Posts tagged as:

junk food

Teaching your kids about food will not cause eating disorders

May 17, 2013

There’s a dangerous thread running through the national conversation about kids and food, and it is this: If you talk to your kids about food, if you teach them to understand ingredients and to actually think about what they eat — and, heaven forbid, you actually limit junk food — you are setting them up for, at best, rebellion-fueled binges, or, at [...]

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Handout: Why school and junk food don’t mix.
And what educators can do about it.

September 20, 2012

If there’s one question I hear over and over again, it’s this: “I try to feed my kids well, but I’m thwarted by all the junk they get at school! What can I do about that?” Here’s my answer. It’s a handout you can print and give to your child’s teacher or principal. In it, I list five reasons [...]

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Halloween treats don’t have to be tricky

October 11, 2011

When you blog about kids and food, people ask you questions. Especially this time of year, when sweets flow like lava and the sugar high carries you from trick-or-treats to Easter baskets. What do you do about the candy? So here it is. The post about the candy. Our Halloween night strategy is pretty simple. [...]

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Orthorexia vs. chocolate milk:
Will the real eating disorder please stand up?

June 1, 2011

Have you heard of an eating disorder called orthorexia? Translated literally, it means “correct appetite” or “correct eating,” and it’s when people obsess over the “right” foods to the point that it controls their lives and wrecks their health. Orthorexia isn’t new, nor is it recognized as an official disorder. But it’s gotten a lot [...]

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Want kids to eat better?
Stop calling them “picky eaters.”

February 23, 2011

Spend even a few minutes online and you’ll find blogs devoted to sneaky vegetables, artful bento boxes and countless other tricks to make kids eat spinach. Turn on the news, pick up a paper, check Facebook, and you can’t escape talk of school food, Happy Meal toys and the travesty of chocolate milk. Everyone is [...]

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Food donations revisited: Dealing with the junk

January 14, 2011

Just saw an interesting NPR story called Overburdened food banks can’t say no to junk. And that brought to mind a Spoonfed discussion from November: Would you feed your own kid the same food you donate to food pantries?  The NPR piece notes that most of the unhealthy food given to food banks comes from grocery [...]

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Candy insanity: Halloween here we come

October 20, 2010

When you blog about kids and food, people ask you questions. Especially this time of year, when sweets flow like lava and the sugar high carries you from trick-or-treats to Easter baskets. What do you do about the candy? So here it is. The post about the candy. Our Halloween night strategy is pretty simple. After trick-or-treating, costume [...]

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Stealth veggies: Yes or no?

October 12, 2010

Last week, out with friends at a new restaurant (a place I wrote about here), my 6-year-old ordered chocolate mousse for dessert. Actually, chocolate avocado mousse. But my daughter didn’t know that. She’s a beginning reader and “avocado” is not yet in her repertoire (though “chocolate” is), so I let her order the mousse without mentioning its secret green [...]

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Junk food as kiddie heroin?

October 5, 2010

I’ve watched this video several times over several days, and I’m still not sure what I think. It’s unsettling. Intense. But is that chill in my spine because it goes too far? Or because it hits the mark? People argue over whether junk-food-fast-food-pseudo-food is addictive, but, really now. Of course it is. Former FDA commissioner David Kessler [...]

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Carrots are just Cheetos wannabes

August 31, 2010

Have you heard about the new ad campaign that’s branding baby carrots as junk food? Not an alternative to junk food. But junk food’s cheeky, farm-fresh cousin. There will be crinkly, snacky-type bags, some sold in vending machines, all labeled with the hipster directive to “Eat ‘em like junk food.” In a world of food gone crazy, [...]

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