Simple Food for Busy Families: The Whole Life Nutrition Approach - Couverture souple

Bessinger, Jeannette; Yablon-Brenner, Tracee

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1587613352 ISBN 13 : 9781587613357

Editeur : Celestial Arts, 2009

Synopsis

An easy-to-use guide to nutrition and healthful meal planning for busy parents.

Written by nutrition educators Jeannette Bessinger and Tracee Yablon-Brenner, aka "the Real Food Moms," this one-stop shopping resource and cookbook provides convenient cooking solutions based on fresh, healthful ingredients and sound nutritional science. Filled with quick tips for preparing wholesome meals on a workaday schedule, SIMPLE FOOD FOR BUSY FAMILIES helps parents nourish and teach their children balanced eating habits for life.Reviews“...packed with advice, ideas and good recipes.”—Fort Worth Star Telegram  http://www.turnto10.com/jar/lifestyles/health_med_fit/article/health_check_real_food_moms/11742/ —Cranston, WJAR-TV HealthCheck Report

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

TRACEE YABLON-BRENNER, a mother of two, is a registered dietician, holistic health counselor, and owner of Nutrition Is Healing. She lives in Haworth, New Jersey.THE AUTHOR SCOOP

How did Simple Foods For Busy Families come to be? My co-author Jeanette and I met at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck NY and hit it off immediately. We realized we both had just graduated from the Institute For Integrative Nutrition but had never met before. I suggested us writing a book to educate people about the importance of eating real food, and soon after returning home, the Institute For Integrative Nutrition announced they were starting a contest where the two best proposals would get published. Jeanette and I wrote a proposal, and much to our surprise, we were chosen and our journey began.  What's the farthest you've ever traveled?To Israel. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the Middle Eastern food.Do you eat your vegetables?Yes, and through writing Simple Foods For Busy Families I eat a lot more green leafy vegetables on a regular basis. My children have tried more vegetables and enjoy many, including cauliflower, collard greens, and kale. Their favorite is broccoli.If you had a superpower, what would it be?To make people realize that cooking is fun and that cooking real healthy food makes a huge difference in how you feel on a regular basis.What was the hardest thing about writing a book?Taking a leap of faith and believing in the concept of the book. Also, it was a challenge working from home, being an active mom, and balancing the many different life situations as they came up.   What did you want to be when you grew up?I always had a fascination for food and healthy eating. I was lucky enough to have a relationship with my great grandfather who left Russia as a young man and became a chef. As a little girl, I remember enjoying time preparing and eating stuffed cabbage with him. That began my passion for preparing high quality food.


JEANNETTE BESSINGER is a mother of two, holistic health counselor and educator, and owner of Balance for Life, in Newport, Rhode Island. THE AUTHOR SCOOP

What was the hardest thing about writing a book? The hardest thing about writing Simple Foods for Busy Families was being in a busy family! Because of an unusual constellation of events, we actually moved three times in the three years that we worked on this project. It really brought home the incredible challenges we working moms have to cope with in this day and age just to support our families with healthy, home-cooked food and consistent routines. What's the oddest meal you've ever had? I have a vivid memory of going home for dinner for the first time with my college boyfriend, who was Japanese. As we walked through the foyer into his house, his mother, backlit by the late afternoon sun, opened the stove door and removed an entire octopus from the oven! It was stuffed into a baking pan and came out steaming, tentacles spilling out over the sides.  I was utterly horrified. By the time it made its way onto our actual plates, however, it was thankfully unrecognizable as an aquarium escapee. It tasted phenomenal—delicate, chewy-crunchy and extremely exotic.Any unusual hobbies?Lately, one of my friends had to learn some circus arts to fill in for a clowning instructor at a performance camp. She brought some of the props over one night and my family got hooked. I bought some juggling balls and devil’s sticks and am now working on my skills during writing breaks. Next I might try the spinning plates…Name the most horrifying dish that your mother used to make. My mom was very into the trends of the 70’s and periodically, she would dabble with vegetarianism. Her early experiments with tofu were pretty tough on us all--she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. It was supposed to be a “meat substitute,” right? So for a southern-raised woman, that meant you should heat that sucker up and slather it in grandad’s barbecue sauce. Eek!Do you eat your vegetables? I refuse to eat beets or eggplant, and I will always pick out any big pieces of onion. I do, however, love all things green. Late spring/early summer is my favorite time of year because it means I’ll get to eat the beautiful and exotic lettuces, kale, collards, and bok choy from our local farmers markets every day. And I am not above harvesting the young leaves right off the lawn dandelions before mowing time…

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Chapter 1: The Big American Picture

Families Under Pressure

A strong family is a national treasure. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and they are the best vehicles we have for raising healthy, vibrant children. It may sound corny, but it's true: children are the future. And in America right now, families are under a tremendous amount of pressure.

In the past, families were founded on marriage, with children raised by two parents and supported by extended family and friends living nearby. Today's family looks very different. More than half of all marriages end in divorce; some couples never marry, and some individuals choose single parenthood. One in three American families is comprised of a child or children with only one parent. Often parents move to follow jobs far away from their birth families, so they are without the support of grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins. Instead of living in a close-knit community, many people don't even know the names of their next-door neighbors.

As family structures and our society change, every family member is suffering under levels of pressure never before experienced. Work demands are at an all-time high: people are expected to produce more with less support in less time. Mothers are working and managing homes and raising families; some fathers are doing this too, and even some grandparents. More is being demanded of school children: they have more structured activities, more academic demands, and less free playtime.

The increasing pressures and pace of family life create significant stress on the mind and body that must somehow be alleviated. Anything that promises to help families get more done in less time, that gives them a moment to relax and put their feet up, is almost irresistible. So it is no surprise that many parents and children are turning to fast food and fast-paced entertainment to help them balance that stress.

Consumers' demand for speed, ease, and stress relief has led to remarkable changes in how they eat, what they buy, and how they use their time. Consider the following:

People eat out at restaurants more than any other time in the history of modern life.

Young mothers don't learn how to cook because they don't have to: American grocery stores stock more than 30,000 products, most of them processed, refined foods that require minimal preparation.

Portion sizes are exploding. The average dinner plate at a typical family restaurant chain today would have fed a family of four fifty years ago. You can buy a 64-oz single serving soft drink; that's almost ten times the size of the average soda in the 1950s.

Cable and satellite TV and radio provide hundreds of channels of programming.

iPods can hold several TV episodes so people can watch CSI on a 2-inch screen whenever they have a two-minute break.

The Internet allows anyone to access an infinite amount of information instantaneously.

All these changes in food and entertainment technology feed the modern need for stress relief and speed.

Kids' Health Epidemic

Let's look at other developments that have taken place as life has gotten busier. The prevalence of overweight and obesity in US children has quadrupled since the 1960s. According to recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 32 percent of American children between the ages of two and nineteen years are overweight; about half of those (16 percent) are obese.1 That's more than 23,500,000 kids.

American kids are getting fatter every day. The problem isn't just weight, either; there is also an alarming increase in type 2 diabetes, even in the very young. This disease was called "adult-onset" diabetes for a long time because it was seen only in older generations. Today, however, adolescents and even some preadolescents are being diagnosed with it. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes newly diagnosed in children jumped from less than 5 percent before 1994 to 30 to 50 percent since then.2 Today's children are also at risk for other "adult" imbalances that go along with being overweight, such as hypertension and elevated levels of triglycerides and LDLs (the "bad" cholesterol). This was almost unheard of in our youth population even twenty years ago.

American children are among the first generation in modern history that will likely have shorter life spans than their parents. This is shocking. No one wants these health problems for their children, so how on earth did it get so bad? The connection between the advent of the high-pressure American lifestyle and the decline of our children's health is not coincidental. As families have become busier, their quality of food, exercise, sleep, and self-care has decreased. It used to be that the cheapest and easiest food was the healthiest, but now the opposite is true: too much inexpensive, fast, and processed food is harming our children. It used to be that family home entertainment involved the whole family and was truly entertaining. Now it keeps kids inside, sitting on their butts in front of the TV or video games. Sadly, in the health of this generation of children, we now see the results.

Overindulging in quick and easy "junk" food and "junk" entertainment has become a favorite escape from modern-day stress for both kids and parents. But this collective "solution" isn't working. It's actually adding to the pressure by making everyone slower, heavier, and sicker. We call this new problem the Standard American Diet (SAD) Lifestyle.

The SAD Lifestyle is one that includes:

Fast food, junk food, family-style restaurant food, or processed store-bought food as regular sources of nourishment

Screen entertainment (television, DVDs, computer time, video games) as a significant part of every day

Stress as a regular part of daily life

The SAD Lifestyle is missing:

High-quality, natural foods as the foundation of the daily diet

Ongoing healthy lifestyle practices (getting enough sleep, exercise, play, relaxed family time, etc.)

Daily structure or routines for those practices

How Did We Get Here?

The negative long-term effects of passively indulging in the SAD Lifestyle have crept up on us slowly. Although there are reports in the media about the epidemic of childhood obesity and the increase in lifestyle illnesses that go along with it, much of the nation is still unaware of the depth or seriousness of the problem.

The situation is like that of the frog and the boiling water. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will sensibly jump right out. But if you put it into cold water and heat the water very slowly, it will stay in and eventually get cooked. Right now, America is a nation of such frogs: unknowingly getting cooked by junk food because we haven't noticed that the diet-related health crisis is heating up to a dangerous degree.

America has been in this situation before, with the smoking crisis of thirty years ago. Eating lots of junk food today, like smoking cigarettes thirty years ago, is accepted and not considered a cause for alarm. This acceptance is deeply entrenched in our culture and will require a long-term, comprehensive approach to change the cultural tide, similar to the approach taken to curb smoking.

Early advertising touted smoking as a healthy activity. Maybe you've seen one of those older ads: someone on a mountain talking about how he never would have made it to the top without the help of his trusty cigarette! It took a long-term, exhaustive campaign by national and state health departments to convince the American public that smoking was truly unhealthy and to "kick the habit." That campaign continues today with a multilayered effort to discourage kids from taking up smoking in the first place.

As with smoking cigarettes in the past, people today are consuming a lot of manufactured food products without fully understanding their effects. In part, that responsibility should be taken up by corporations and the government to ensure that foods on the market are truly safe and healthy. But to a larger extent, this is a matter of education. Many American families simply are not aware of the fundamental connection between what they eat, how much they eat, and their health and well-being. So many of the illnesses faced by American children are essentially diseases of food and lifestyle. But some parents still think, "What's the harm in a Happy Meal?" They do not deeply consider what they feed, or do not feed, to their kids because they don't understand the health effects.

Other parents out there are aware of the impact diet and lifestyle has on their kids, but they feel a sense of powerlessness or hopelessness about the situation. Perhaps you know that your children are unhealthy or overweight, but you believe that because you are overweight, or because your parents were, that your kids are doomed to the same condition: "There's nothing I can do, so why try?" Or you may feel isolated and overwhelmed when faced with trying to make changes in your family's health, especially after years of being stuck on the SAD Lifestyle treadmill.

You have more power than you know. The fact is that nearly all of the health problems we have mentioned are reversible, or can be alleviated by making some basic changes in the ways you nourish yourself, move your body, and help your kids do the same.

We definitely don't want to sound fatalistic here; national consciousness is rising, and the tide is starting to turn. It is possible to turn our kids' health crisis around and to make healthier diets and lifestyles an important national priority. Just take a look at the smoking issue. In many states it is now illegal to smoke inside any public buildings; there are ongoing lawsuits against tobacco companies; and smoking is much less socially acceptable than it was in the past. In the same way, the hazards of the SAD Lifestyle can be recognized and reversed.

The fact that you picked up this book is a good sign. You must know something is out of balance and want to make some changes. You are not alone. Many families are starting to think differently about food and lifestyle choices. With a gradual and sustained effort, you can make changes that will dramatically improve the quality of your family's health and daily life. This book will show you how.

We don't pretend that these changes are easy. It's going to take hard work on your part. Your family's health is not the responsibility of schools or the government or advertisers in the media-it is yours. Those institutions are probably not going to help you-they may even resist you. But you can do it. The real question is, what do you want your family's life and health to look like a year from now? The next year is going to pass anyway, right? On your next birthday you will be one year older, whether you and your family are in the same "SAD state," worse, or improving. Why not go for it?

Whole Life Nutrition: An Alternative to the SAD Lifestyle

This book offers an antidote to the SAD Lifestyle: Whole Life Nutrition. This is a holistic approach to nourishing your family's bodies and minds in a way that is more in tune with the natural rhythms of life. It allows your family to enjoy the conveniences and pleasures of modern life in a balanced way, while reconnecting with simple foods and tried-and-true practices that have kept humans healthy throughout time.

The wonderful thing about the Whole Life Nutrition approach is that, although it takes deliberate effort and investment (which can be hard to muster if you have an overly busy life), it will pay for itself, and more, in the long run. Implementing new routines now might take extra time and organization, but you'll be rewarded with a healthier and therefore more manageable life later. Also, higher quality food might cost more, but you'll save a lot over time in doctor bills, chiropractors, sleep aids, and diet pills.

If you make the effort to change, you'll not only improve your family's health and quality of life right now, but you'll also help prevent the development of disease later. Not enough families are doing this yet, so your children will likely be among the healthiest in their adult peer groups, and thus even more important to our future.

This book represents our effort to share an approach that has helped our own families and our clients meet today's challenges with success. But we recognize that your family is unique and that no one has perfect solutions for what families face. We are all in process, all working together on the problem. For this reason, Whole Life Nutrition is a flexible approach; we encourage you to dive in and experiment with our suggestions yourself and to see what works best for you.

You Are Not Alone

We want you to know that you are not alone. Here are some stories from dedicated parents who have made positive changes in their families' lives using the Whole Life Nutrition approach.

Sally, an overworked and overweight mother of three rambunctious boys, felt her eating and her children's behavior were completely out of control. "I'm so scared they are going to end up fat like me!" Simply by restructuring her day to include a regular schedule of mealtime, bath time, and bedtime routines, Sally cut down the "whine time" that was the theme of all her evenings to almost nothing. Her stress levels decreased radically as her children became more deeply rested and their frantic, oppositional behaviors calmed down a little. It became much easier for her to "get her face out of the chip bag" in the late evenings, and her weight gradually began to decrease.

A couple of young professional parents with two "very finicky" girls (a toddler and a preschooler) came looking for help. They wanted to get their children to start eating vegetables and to boost their own energy levels. Mom "wasn't much of a cook" and lacked confidence in the kitchen, so she often resorted to feeding her family with restaurant food and prepackaged meals. After being walked through some basic cooking techniques, and educated about the less familiar whole foods such as grains, greens, and beans, both parents began experimenting with creating home-cooked meals. As their cooking confidence grew, they brainstormed many ways to make vegetables more appetizing to their girls, as well as many methods for "sneaking the veggies in." In time, both girls were eating a much wider variety of healthy vegetables, often without even knowing it! The parents found their energy improved to such a degree that they were both able to reduce their heavy caffeine habits.

Another overweight mother working with the principles of Whole Life Nutrition helped her young daughters learn to tune in to their bodies' hunger cues for guidance about their food choices and portion control. She delightedly reported that, after checking whether her daughter was "truly hungry again-dinner was just an hour ago," her daughter thought about it and said, "Actually Mommy, I'm hungry for bed!"

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Celestial Arts
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1587613352
• ISBN 13: 9781587613357
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible