Paleo Kids – Combating Outside Influences

I get a lot of emails from parents – from what to offer kids for snacks and lunches, to how to make the transition to the Paleo diet easier on kids; I get questions about pregnancy and PCOS, and questions about eating raw meat. I typically just answer them in a reply email but this latest question was so detailed and the answer so long, I thought I should give it a home here on the blog.

Email from Jamie

“I’m looking to switch my 5 year old over to Primal. How do you handle events and school with your daughter?

I think because of his high carb intake now, it’s going to be a brutal transition, but do-able. The transition wouldn’t be a big deal if we lived in a cave… But he starts kindergarten in a public school in the fall. Part of this (to my utter dismay) is MANDATORY breakfast. They don’t HAVE to eat it, but it occupies a certain time frame of the day. And it’s pretty much crappy dessert. Even though I intend to send him with a full belly, I’m pretty sure he won’t be able to resist.

We also live around a ton of family and there’s at least one birthday party a week.

How do you handle this in your own family?  Is it better to be half primal for kids? I guess I’m worried about the high fat combined with a lot of “cheats’. My understanding of the science (rudimentary) is that to be high fat, you need to get your body acclimated to using that fat as fuel, which it might not do if there’s readily available glucose.

Any insight you have would be awesome.”

“The transition wouldn’t be so difficult if we lived in a cave”

Indeed! Acting like Primal people would be so much easier if we could actually live like Primal people. But most of us can’t. We don’t live on some big Primal commune where we grow our own food and home-school our children. Instead, temptation abounds – in the grocery stores, on TV and the Internet, at schools, and within our peer groups.

Unfortunately, our children will, at some point and to some degree, struggle with food (or non-food if you will). As parents we really can’t control them or “protect” them from temptation – not beyond a few years of life anyway. We can simply offer them alternatives and hope they take it.

The same is true with Internet porn, right? or the “bad crowd” in high school, drugs, and all the paths you hope your children don’t walk down. Our job is not to shackle our children to our chosen paths but to guide them in the direction we think is best and teach them to make informed decisions. Ultimately, though, those decisions are their own. This future may seem bleak but I don’t think it is. If we do a rockin’ job teaching and practicing healthy habits, our children will usually follow. Parents are the leaders and kids know it. They are programed to follow us, at least for a time.

Teaching is key

I am pretty blunt about what food is and what it isn’t. I tell my daughter, Evelyn, like it is about french toast, cereal, bars, and candy. IT ISN’T FOOD. It’s that simple. It’s not just junk, it’s simply not food. I make that very clear.

I also explain that some food comes from factories and some from nature. That concept really resonates with her. She even knows that she can eat eggs and meat at our house, but that the eggs and meat at preschool come from caged chickens. She knows they aren’t the same. You can bet I’ve shown her pictures and have taken her to farms. I talk to her about it and I show her. She has learned enough by now that she can use her own brain to make smart decisions.

Sometimes she doesn’t, though, and that’s ok too. I can, to some degree, protect her from the ill effects of bad decisions.

Outside Influences

Outside influence #1: Family We all have someone who watches our kids when we go out or who loves to spend time with our children. Chances are these people don’t eat like us. There’s really nothing you can do about that! Unless you want to keep your kids locked up, which would inevitably backfire, then you’ve just got to throw in the towel at times.

There are, however, a couple of things you can do that can help.

1. Teach your kids everything you know so that they can make informed decisions. They might just refuse junk food if they understand how bad it is. They also might choose to have a single bite as opposed to a whole piece of cake.

2. Talk to the caretakers about your kid’s diet. Never leave a kid with a babysitter without explaining what and why you eat like you do. Make sure your kids know that friends, family, and caretakers know the drill.

3. DON’T MAKE YOUR KIDS FEEL GUILTY! Kids probably already feel stupid about eating junk. A body will rebel against it and send very clear signals; they stink, they make lots of noise, gain weight, cry, fight… Encouraging kids to eat better is preferable to reprimanding them for the weaknesses that they already have to suffer.

Outside influence #2: Spouse My boyfriend of 2 ½ years has only just gone all the way primal recently. His diet was never all that bad from the beginning, having spent most of his life eating home cooked Colombian food (he’s from Cali, Colombia). They do eat a lot of bread over there, though, and a god forsaken amount of sugar cane (which makes trips to Colombia tough for us. Evelyn does not do well on gluten and sugar). He used to keep gluten free breads in the house and chips and stuff that I didn’t want her to eat. Her cravings were a lot stronger then than they are now. It was all her begging for food that finally convinced him that the food was insidious. So he ended up going primal.

Outside influence #3: Mandatory School Meals And then there’s preschool. Evelyn hasn’t stayed at home with me full time since she was two. Kids learn a whole lot about junk food from their peers so once she started making close friends the daily battle of temptation began. Breakfast is served each morning at preschool. I don’t normally take her there that early but when I do, I send her with a piece of fruit and maybe some cheese (after already having eaten a huge breakfast – always a huge breakfast) or even some plantain fried in coconut oil – a Colombian favorite (actually they use crappy vegetable oil over there these days. Things are changing all over the world…).

I have turned her into a fat lover so that helps stave off the sugar cravings. After a really killer high fat breakfast, who’s going to care about cereal? Cereal is for low-fat people, it’s not even a temptation for people like us. Evelyn has never had or even ever asked about cereal. She thinks it’s weird.

Outside influence #4: Peer Pressure At her preschool she is one of a crew of six girls who are all best friends. They all have birthdays and get-togethers. None of the families really knows anything at all about health, so just about anything goes. I do dread these events because they are totally food centered. It’s as though nobody can think of anything else to do but eat. Such is life.

Evelyn is in the habit of bringing alternatives. Yeah, we’re snobs like that. Just today one of the girls was leaving the preschool because she is moving. Evelyn came to me and said, “Hey mom, they are having cupcakes today. I need to bring one of my suckers and a coconut cookie.” She knows the drill. She gets to have sweets too sometimes, but she knows all about organic, food coloring, animals that live in cages as opposed to outdoors, chemicals, etc.

Outside influence #5: Environment We live in a really lively area. Just a step outside our front door are great restaurants and pubs. Just one block from our house is the greatest ice cream shop in town. Everywhere we go there are people sitting on patios eating, drinking, and gulping down ice cream, gellato, and frozen yogurt.

It’s not like she doesn’t notice how happy they all look shoving this stuff down their throats. She watches and she knows, but she is also accustomed to our activity-centered outings that she doesn’t even notice food most of the time. I’m not totally lame, though, either. We get ice cream or dark chocolate sometimes. There are a few things we do and many things we don’t do. For instance, we’ve never stopped in at a bakery, we don’t buy food at amusement parks – ever. She wouldn’t even ask me because it’s not an option. I have condemned that stuff as non-food so many times. She totally gets it by now.

How I deal with all these influences

I make my home a primal home. This means that cheats rarely come around here and are never kept in the cupboards. She takes ownership of this because it is very much us. She knows which things I think are less bad than other things. She knows which types of things are totally off limits. She knows why we eat like we do and how often we cheat. It is very clear to her that sugar makes you sick and fat, and that packaged foods offer very little nutrition. My dad is dying and she understands that his diet is responsible (really sad, I know). He eats a diet of TV dinners, nutrition shakes, and other packaged food. She says to me how sad it is that he eats the way he does.

Personally, I don’t see any reason to allow her to believe that it is his time to die or that his disease is normal. It isn’t. A body simply can’t function on so little nutrition. I am careful not to scare her with it but I do let her know that this is the mess we’re in as modern humans but that we have a choice.

She knows all of this because she cooks with me, shops with me, and hangs out with me all the time. (It’s remarkable how much family time there actually is when you don’t plop kids down in front of a TV. We don’t have one. We never have. I think commercials are the devil and TV is a waste of time. Yes she knows about that too.)

A word about judgement

I do my best to teach her not to be judgemental. I think it is important that she decides for herself who is good and who is bad. So far, she has never had any problem making and maintaining friends. When she was younger – like 2,3,4 – she would comment about other people’s carts at the grocery store and that they were “full of junk”. While I thought it was awesome that she sees it that way, I always told her that saying those kinds of things will hurt people’s feelings and that people won’t want to be her friend then. She got it. She comes home and tells me what her friends eat sometimes, but she shuts up about it around them.

The world we live in is not perfect and our kids won’t be either, but I am certain that if we are cool with our kids and we teach them everything we know, they will learn and they will follow. This is a process, though. It takes time to prove yourself as a primal parent and it takes time to pass on all the information that they need to be caveman kiddos.