Podcast Episode #24: Are You Making Your Kids Fat?

Podcast episode number 24 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm a certified personal trainer, nutritionist and exercise physiologist. Each week I'll be bringing you cutting edge information on nutrition, fitness and sports performance, including interviews with leading experts in health, diet and exercise fields. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or.

You just want to lose a few.

Pounds, you're guaranteed to find content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com that breaks the mold of run of the mill wellness advice and helps you reach your goals as quickly as possible. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and in today's podcast episode number 24, we're going to be covering a problem that is pretty serious because basically what's happening right now in our country is that kids are dying of diseases that adults used to primarily be afflicted with. Primarily cardiovascular issues related to nutrition and physical activity that kids shouldn't be having to deal with, but they are. And part of it is because of the choices and the examples that we as adults are giving them. And, and so whether or not you have children, this issue is important for you because you are the person who influences the decisions that children make. And also you're going to be affected by the cost that's going to be afflicted upon Americans based off of the rising cost of health care, the rising amount of money that we spend on health care, taking care of kids who are suffering from childhood obesity and many of the metabolic syndromes associated with that. And so today's interview is going to be with Monica Reinagel, who is a well respected nutritionist and host of the Nutrition Divas Quick and Dirty Tips, a fantastic weekly podcast that I listen to, full of practical tips. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. We're also going to be going over a listener Q and A on calcium and ways that you can get calcium if you're allergic to dairy or if you simply want to limit the amount of milk in your diet, I'm going to be once again giving out a special coupon code discount for the gym stick, my favorite portable exercise tool. And then finally, for you triathletes out there who are getting ready to tackle this year's race season, if you signed up for Ironman Coeur d' Alene or Ironman Canada, you are going to want to keep listening. I'm going to be revealing some pretty cool things I have available for you in just a few minutes. So let's go ahead and start right into the content this week from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Listener Q and A. Now if you enjoy the Listener Q and A, I would highly suggest that you jet over to the website to trainingpeaks.com because I also run a Q and A over on that website primarily related to sports performance and wellness. So trainingpeaks.com it's a fantastic piece of online training software. It's the software that I use to coach all the athletes and the clients that I work with online from all over the world. And in that blog I also have a Q and A which includes some topics that I don't go over on this show. But in this week's Listener Q and A, I'm actually going to be responding to a question that one of my clients asked me this week while we were working out. I do face to face kind of like a concierge style personal training service where I help people out with their nutrition, their personal training, their stress management, their wellness just as much as possible on a month to month basis here in Spokane, Washington. So I get a lot of questions from these clients. And one of my clients is very sensitive to dairy products, almost like a dairy allergy, a lactose intolerance. And she is concerned about bone density. She's concerned about calcium intake. Well, of course, the first thing that I tell people is that when you're concerned about calcium intake and you're concerned about bone density, you need to be sure to limit the amount of processed sugars in your diet because sugars can cause an acidic environment within the body. And one of the most alkaline or non acidic substances in your body is calcium. And so if you're on a high sugar diet, body will often leach calcium from the bones to bring your ph back to a normal level. In my opinion, the problem with osteoporosis in our country is not necessarily inadequate calcium intake. I think people are actually getting far too much milk and dairy products. And that's an entirely different issue with hormones. But the underlying issue that I think is far more serious than inadequate dairy intake is sugar intake and way too much processed sugar. And yes, anything with flour in it is considered a processed sugar substance. So even if you're cutting candy and sweets and soft drinks out of your diet, are you cutting pasta out of your diet? Are you limiting your intake of rolls? How about those healthy pitas, healthy wheat wraps that you're consuming? Those type of things can actually have an effect on your bone density and your calcium intake. But what this person was asking me was, what are some ways I can get calcium in my diet without actually consuming milk? And so what I want to give you today is a list of alternative calcium sources to milk. So if we look at the amount of calcium in about a cup of milk, you're looking at getting about around 250 to 300 milligrams of calcium. And one of the excellent calcium alternatives that you can get would be collards, mustard greens, kale, anything of those. Along those lines, about a cup of that's going to give you around 350 milligrams of calcium. Like a cooked dark leafy green like that. One of my favorite things to do is I'll go get some kale from the grocery store and I'll saute it in just a little bit of olive oil. I'll add a bit of minced garlic or some of that pre crushed garlic that you can get in the jar at the grocery store. You can add just a little bit of teriyaki sauce to that to sweeten it up just a bit. And that's literally all I'll do is garlic, a bit of teriyaki sauce, a bit of olive oil, and some kale or some mustard greens or some collards. And if you want, you can also put a few pine nuts or something crunchy in there to add just a little bit more substance, turn it into a bit more of a meal. But all you do is you literally saute that in a pan for about five to 10 minutes and it can make for a great salad. One of the things that you want to do is make sure that you cook it long enough so that the stem that runs up the center of some of those thicker mixed greens isn't chewy. And sometimes it can help to actually cover that with a lid as you saute it to help introduce a little bit more softness into the green. But cooked collards, greens, kales, kale, mustard greens, anything like that is going to be a great source of calcium that oftentimes gives you more calcium than milk. Spinach. Not quite as much as some of those that I just mentioned, but spinach is also very high in calcium. If you're currently having salads, just mix a little bit of spinach in with your lettuce and make that a daily practice. Soybeans. I'm not a huge fan of unfermented soy. Soybeans are high in calcium. So if you can do something like miso or natto to fermented sources of soy, which basically are a little bit healthier. When you ferment soy, you get lower levels of a substance called phytic acid, which can interfere with some of the nutrient absorption that occurs when you consume a food. Then that would be fantastic. One of the staples in my diet during the winter is miso soup. I just get some miso paste and you add about a teaspoon of that into some water and then you simply drop a few other things in there, usually vegetables, carrots, mushrooms, onions, garlic. And you can also put some meat in there if you want a little bit of substance. For instance, some cooked chicken breast. But miso soup is a fantastic way to get a little bit of calcium from a soybean based source. A couple of the other things that are going to give you calcium, white beans, those are high in calcium. About a cup of white beans that you can use over a salad or in some rice. Salmon, great source of calcium if you do salmon. Try and avoid the farmed fish if you can. But salmon, in addition to being a great source of omega 3 fatty acids, is also going to be a good source of calcium. And then finally, another good source of calcium that I'll use a lot in the winter is cabbage. You can literally steam or cook cabbage in the same way that you cook some of those other greens that I talked about. A lot of times I'll simply steam cabbage and have that with a little bit of sea salt and black pepper as a side dish. And that again is a great source of calcium. Now if you do go with dairy sources, I would suggest that you choose non fat or fat free as much as possible. One of the things that I do have every day is just a little bit of non fat or fat free yogurt. And I'll add my own substances like blueberries, almonds, flaxseed, things like that. If you're sensitive to lactose, dairy a lot of times has many of the enzymes that help to break down the lactose sugars. And so your body might not have as sensitive a response to that as to something like milk. So anyways, understand that if you're limited on dairy and you're trying to get calcium in your diet, the two most important things you can do if you were to prioritize would be to remove processed sugars as much as possible from your diet and introduce dark leafy greens into your diet. So that's this week's listener Q and A. Okay, I know that some of you may have not listened into last week's podcast, so Once again, I'm going to give away that coupon discount code right here. To get a $10 discount on the gym stick, use the coupon code HOLIDAY. That's all caps H O L I D A Y. Simply click on the link in this week's show notes to order your gym stick. This is a fantastic way to stay free fit over the holiday season. If you're going to family's house, if you're traveling, all you got to do is simply throw this in the back seat of the car, take it with you, and you've got basically a gym in one small portable stick. I love this thing. I've got some videos on the website in the video section@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can see me doing some workouts with the gym stick. The stick itself actually also comes with a video and a workout poster, so make sure to get your hands on the gym stick. That's a $10 discount code. These things run for about $79, and so you're saving pretty significantly with that code. And again, the code is holiday. All caps H O L I D A Y. Enjoy your gym stick. Great way to stay fit over the holiday season. Okay, before we move on to this week's interview, I want to give a brief message to you Ironman triathletes out there. Now, I do offer personalized Ironman coaching, but just in case you don't actually want to get a personal coach to have unlimited email access and have your workouts kind of catered around the way that your life is going leading up to Ironman, there are available two different training plans that I've written to begin in January. So if you plan on starting your Ironman training in January, I've created a training plan that will take you either a There's one training plan that's going to take you to Ironman Coeur d' Alene, and then I've written another training plan that will take you to Ironman Canada. Now, these training plans are available by clicking on the link so in the show notes and they're prescribed using the TrainingPeaks online training software, which means all you do is you get a free TrainingPeaks account automatically with the program and then you can go in and have complete access to a detailed daily workout calendar that tells you exactly what you're supposed to do every day. Both programs include special perks that I go over in the description document that comes with the program, but I give you all your weightlifting instructions, your you're engaging in frequent testing to make sure that your workouts are progressing according to changing levels of fitness. There are power recommendations if you have a power meter on your bike. There are heart rate recommendations if you want to use a heart rate monitor while you train. Now these training programs are Both available for 1 99. Now to have your complete program written out for you with detailed daily online instructions for $199 is a steal. And these are available by simply clicking on the link in the show Notes. Now I also have a great way for you to save another $20 on that training plan.

All you have to do is type.

The following discount code in when you get those Code is all capital letters BGF as in Ben Greenfield Fitness. Type in BGF when you're brought to the purchase page for those plans and that will automatically knock another $20 off of a complete training plan for Ironman Coeur d' Alene or Ironman Canada. Both these training plans again are set to begin in January. So email me BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you have any questions. And let's go ahead and move on to this week's interview with Monica. You'll notice that the audio levels in this interview are, in my opinion, not perfect. However, the things that we talk about are very relevant and very important. So I encourage you to listen in and any audio problems I apologize for in advance. You'll still get a lot out of this interview.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield, and today I'm going to talk about a pressing issue that's going to be important to anyone out there who has children or who might be thinking about having children, or who just has exposure to children or the ability to influence the nutritional habits of kids. And I've got somebody on the show today who's very experienced in the realm of nutrition. Monica Rheinangle is on the show. And if you're familiar with nutrition podcasting, you may know that Monica actually has a podcast over on the Quick and Dirty Tips Network called the Nutrition Diva. And Monica is a board certified, licensed nutritionist. She's professional, a professionally trained chef. She's actually the blogger in chief and the Nutrition Guru for nutritiondata.com which we've mentioned before on this show as a very informational place to go for any of the data that you need on whatever it is that you may be eating. And she's also a member of the American Dietetic association and the International association of Culinary Professionals. Monica, thanks for coming on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

Now what I'd like to talk about a little bit today is childhood obesity. And the reason that I was interested in having you on the show to talk about this, Monica, is because over on your Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, you always have lots of practical tips. And I think that one of the issues facing us with the child obesity problem is the fact that many times parents just may not know how to practically approach the issue of healthy nutrition with their kids. And it's particularly troubling because the extra pounds on kids can lead to health problems that used to be things that we saw in adults, like diabetes and blood pressure, high cholesterol. So in your opinion, how serious is this problem with childhood obesity?

It's very serious. I mean, you probably know the statistics. A third of our kids are obese right now, and that's staggering. It's very hard for these kids to come back from that and to lead a life, you know, a normal, healthy life. And I feel like we've done our children a huge service when we're still responsible for them, for helping them make healthy choices and when they're not, and to make those choices for them at some level until they are mature enough to make those decisions by themselves. And when we don't take that responsibility seriously, we allow our kids to get overweight. That's something they're going to be battling for the rest of their lives. And so I think for nutritionists everywhere in clinical practice, like me, we're bracing for a generation of folks who are going to need a lot of help, a lot of support to get themselves into a healthy lifestyle and then to maintain that. So I guess I think it's quite serious. And if we could turn the tide here before things get any worse and start bringing that number immediately, I think the benefit to the coming generation will be profound.

Yeah.

And what I like to think about is what kind of baffles me is how we got here in terms of the way that America was, say, 50 years ago and the way that America is now. Because from the impression that I get from listening to my parents talk about the way that it was when they grew up, you could still eat hamburgers and drink soda and have access to fast food and maybe a lot of the unhealthy things that kids might be able to get their hands on. Now, if it's not just say something like fast food and restaurants, what would you say are some of the underlying nutrition issues behind this problem?

Well, that's an interesting point that you make. It's not like fast food was just invented in this Decade it's been around, you and I growing up and our parents growing up had access to, to those kinds of foods and yet didn't seem to have the same obesity. I think part of the problem is that these foods are not just an occasional feature of the diet, but have become a daily staple in many families. It's not a weekend treat to go out to the drive in and get your burger and your milkshake. It's more nights than not, that's what dinner. Because parents are working and they're not home preparing foods. And so maybe it's not so much the foods that are in the diet as the proportion of those foods to the healthier meals that our parents and that we also ate when we were young.

That's an interesting idea and it makes sense. Even though supposedly fast food used to be a lot cheaper. I think I've heard that you could get a hamburger for a dime, but has changed just a little bit, I'd say.

I think it's still shockingly inexpensive. It frightens me that you can get a double decker burger for a dollar. I don't want to know where they get that meat. It's still very, very inexpensive. And of course people are very concerned about money. And it may seem like a great deal to be able to go and feed your whole family at the drive through for 10 or 20 bucks. But I see it as a real false economy because the costs, the real economic costs of that are grave and not that far. So I'm not sure that it's as good a deal as it looks like. But I think what we're really doing when we rely too heavily on fast food in families is not saving time, but saving money. I'm sorry, other way around. Not saving money, but saving time. We haven't left time in our schedules to plan meals, to grocery shop. And those are activities that ideally involve our children in so that we teach them how to do that, we teach them how to plan a meal, we recruit. Anybody that's worked with children knows the best way to get a kid sign on a buy in is to involve them early in the decision making to give them a stake in it. And the same with healthy eating. When you get your kids excited about healthy foods, help them understand what nutrition is all about. They're hungry for that information, they're interested in that information. If we give it to them, we take them to the farmer's market with us and allow them to pick out foods. A lot of them have that, that fun, that experience. Choose something that they have never had before that looks interesting to them, that catches that make it a game, you know, to find a vegetable you've never had. And that's one of the things that we'll get this week or teach kids how to cook. Kids love to cook. And we get our kids in the kitchen and we show them some easy ways to prepare food. Those are foods they're going to be very interested in eating. So I think there's a lot of ways that we can recruit kids to healthier eating habits. But it takes a little bit of time for the parents. It's time that we don't spend for ourselves anymore. We have sort of stopped planning and preparing healthy meals for ourselves, much less our kids. And so the kids just don't. They don't see it happen, and they have no idea how it works. It's a, you know, it's a. It's a mystery to them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. As a nutrition consultant and I see a lot of the things that you're talking about in adults in terms of successful strategies for changing nutritional habits in people. That's an interesting observation. You have to empower someone with the knowledge. And I think that perhaps a lot of parents maybe don't think about empowering their children with the knowledge or with the ability to make a nutritional decision outside of, you know, something like McDonald's or Burger King or the Quick Stop at the pizza joint on the way home. Now, I've talked to parents who are concerned that their kids are going to miss out on life somehow if they don't get McDonald's or they don't get to experience the Happy Meal or the Coca Cola at the movie theater or the big bucket of popcorn or whatever the case may be. May be. What's your opinion on this?

Well, I think that it's hard to miss out on childhood because you know of a missing Coca Cola. But I understand the concern. I think a lot of it is just that parents don't want to say no to their kids. And sometimes, unfortunately, being a good parent or a caretaker does involve saying no. Anybody who's raised a puppy knows that. So sometimes step parents have to be willing to make an unpopular decision that's in the kid's best interest and be the grown up in the family. But I happen to be somebody who believes that yes, you should have cake on your birthday and if you're going to the movies, there's nothing wrong with having some popcorn. And that there is room for treats and is a special treat if your kids really enjoy McDonald's and that's a special treat for them. I think there is room for that. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing enterprise and it doesn't have to be an extremely kind of purist thing. But here's the sort of guidelines. You know, it needs to be a treat and that means it can't just be, you know, the day, hop out for dinner, let's go get a burger. Secondly, it's an opportunity to teach kids appropriate portion control. It doesn't have to be be the largest, the hugest bucket of popcorn or the mega fries. It can be a reasonable portion, the small fries, a regular burger, not one of these quadruple stackers with everything on it. And that's an opportunity to show kids, yeah, this is fun. Every once in a while it's nice, but we don't go crazy. We kind of keep it within reasonable guidelines because you're small, so your food should be small and that it fits into a larger picture of other meals at which milk is served and vegetables are consumed so that it takes its rightful place as a treat. In the context of a healthy diet, that makes sense.

And so you wouldn't necessarily condone using, using junk food as some type of reward or some type of positive association food, but you would instead just recommend that it be something that is, that is in moderation. The same way that you would encourage, for example, in adults to drink red wine in moderation.

Yeah, I would certainly stay away.

Probably isn't as healthy for you as red wine.

I think. No, I wouldn't condone using unhealthy food as a reward. That just feels like a lose lose proposition. You know, there are plenty of other rewards that can be offered to children that are very meaningful and very enjoyable to them. Why use foods that you prefer they didn't over consume as a reward? The more they have to be rewarded for, the less healthy that is for them. So I don't see that. But for example, some families, the tradition is that on your birthday you get to pick the restaurant or, you know, whatever it is. And if you know for. Oh, hang on a second, Ben.

Sorry.

Do you want to go back in?

No, no. Was that your pizza order?

That's right. Domino's calling. I forgot to, you know, recording on the computer and I forgot to unplug my phone.

No, that's fine.

It's a tradition in a lot of families that if it's your birthday, you get to decide where to go for dinner. And when you've got young kids, that means you gotta suck it up and go to Chuck E. Cheese once a year. Once a year. That's a treat for kids and they enjoy having that. And as they get older, their taste in restaurants hopefully will improve a little bit.

So what we're trying to do as parents is not establish patterns for our kids to have on a daily basis some type of fast food or junk food staple in their diet.

If anything, we want to establish patterns for our kids that mean that every day involves several different kinds of fruits and vegetables. You know, includes some calcium containing foods, the kinds of things that our kids are really missing out on. And also, these are exactly the foods which fill kids up and take the place of really calorie dense foods in the diet that are why our kids are packing on all this weight. Those are the patterns we want to develop.

Yeah.

And that kind of leads into another question I wanted to ask you. Do you have any examples of ways that kids can, I don't want to say trick their kids into eating healthy, but meal substitutions or things that parents can add into recipes at home to help children eat healthier or help children enjoy healthy food?

Well, that's a big debate in the nutrition community about whether we should trick our kids. Jessica Seinfeld had a book out. Oh, I'm blanking on the name of it, but it basically was Ways to sneak Vegetables into kids diets. And there was kind of a backlash from other childhood nutrition experts saying, no, teach them to enjoy and appreciate healthy foods. Don't fake them out. There's probably a little bit of a middle way that when we have opportunities to make foods more nutritious and you can read sort of standard tips about, you can grate carrots and zucchini into your spaghetti sauce. You can fold some pumpkin puree or something, muffins or pancakes or those sorts of things to put more of those vegetables in. And I would say those are just as useful for adults who have a hard time meeting their quota of five vegetables a day. But I do actually ascribe to the theory that the way we can get our kids to eat healthy is to teach them to enjoy food, to get excited about foods, to involve them in the selection and the meal planning and the preparation. There's a lot of things that are simple for kids to do. Very young children obviously need supervision in the kitchen, but they enjoy that kind of stuff, and it makes those foods instantly more palatable to them when they've had and had some say in that. I think it's also really important to teach our Kids portion control. And that is a way to allow them to understand that they don't have to deprive themselves of everything that they enjoy, that every food is acceptable, but that we have to exercise portion control when we're eating. I just saw a very interesting study that, that showed that young children have a very poor ability to estimate what the right amount of food is for them. It kind of makes sense when you think about it. But, you know, we sometimes we treat our kids like little mini adults, and we just assume they know everything we know. And they would sit kids down to a meal and they would serve platters of food kind of family style. And without giving the kids any cues, they would just hand and tell them to take what they wanted for dinner. And the kids were. How much they took completely had to do with how much was on the platter. They somehow sort of mentally divided, like, okay, if this is for the whole family, then one fifth of this must be my portion. And then if they changed the amount on the platter, the kids would automatically adjust their portion size. So the kids have no idea what's the right size portion. That's something we can help them learn at the dinner table by serving them or just by talking with them about it.

I think that those are probably two critical points that you just made in this entire conversation. The first thing you were saying you were talking about was something you had mentioned earlier about getting kids involved in the process. And what that boils down to is that if parents aren't cooking with real ingredients, using real food at home, if parents are eating out of packages and containers and delivered foods, then the children will never get exposed to the joys of actually producing food at home. And some of the subtle fine points that actually can make cooking and eating at home and meal preparation a fun thing.

You're absolutely right.

The other point that you made about portion control is that, as most of us know, it's very, very easy to overeat fast food. You can scarf down a Big Mac pretty easily and consume 700 or 800 calories before you know it at a fast food restaurant. And if that's the way that children are eating, then that's another kind of difficult area for them to navigate through when it comes to portion control. So I think that those two points are probably good places for parents to start in terms of teaching their children the proper nutritional habits to set them up for good health going forward into.

The rest of their lives.

You know, Ben, I think you make a very important point about when parents have come to rely entirely on processed and packaged foods. As you know, those foods tend to contain much more sodium, much more sugar than the same sort of thing that you would make for yourself. It's just a fact of life with processed foods. And when that's what we feed our kids, we're training their palates to first of all to require a lot more sodium and a lot more sugar in order to find foods palatable. And also just kind of blunting the appreciation of other foods and other flavors. And that is, that's a real disservice to kids. Kids are biologically programmed to refuse new foods. It's one of the ways that our species kept itself from eating poisonous foods when we didn't have anybody to tell us any better. It's hard, light into biology to not want an unfamiliar food. And that's what we see with kids when we give them something for the first time. They reject doesn't mean they're picky eaters. It means that it's not familiar to them. And the technique that seems to work is you ask your kids to, to always be willing to try one bite of anything. Sometimes kids can get pretty dramatic, you know, about how that's, you know, they're going to be, it's going to be just impossible for them to do that. But usually you know that you can get them to take one bite and that you reintroduce those new foods, you know, every once in a while and get them to try them more than once. And generally when kids try an unfamiliar food three or four times, they will actually find that they enjoy it. But if you give up the first time, you never make them eat any familiar. They won't ever expand their capacity. And those are the kids that won't eat vegetables, you know, that they've just never been, they've never developed a taste for it. And that can be hard to get past when you're a grown up and the only thing you'll eat is peas.

Yeah. When you talk about biological programming, that brings up one kind of final issue I wanted to tackle with you. And it's one that's close to my home right now because I have two 7 month old babies at home. And I know we have many other listeners who have young children that are just beginning to start on solid food. Do you think that the way that babies are fed, and perhaps this returns to the idea of certain food addictions, do you think that would influence their food potential for childhood obesity later in life or decrease their potential for it?

Well, it's very important that babies are fed an appropriate diet. That babies should not be given a low fat diet that does not decrease their potential for childhood obesity later in life. It's very, I'm sure, you know, babies have a much higher need for fats early in life. It's very critical to their.

Oh, go ahead. I probably was going to say. Say what you were going to say the brain development.

Exactly. Very critical for their brain development. So one thing I think we want to just caution people out of an abundance of diligence, please do not give your babies low fat diet. I think that as kids start on solid food and of course you want to be appropriate and pediatricians will give you recommendations for which foods when but including variety begins to expand and make them a little bit more flexible about the kinds of foods that they, that they will accept. But as long as their diet is balanced and healthy, I think that it's not as big an issue as it is once the kids are what I like to call free range. You know, once they're picking their food, that's when you really need to pay attention. I think, you know, as long as babies are fed an appropriate nutritious diet, that's not when obesity starts. In my opinion. I think obesity starts when kids start making their own choices without sufficient supervision and management on behalf of the adults who are responsible for them. So I'm more concerned about when the kids, especially when they're off in school and there's many, many hours of the day when you're not seeing and you're not watching. And I think that's when things start to unravel. The vending machines in schools and, you know, coaches after school pouring Gatorade down their throat, you know, for two hours in the afternoon when it's absolutely not appropriate or necessary. So that's when I think the groundwork gets laid for problems later on is when the kids are making their own decisions away from home, away from the. That's why we need to do what we can to train them only.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Sense.

The reason I ask is because I'm personally very careful about the presence of processed sugars or preservatives specifically in terms of my young children's diets. But I haven't actually ever seen any studies that show that anything like that would be associated with childhood obesity. And I think that your point about focusing more on the decision making abilities of children is probably more important than trying to control everything that goes into their mouths.

Yeah, I think that you make a good point. You know, nobody needs a lot of refined sugar, including babies. And the same sort of principles that we would apply to our diets, we want to apply to theirs. Those are just, it's not so much that the calories are going to get them into trouble because they're growing so fast, but it's just, it's not terribly nutritious. And, and there's other things that we could give them to grow on that would get them a lot farther.

Well, Monica, Obviously this site, nutritiondata.com probably has a lot of good information for parents in terms of finding out the content of the foods that are in their diets. But do you have any other suggestions on resources for parents or for children in terms of healthy eating?

Just a couple. I guess one of the tools that you can find on nutritiondata.com in addition to looking up the nutrient content of foods, there's also some tools that will help you calculate with an appropriate calorie intake for your growing children. Sometimes that can be a little bit of a mystery to parents. You know, how many calories should they get? They're half as big as me. Should they get half as many calories as me? So there's some tools that can give you some guidelines for your child according to their weight and their, I'm sorry, their age and their height about what's an appropriate calorie intake. And I think that can help you help them make more appropriate decisions. I have a colleague, Tanya Wenman Steele, who recently published a fabulous book called Real Food for Healthy Kids. And it's all about helping kids, bringing up children who appreciate healthy, nutritious foods. She makes it very fun. There's some great recipes, and it's all really from a kid's eye view. And this is very directly your question that you started with, like, what do we do in this era of fast food for everybody? This book is really the response to that question. So for your listeners who have older kids, older than yours, kids that are beginning to make their own decisions about food, I recommend that as a great read. It's called Real Food for Healthy Kids. And lastly, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the MyPyramid.gov resources that are online, which are free online tools that the government has put together to help you kind of track and learn about portion sizes. They have one that's directed specifically for children. Kids are so Internet savvy now, they get on in three clicks. My niece can fix my antivirus program. You know, they know how to. And it's fun for them. And there's some tools there that can get kids engaged and start making a little bit of a game out of it, making it entertaining. But a lot of good information gets through that way too. So you can investigate those resources@mypyramid.gov we'll.

Try and get some of those links up in the show notes for this podcast. You actually cut out just a little bit when you're talking about that book for kids. But I'll definitely make sure I go to nutritiondata.com and get that up onto the podcast show notes and then in a completely different arena of, of nutrition. I know that Monica has written a book called the Inflammation Free Diet Plan and we've actually talked about inflammation before on the show just a little bit. But where would be the best place to go if people wanted to get more information on that book?

Monica, for information in the book, there's a website@inflammationfreediet.com and that gives you a little bit more information about my approach and the rating system that I developed to help you understand how different foods affect inflammation in the body and help you build an anti inflammatory diet.

Fantastic. We'll get a link up to that as well. Well, Monica, thank you for coming on today.

It was my pleasure. Thanks very much and greetings to your listeners. Come on over. Listen to Nutrition D this time.

That's right. And you can find Monica's podcast just by doing a. You can do a search in itunes or go over to the Quick and Dirty Tips Network and I'll make sure I put a link to that in the show notes. Monica, thank you.

Thanks Ben. Always enjoy your show.

Alright, bye.

So that's all the content today from BenGreenfieldFitness.com hey, we love to see your comments in the blogs. Don't worry, you don't mess up the website by commenting. Make sure you get some discussions going. All you do is click leave a comment under the podcast listing for any of the episodes that you want to talk about. You can also email your questions to me if you have questions for the listener. Q and a to Ben greenfieldfitness.com Remember Ironman triathletes? You can get a link to your Ironman training plan by going to the show notes for this week's episode number 24. And you can also use that discount code BGF ALL CAPS for that training plan. You can also for the gym stick use the discount code holiday H O L I D A Y. So there you go. I just made you 30 bucks by listening to this podcast. So next week we're going to return to some more fantastic interviews. I've got a lot of great stuff coming down the pipeline for 2009. I've lined up some really, really interesting people to talk with. And so until next week, this is Ben from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great week.

SA.