The pendulum swings: too much healthy food bad for kids?

Believe it or not, there is now a research study published in The Times of London that shows that feeding kids under 5 too much “healthy” food may lead to their malnutrition.  How does this happen, you ask?  Well, basically it results from feeding kids too much high fiber food that fills them up before they’ve had the necessary amounts of fat and minerals.  Bizarre, but true.  Bottom line recommendation: keep meals balanced, paying particular attention to the amounts of dairy, meat, eggs, and fish young children are eating.

Healthy diet = better school performance

While the statement, “a healthy diet means better school performance” may seem obvious to those of us who grew up hearing, “you are what you eat”, there’s actually been rather little empirical research to prove this correlation; until now, that is.  The authors of the Children’s Lifestyle and School Performance Study just released their findings … Proving that students who ate an adequate amount of fruit, vegetables, protein, fiber and other components of a healthy diet were significantly less likely to fail a literacy test.  Importantly, dietary variety was considered a key component of having a healthy diet.  This research underscores the importance of all the efforts by parents, communities, and businesses to improve children’s eating habits. 

French Food Already Better at Age 4!

Thanks to Maggie Rosen (a friend of a friend living in the UK), I just tuned into a fascinating report on Radio 4 UK (their version of NPR) called “The Food Programme” (love the extra “m” and “e”.)  It’s on each Sunday afernoon & this past week’s segment (2/10/08) was devoted to the eating habits of young children in Britain.  They offered reports from real mothers on the playground, a high end nursery school with its own organic garden, academic experts in nutrition and child development, as well as a fascinating report from a nursery school in France where children were already eating 4 course lunches during 2-hour lunch periods (I kid you not!) 

 I was particularly struck by the statistic that French government schools are spending 6 Euro per meal per child!  That’s around $9 per meal … while in NYC we’re spending around $1.50! WoW!  The focus is not so much around health, but around introducing children to the pleasure & culture of food.  Clearly this is where the “French Women Don’t Get Fat” momentum begins!

For those of us not living in France, experts offered other advice to encourage kids to eat a range of foods.  Several of them promoted the idea of introducing as many different foods as possible in a child’s first few years.  They explained that variety in the early days was crucial to building good life long eating habits.  In fact, one expert was really pushing the 6 month to 1 year phase as the most crucial time for new food introduction.  She cited research that the more fruits, veggies and foods of different textures a child ate during weening, the wider range of foods they ate at age 7.

Lots of good food for thought from our friends across the Pond.

Report from Qatar – Kids really are what they eat

I don’t think I’ve ever read news from Qatar (that would be the Arab emirate in Southwest Asia), but I just read about an interesting study that was conducted there on how kids’ eating habits affected their academic performance.  Researchers found a “clear and consistent” relationship between nutritional intake & long term academic performance.  This relationship existed both when children ate too little (e.g., fasting or low nutritional intake) and when they ate too much (particularly a diet high in fat & sugar.)  Seems like the study confirms what we were always told as kids, “you are what you eat.”

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Local_News&month=January2008&file=Local_News2008010723614.xml