I trust whether it’s chicken keeping, pressure canning, building your own solar hot water heater, fermenting food, or this month’s feature – how to get more flavor and nutritional value out of your fresh food.

I saw the title and opened to the article, curious to know how you can improve fresh food you’ve already picked. I took it for granted that Mother assumed I was dealing with organic fresh food. The article boasted ten tips. I encourage you to look it up for yourself, but just in case you aren’t a subscriber (what?), I’ll summarize: 

Food For Thought (and Health)

What to Eat? This is not only a question every person asks themselves every day, it’s also the title of a wonderful book I’ve been reading. It was a gift from my oldest son. He of the inquisitive mind must have been intrigued by the questions that pepper the cover. Questions like,

“Is organic always more nutritious? How fair is fair trade coffee? Farmed fish or wild fish? White, whole wheat, or multigrain? Are there pesticides on that apple? Are vitamin supplements safe?”

Or maybe he was just responding to his father’s nudge, “Your mom would really like that book,” when they were out Christmas shopping on a crowded afternoon and he was in a hurry to get home to his friends.

Either way, love the book. It asks all the questions I ask and some I never thought to ask. Marion Nestle is a nutrition professor, and author of two other books (soon to grace my shelves or my kindle) – Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism.

In her book, What to Eat, Marion addresses the things that plagued the concerned parent when she or he enters a grocery store. How do you sort through all the confusing messages and buy what’s best for your family and your health? The book literally takes a tour of the grocery store expounding on every aisle with helpful, clear information.

I want to share some excellent ideas I found in the introduction. All of us struggle with the immense amount of information and the almost daily new studies that tell us what we should and shouldn’t eat to avoid health issues like cancer and heart disease, have more energy, live longer, and maintain a healthy weight. Although I’m certain there are a few factors out of our control (heredity and all the stuff we already ate that we shouldn’t have before we knew better), Marion’s simple directions make sense -

Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits & vegetables, and go easy on the junk food.

This is a mantra we can all embrace. If we keep it in mind as we make our food and activity choices each day we can feel we’ve done all we should. Sure, the details like organic, fair-trade, GMO, locally grown, sustainably-harvested will play in to your choices, but bottom line start by eating right before you stress the rest.

Another point Marion makes in the introduction is that it’s very easy to be overcome by the marketing of food. Companies, grocery stores, and even our own government encourage us to eat things that are not good for us. As Marion points out,

“The produce industry does not advertise fruits and vegetables much because its profit margins are low and its constituents are fragmented and competitive (broccoli growers versus carrot farmers, etc.). …the government does not subsidize fruit and vegetable production the way it supports corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and sugar beets….the lack of profit means that less effort goes into making sure these foods are as fresh, tasty, well prepared, and easy to use as they might be.”

I want to share one last powerful point Marion makes. It’s been darting around my mind ever since I read it. She asks the reader to consider this question:

“What industry or professional organization might benefit if you ate more healthfully?”

Like Marion, I struggle to come up with even one. I want to say the government, because then it wouldn’t have to spend nearly as much on medicare and Medicaid. But that’s a stretch, huh? In my fantasy world I would also say the government because it wants what’s best for the people. But I still reside in the real world.

Here are the industries she lists that benefit from all the confusion and bad decisions we make about nutrition and health: food, restaurant, fast-food, diet, health club, drug, and health care industries.

Food for thought. Be aware of the motivation behind the claims. And remember: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits & veggies, and go easy on the junk food. Words to live by. Literally.

What's For Dinner?

What’s for dinner tonight? Are you sick of that question? I certainly am. I believe it might be the most challenging question for any parent. Coming up with healthy dinners seven days a week, 52 weeks a year can make a person nuts. Or maybe it just makes me nuts.

My repertoire is fairly extensive. Even so, I’ve grown tired of it. So this year I’ve challenged myself to expand it. Instead of making one of my tried and true meals, or slapping together something from what’s lurking in my pantry and then being pleasantly surprised (or disappointed) in the result, this year I’m going to try at least 100 new recipes.

100 seems daunting until you break it down to 2 new recipes a week. I’m just finishing my fourth week of the new year and have already nailed down 10 recipes, so I’m ahead of the game. Would you like to join me in the challenge? How about just 50 new recipes?

My shelves groan with the weight of cookbooks I just had to have (or someone just had to give me!). My desk is scattered with recipes torn from magazines, and the cubby in my kitchen is jammed with index cards, papers, and pamphlets full of recipes. I have the best intentions, but the untold potential was beginning to weigh on me. So I collected as many as I could in a 3-ring binder and piled the dog-eared books on the corner of my counter. I’m ready. I can do this.

So far, we’ve all been enjoying the new venture. The Chia Pancakes made the blog a few weeks ago, and were requested a second time (heavens no!) this past weekend. The Balsamic-Roasted Sweet Potatoes resulted in zero leftovers. The grapefruit cake was a monster hit. But my favorite is the Pear-Celery salad. I’ve made a batch each week since I discovered it. I will confess to altering the original recipe quite a bit, but it’s still delicious and super healthy, so it’ll do.

Eating healthy doesn’t have to be boring. My kids are in on my challenge. My oldest son just started a course on Food Management at the high school, which I’m certain will provide endless fodder for our dinner table (and this blog!). I’m thrilled at the idea of someone else teaching him his way around a kitchen. Maybe he’ll realize I’m not the crazy loon he imagines me to be. As he’s gotten older, he’s begun trying more of my creations. I can't wait to try his!

I’m planning on adding a current recipe challenge count on the blog front page to keep myself accountable, but I’d love for you to join me. If you need some recipe ideas, I’ll pass one along right now –

Winter Celery-Pear Salad

2 cups chopped celery

1 cup chopped pear

¼ cup crumbled blue cheese

¼ cup walnut pieces

1 Tablespoon dressing

Cara’s “house” dressing:

½ cup roasted garlic grapeseed oil (or good canola or grapeseed oil, plus 1 t finely minced garlic)

½ cup good vinegar (this week it’s half balsamic fig vinegar and half white wine balsamic vinegar)

¼ t salt

½ t pepper

Happy cooking!

Open Season for Sugar

Now we all know you shouldn’t take candy from strangers. But what about parents-of-kids-you-know who offer you candy? And what if you're old enough to know your mother will most likely be really annoyed that you’re eating candy at 9:30 at night? (especially when that same mother is about to arrive and has already promised to stop for ice cream on the way home to celebrate a recent academic achievement!) Maybe this sounds like something that only happens in fairy tales or Law & Order re-runs, but this actually happened to one of my children just a week ago! Sure, maybe I’m overreacting, but here’s how it went down:

I pull up only a few minutes late to pick up said child from the evening’s sporting practice. As I look in the door, I see my child crouched in front of a candy machine, reaching in to retrieve something. I think, “Gross, he’s grabbing for leftover candy in that filthy machine!” I spot said child’s friend leaving the practice with his father and wave at them, climbing out to go fetch my disgusting child who is now shoving nerds in his mouth as fast as possible and trying to look innocent.

Of course, I confront this child and he tells me that no, he wasn’t gathering leftover candy, but had purchased the candy himself. With what? I ask, knowing full-well that this child is flat broke. And he tells me that his friend’s dad who has just left, handed him a dollar and told him to go buy some candy. An avalanche of emotions rushed through me at this point. Anger, because who is this guy to think he can order my kid to eat candy? Embarrassment, because I know the motivation for this is that my child has claimed (more or less truthfully) that his mother never buys him candy. Frustration, because I’m sick of being the odd man out in nearly all parenting situations. Sadness, because apparently my devoted spawn feels deprived. And then back to Anger, because I had promised this little Einstein that we would stop for ice cream at Handels (where they make all the ice cream fresh every day from real cream!) on the way home that night.

This episode traveled with me for a few days. It’s silly. As much as I wanted to hunt this man down and explain to him why my child’s diet doesn’t consist of daily sugar loads, I resisted. I’m sure he thought he was earning brownie points with my kid (although for the life of me, I don’t understand why parents want to impress kids, their own or anyone else’s). And I’m sure he never gives the dangers of sugar a second thought. But I do.

Sugar is not good for any of us. As recent research is bringing to light, sugar, and not fat, may be the real cause of our collective health issues related to obesity. According to Dr. Robert Lustig, a UCSF professor of pediatrics and very eloquent and passionate anti-sugar advocate, Americans are consuming about 141 pounds of sugar per person each year.

He also points out that we weigh 25 pounds more than we did 25 years ago. His lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” can be found on You Tube. It’s fascinating and very convincing. He boldly states that sugar is a poison that is slowly killing us all. And after watching his lecture, I’m convinced that he’s on to something. We are eating more sugar now than we ever have. A 12 ounce soda (and Lustig points out that the “normal” soda from a machine these days is actually 20 ounces) has 8 teaspoons of sugar in it. How many sodas does the average person drink in a day? Sodas contain all that sugar to mask the huge amounts of salt in each can. I only pick on soda because it’s sited as the number one source of sugar in the American diet on several websites.

The USDA website which promotes the latest version of the food pyramid, labels sugar “empty calories” and has a chart explaining how many “empty calories” are acceptable in a typical diet.

Children ages 2-3 years: 135 calories

Children ages 4-8 years: 120 calories

Girls ages 9-13:  120 calories

Boys ages 9-13:  160 calories

Girls ages 14-18: 160 calories

Boys ages 14-18: 265 calories

Females 19-30: 260  calories

Males 19-30: 330 calories

Females 31-50: 160 calories

Males 31-50:  265 calories

Females 51+:  120 calories

Males 51+:  260 calories

The average soda (and I’m going to assume it’s only a 12 oz can, silly me) has 145-160 calories. All of which, would be empty. So there’s your day’s worth of empty calories if you’re the average kid. Hope you don’t plan to eat any other junk food or processed food today, cause you’ve already reached your limit. And if you’re hankering for a candy bar, you better divide it up between several days or you’ll blow 2-3 days worth of your empty calorie limit in one day.

Bottom line: We’re all consuming way too much sugar. We drink soda like water. We eat candy mindlessly. Sugar is one of the primary ingredients in pretty much every processed food you buy. Don’t believe me, head for the grocery store and check for any of the following names for sugar on the ingredients list of your favorite cracker, prepared meal, frozen burrito, seasoning, dressing, or what-have-you. Just because it doesn’t say sugar, doesn’t mean it isn’t sugar:

• anhydrous dextrose

• brown sugar

• confectioner's powdered sugar

• corn syrup

• corn syrup solids

• dextrose

• fructose

• high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)

• honey

• invert sugar

• lactose

• malt syrup

• maltose

• maple syrup

• molasses

• nectars (e.g., peach nectar, pear nectar)

• pancake syrup

• raw sugar

• sucrose

• white granulated sugar

Dr. Lustig’s belief (shared by many other doctors and researchers) is that sugar is the main culprit in causing not only obesity and dental disease, but diabetes heart disease, and host of other ailments, effectively poisoning us. Sugar has been linked to immune disorder issues, chromium deficiency, cancer, arthritis, and even learning disabilities. While sugar gives you a temporary “high”, very quickly your body crashes from that surge of false energy and you are left grumpy and tired. So what do you do? You crave more sugar.

Being a confirmed sugaraholic myself, I would never tell you to cut out sugar completely because you can’t. We get plenty of natural sugar from fruits, vegetables and grains. But the refined sugar we could do without. I might know this, but offer me a key lime cheesecake and I’ll take back everything I said. Sugar is a powerful thing.

Still, cutting out as much as possible might just be the best thing you could do for your health and your child’s. here’s just a few ideas for reducing the amount of sugar in your diet.

1. Read labels. If sugar (in any form, see list above) is one of the first four ingredients, but the package down.

2. As much as possible, cook from scratch. Make your own smoothies with fresh fruit. Most prepared foods have extra sugar and salt to mask the taste of the all the extra preservatives and additives.

3. Consider using Stevia, a natural sweetener derived from a plant, 300x sweeter than sugar with no calories.

4. Eat lots of fresh fruit and limit dried fruit which has considerably more sugar by proportion.

5. Cut out soda completely. You don’t need it and it is only damaging your health. Drink water or tea instead. It’s just a matter of changing habits.

6. Control the sugar added to what you eat. Buy your tea unsweetened. Buy plain yogurt and sweeten with fruit. Make plain instant oatmeal and sweeten it with dried fruit (those tiny, seriously expensive packets are more sugar than oatmeal!)

7. If you must drink fruit juice, buy only 100% juice with no added sugar.

8. Be very careful of “fat free” foods, many times the manufacturer compensates for the lower fat with higher sugar (and salt)

9. Start dialing back your sugar gradually. If you normally add two packets of sugar to your coffee, go for 1 ½, same with your kids oatmeal, cereal, etc.

10. Curb cravings with fruit. When the urge for sugar seems to overwhelm you, reach for fruit. It’s still sugar, but with some extra fiber and a few less calories. I keep dried cherries on hand for these moments. And distract your kids cravings by offering them fruit after a meal or as a snack.

Giving up sugar is not something I can claim I’ve done. I have been able to reduce my refined sugar consumption and it becomes clear very quickly that it improves my mood, energy level, and reduces the amount of sleep I need. But I’ll be the first to wrestle that chocolate out of your hand if you tell me I have to give up all my sugar forever. Not happening. This I do know: If I can reduce the amount of refined sugar in my children’s diet, I’ll be helping them to not only be healthier and avoid cavities, I’ll be helping them to think more clearly and handle their emotions more consistently. That pay off makes the battle worth fighting.

I still don’t know why that dad ordered my child to eat candy last week. But the next time I see his kid, I might just tempt him with some fresh, homemade, organic applesauce with cinnamon! So there!

Don't Waste the Mustard (or anything else)

I love mustard. Love it. Especially the sweet-hot kind. My youngest child is also a mustard lover and feasts on the plain yellow kind with a fistful of pretzels most days after school. Being a male of the species, when the mustard becomes difficult to get out of the jars he simply puts it back in the fridge and opens a new one. Thanks to this habit, at any given time there could be 2-3 almost empty open mustard containers in our fridge.


Yes, of course I rant about this. But it falls on def, hungry ears. A better mother would stop buying mustard. But then that would just be punishing myself, right? So we carried on, until I read this GREAT idea for almost empty mustard containers, especially the squeezeable kind. I found this brilliant idea in a free copy of a home cooking magazine, which has long since landed in the recycling, so I can’t give credit where credit is due. It was one of those abbreviated versions of a bigger magazine sent with stickers and a subscription offer you can’t resist. Since I’ve got stacks of magazines on my desk to be read, I could resist. But before recycling it, I did skim through it while waiting for the mustard-eating child to locate his cleats.

Here’s the great idea: when your mustard jar is almost empty, add oil and vinegar and whatever other things you like in your salad dressing and shake. Brilliant! I added garlic grapeseed oil, elderflower-lime-apple vinegar, salt, and pepper. Yum! Simple, easy, gourmet dressing and no more wasted mustard. And when I’m finished with the dressing, the jar is easy to rinse and recycle.

I’m thinking this idea might also work on BBQ sauce bottles too. You could make a quick marinade by adding oil and vinegar and worchestershire sauce or soy sauce and water, plus whatever spices float your boat.

So there you go, my healthy-eating-good-for-the-planet-don’t-waste-anything tip for the day!

One of the biggest excuses I hear time and again for not eating organically is - "I can't afford it." The first step in affording to eat organically (or affording to eat at all) is to not waste the food you do buy. I've blogged about this in the past, but now I'm focusing on this and other ideas for an upcoming workshop I’ll be giving on Eating Organically and Affording It. I’m still a bit stuck searching for a catchier title for the series of workshops I’ve been developing on all the aspects of kid-friendly organic life. I’ve started with Healthy, Happy, Homemade Life, but that’ a mouthful. If you’ve got a better idea – I’d desperately love to hear it.

And if you’re local, mark your calendar for Wednesday October 26 at 7pm. I’ll be presenting at the Paul Smith Library in Shrewsbury and I’d love to see you there. It’s free, of course. Bring your own ideas for eating organically and saving money, or send them to me and I’ll share them. We’re all in this together and we need all the help we can get.

Fast Food Fight

I know this post is most likely point-less. But I’m going to say it anyway. Seeing as it is the season of fast food. And maybe I’m a hypocrite because I’ll confess right up front that during the two road trips we have planned for this summer, we will undoubtedly wind up eating at a fast food joint. And yet, I must carry on with this rant.


Please, please, please don’t eat fast food. I understand that when you have children in the car who are pulling your fingernails out one-by-one with their incessant whining while they wither away to nothing with bloated bellies and sunken eyes in the back seat, you have no choice but to pull in to the fastest food possible. You have no other option. But let’s be honest here, folks. Sometimes we choose fast food because it’s easy. It makes the kids happy. And heck, it tastes good.

But you know what else it does? It makes our country fat and unhealthy. It makes our kids develop tastes for foods that are over-salted, drenched in fat, and coated with sugar. It teaches them that eating fast food is an acceptable choice for their meal, rather than a last-ditch, there’s no-where-else-to-eat, it-might-make-us-sick, kind of option. My three kids will never eat at McDonalds without at least feeling bad about it. I’ve driven the knowledge in to them that when they eat fast-food they are eating food that is not so much food as animal by-products, lard-coated pesticide-enriched, GMO potatoes, and chemically created drug-filled sugar water.

It’s every mother’s duty to give their kids some baggage. And this is one of the carry-ons I’m loading on mine. I think it’s a good one. To be sure, you can occasionally find something nutritionally redeeming at a fast food restaurant. But my guess is your kids aren’t choosing the carrot sticks or fruit cup. And if they go for that baked potato, it’s sure to be smothered in artificially-colored cheese food products. A grilled chicken seems harmless until you ask about the chicken’s heritage and discover it was raised amongst millions of other chickens crammed in a dark, closed-in house with horrible ventilation and hopped up on antibiotics to keep it from dying from the bacterial infections that are common in such set-ups. Don’t be fooled by those lovely pictures of chickens sitting on a fence. Those chickens can’t even walk, let alone hop up on a fence because they’ve been bred to have grotesquely large breasts that prevent them from even moving. Egg to deep fryer in about 12 weeks time. If they live any longer, they’ll die from congestive heart failure because their bodies can’t support their breasts (no lie – I know someone personally who didn’t get his chickens butchered in time and this is how they died!).

If my ranting and raving isn’t enough to make you steer past those golden arches and smiling freckled-faces, consider these facts:

“With 250,000 quick-serve restaurants to choose from, Americans fork over more money on burgers, burritos, and bacon-topped sandwiches each year than what we spend on higher education, new cars, and computers combined.” (Hyman, Ultrametabolism, 60)

“The average weight of a ten-year-old boy in 1963 was 74 pounds; by 2002 the average weight was nearly 85 pounds. The average weight of a ten-year-old girl in 1963 was 77 pounds; by 2002 the average weight of a ten-year-old girl was 88 pounds.” (National Center for Health Statistics, October 2004.).

“One Big Mac is equivalent – in terms of grain produced and consumed – to five loaves of bread. But instead of feeding the hungry with grain, a lot of it is going to the waistline of people in wealthy countries – often to their detriment.” (Bittman, Food Matters 2009)

Heart disease is not only the number one killer of adults; frighteningly, it’s also the second leading cause of death for children under 15. http://champsforlife.org/whatishcm.html

A person would need to walk 9 miles (14.5km) to burn off the 923 calories found in Burger King’s Double Whopper with cheese.

So what’s an overloaded, stressed-out mom to do? Here are a few suggestions to get you through:

- If you’re in town, go home to eat. A peanut butter sandwich or a frozen pizza are healthier choices. Besides, they’re just as quick and cost less.

- If you’re traveling – pack food. Stuff a cooler with fruit that travels well like cherries, apples, bananas, and blueberries. Toss in several bags of baby carrots. Wheat crackers, raisins, craisins, apricots, nuts, and cheese sticks are easy too.

- When all else fails, remind yourself and your kids that HUNGER IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. There are very few people starving to death in the US. Your kids can go several hours (at least) between meals. Hunger will pass and many times it’s actually habit and/or boredom that drives us to demand food.

- If you must stop, look for a place that serves fresh food quickly, instead of processed food. Chipotle Grill is one of my favorite stops and it’s quicker than the average fast food. Stopping in a Mom&Pop type place can also be quick, if you tell the server you’re in a hurry and ask what can be prepared quickly.

- Find a restaurant with a good salad bar. Don’t forget that many of the newer supermarkets have salad bars. You can even get a pound of shrimp steamed quickly and enjoy a decadent treat instead of a mashed up hamburger that will make you feel ill hours later.

- If you know you’re going to have to stop and you can’t bring yourself to pack food. Remember you have other options beyond fast food. The internet gives you the power to find restaurants on your route that serve healthy fare. And in a pinch, an iphone or GPS usually can give you information on restaurants nearby.

Here’s my bottom line. Fast food won’t kill you, if you eat it once in awhile. (It will kill you if you eat it daily – see the movie Supersized if you don’t believe me!) What’s most important is teaching our children that this is not a healthy way to eat. When we swing through the drive-thru on a regular basis, we are training our kids for a lifetime of unhealthy eating. Every mom I know loves her kids too much to want that for them. I know fast food is easy. I know our children love it (they love candy and potato chips too). But this is one of those things we must do for our children (like driving the speed limit and being nice to rude people). This is the point when we need to stop saying it’s OK even if everyone else is doing it.
Besides the health issues raised by consuming fast food, I’d like to raise another point. When we eat “fast” we are not respecting the place food has in our life. It is our sustenance. When we choke down something in a wrapper while our children duck in and out of the playland between bites of ground up chicken-parts coated in bread and fat, we aren’t paying attention to the food we eat. When we sit down and face one another and eat good food together, it is a form of communion. We need to teach our children to taste their food, to appreciate where it came from, and who prepared it. We need to teach them the power they have in choosing what to put in their bodies and about the power food has to make our bodies healthy or unhealthy. Whatever decisions they make will be apparent at some point in their lives on the bathroom scale or the doctor’s table. Teach them to make healthy, empowering choices for their bodies and their lives.

We only get one shot at raising our children. This is our one and only chance to teach our children about eating healthy and being healthy for a lifetime. It’s more than a meal and much more than fast food.