If you want to "train" your kids to eat healthy from a young age, you'd be better off to train them off sugar and white flour, which they will be exposed to everywhere, rather than worrying about McDonalds which, realistically, is rarely a large part of anyone's diet.
I found, though, that giving my son too much in the wholemeal category is a bit rough on his guts and tends to make him a bit gassy and uncomfortable for a while. Perhaps when he is a bit older (he is three now) he will take it a bit better.
You can always control your child's diet and eating habits at home but to snub a friendly gesture from a well meaning mother I find not conducive to harmonious relations or showing your daughter how to be sociable.
It would really have been kinder to allow your daughter to sample the cigarette, say a few kind words to the mother who offered them and gently guide her away. By interfering the way you did, maybe you are inadvertently teaching your daughter to be intolerant and discriminating.
Sometimes intolerance and discrimination aren't such a bad idea.
One should not feed other people's small children without express permission. Period.
The child may be allergic to the substance. The parents may not want the child to acquire a taste for it. The parents may not want a child to take food from strangers. A thousand good reasons. My job as a parent was not to ask myself if I might be offending other people but to bring up my children.
One of our girls, who was continually being fed by our various friendly neighbours, was informed by me that if I found out she had taken food again, I would hang a notice round her neck saying 'Do not feed'. Brutal?- sure. But at the time she was literally only eating between meals. Even a slice of a bio apple at ten o'clock meant that she didn't eat any lunch at twelve. Which meant she was hungry again at two and the same neighbours would feed her again. No way could I have convinced the charming elderly neighbours - 'this little bit surely won't matter' - but daughter number two knew her Mum! Problem solved.
And I don't think it left her with any ideas of intolerance or with discriminating tendencies - and she still knows that her Mum means what she says.
I learnt this from my experience with a son who has type 1 (childhood) diabetes, which is NOT caused by diet...but we have to measure his carbohydrate intake to match his insulin that is injected twice per day...so we have become much more aware of diet, and see a dietician as part of his health programme.
Based on the assumption that a 'kids meal' contains a 'small' size french frieds. The published content is 68 of fries in a 'serve' - 26g of carbohydrate and 10g of fat.
Compare to processed white bread - to match the amount of carbohydrate you would need (based on a published carb content of 17% and a fat content of 5%) = two slices of bread.
So a 'kiddie' sized fries is equivalent to two slices of bread for a sandwich.
Sounds not so bad ?
Except that one tiny packet of french fries doesn't fill you up, the sugar is processed quickly (high GI). One small size french fries and a glass of plain milk would be his complete 'lunch' - obviously not an adequate diet for a growing primary schooler...he could easily eat four 'small' serves of fries, but I can't see him eating 8 slices of bread in one sitting...
Oh and the sodium content - similar between the french fries and the bread.
I have a friend who fed her toddler 'fries and nuggets' through her toddler years if she was worried that she wasn't eating...and by age 3 she was *twice* the size of other children her age...not a good nutritional start...
Also, my belief is that toddlers crave the things they are missing from their diet...if their is a specific nutritional component missing, they will eat and eat and eat until they get that component...so that is why a broad and varied, healthy diet is recommended...chips and nuggets provide high fat, calories and salt with little else to recommend them...
In our Migros they do not stock any wholewheat noodles; I get them at the large COOP downtown. As with the bread (COOP is even worse for bread), there are a lot of products that "look" like they might be whole wheat. Pasta and breads which are made to look "dark" by the addition of various things, but if you read the labels you will find very few of them are actually whole grain products.
In Canada it is allowed to "make" whole wheat flour from white flour by mixing back in the correct proportions of wheat germ and bran. How crazy is that? I wonder if this is allowed in Switzerland.
Is there anyone here that doesn't get a significant portion of their calories from refined carbohydrates; sugar, syrup, white flour, pasta, white rice, etc. or hydrogenated oil?
Say less than 20%?
That is a completely irrelevant comparison (made by you and others it has to be said). Smoking and alcohol have been shown to be harmful, have know harmful agents in them and are known to be addictive. Drinking, for example is also known to have immediate negative effects regarding co-ordination, i.e. with respect to drink driving. To my knowledge, there are no such warnings associated with fast food (i.e. an eat-drive limit LOL, although that woman who burned herself with a McD's coffee springs to mind ). Fast food, per se, has not been shown to be harmful when eaten part of a balanced diet.
Correct, it hasn't. So that's an opinion that you are entitled to, however biased. I'm sure you agree that bringing children up is not all sweetness and light. This means that they may well rebel against their upbringing at some point, which in turn might lead to a simple act of eating too much fast food or becoming annorexic or something else... You never know how things are going to turn out.
Quite, part of an unbalanced lifestyle and nothing to do with fast food alone. You make the point quite nicely that fast food alone is not bad. It is the balance that is incorrect.
Could you define twice the size of other children? On the 95% percentile on height, weight and head circumference? Or unbalanced and by which criteria?
I'm curious, as our oldest (4 y, 11 mo) is hovering on the 10-20% percentile, and we'd love it if he was bigger as he is underweight... My point is: what are the criteria being used to say that the child is twice as big. At the moment the information supplied is biased. It might not be a bad thing depending on the measures used.
Simply, just so simply totally irrelevant comparison .
I'm surprised DB, as I've seen many of your posts, and you usually seem much more reasonable
Yes, and in reply: "One Swallow doth not make a Summer"...
Just curious... are you a physician or other health care provider? What are the markers of heart disease that you see in these people?
Ordinary cow's milk is 5% carbohydrate (sugar).
Store-bough chocolate llavoured cow's milk is between 10-20% carbohydrate (sugar).
Plain vanilla icecream from Denner is 24% carbohydrate (sugar).
A magnum icecream is around 60% carbohydrate (sugar).
Serving size matters
Big Mac + Large fries + large coke =
45g carb +63g + 86g carbohydrate = 194g carbohydrate.
One sandwich with ham and cheese = 33g of carbohdyrate.
Carb content of water = 0.
So you'd need 194//33 = nearly 6 ham and cheese sandwiches to match your one large big mac meal...
Skip the coke and you can still have Three ham-cheese sandwiches for the same amount of carbs as your one big mac and fries...
I would eat maybe 1-2 sandwiches at a 'sitting' but I wouldn't eat 3 or even 6...I would be full...
Someone asked earlier in the thread if we should do a poll to find out what percentage of our calorie intake is made up of "refined carbohydrates".
FFS, do you think our mothers worried about this back in the day? I was brought up on what was quite quaintly called "a balanced diet" hundreds of years ago and I am a normal weight, with all my teeth and no health problems. I know my diet included white bread and pasta.
Now we've got the food snobs making mothers feel like child abusers for sneaking them into McDonalds or some other fast food outlet once in a while.
We had the first McD's in our town when I was a kid and it was seen as a treat now and again. Nobody got their knickers in a twist if someone took their kids a couple of times in a month. I must have been the only kid in the world that felt nauseous by the smell of McD's, which was the only thing which prevented me from going in with my mates when I was a teenager.
For all the supposedly healthy options they seem to be available in our home countries which people can't seem to find here, there are an enormous amount of fat kids in these "home countries" that you don't find here. Food for thought, eh?
Healthy eating they also learn at home,by example.
My criticism was really about snubbing a basically well intentioned gesture.
That was me, and I was simply pointing out that many things people normally eat without question are not so much better than McD's, and that if you want to make a difference in what your kids eat, then you are better off being discriminating in the grocery store, as this is where you will purchase the bulk of your food.
I am glad that you are your family are healthy.
I wouldn't call these people food snobs, I think they really care about what they feed their kids.
Home coutries? Are you kidding?
I assume you understand the ingredients of the various breads? Vollkorn? Dinkel? There are many different breads you can buy rather than the white bread or their derivatives you keep quoting.
Have you actually asked in your local Migros for wholegrain pasta?
Yes, people eat crap food and many without understanding the full ingredients AND (shock, horror) they feed it to their poor innocent offspring but does it really matter?
Evidence shows (i.e. looking around at the general populous here) that neither adults nor children seem to eat a great deal of crap food. Go home to the UK (or in your case, Canada) and there is a veritable plethora of fatties; fatty kids and their fatty parents. It's the norm.
Ironically, you look around in Complaints Corner here about the lack of choice in supermarkets in Switzerland. In the UK you have more choice than you can shake a stick at and it costs buttons to stuff your face on whatever you fancy and suddenly you have an obesity timebomb just waiting to blow up in the face of the government.
I'll take my chances with Migros and Coop, thanks very much.
I think the burger in moderation is OK, but in my opinion the Coke is closer to the cigarette from DB's analogy.
Yes I do, I am looking for bread that is made from whole grains, and I don't really care if it is spelt or wheat, so long as it is whole grain, and there are very few selections in this category in Migros or COOP.[/QUOTE]
Why, do you suppose they are hiding some in the back somewhere? I managed to find it downtown at the COOP.
You sound like you just want to complain about people who complain about Switzerland. I didn't say whole grain products where easy to find in Canada either.
I'm healthy but I grew up in Britain. How veggie savvi where the parents who were born just before or during the war? Not very. Any one who grew up in the 50's was filled with as much protein and carbs as possible. Simply because veggies weren't available.
My mother was a stickler for grains, barley and lentils, where such a staple of our diet we consider it mum food, the veggies were the cream on top.
My nieces kids of the nineties love it when they get such home food in front of them. Even if they have to come to Switzerland for it now.