Packing your child a nutritious lunch is as easy as going to your pantry and refrigerator. Lots of good ideas are just waiting to be discovered. From bread to carrot sticks and granola bars to pudding, there is bound to be some sort of combination to make a good, healthy lunch enjoyable to your child.

All children have different tastes and preferences. Knowing your child’s likes and dislikes regarding each food group is a must. A meat item such as turkey or chicken breast is fantastic. It doesn’t matter if your child likes it on a sandwich; many children will eat it plain rather than on a sandwich. Peanut butter is a great source of protein and folic acid. Add some jelly for a child that has a sweet tooth. Sometimes that sweetness will satisfy your child’s want for a rich dessert.

Children generally prefer white bread, and it will not hurt them to eat it. Toast the bread, too. Try substituting a very mild wheat bread or even wheat crackers. Children like to make their own little sandwiches using crackers, cheeses, and sandwich meats. The peanut butter on wheat crackers is an excellent idea as well.

Most children prefer cheese on their sandwiches, so add a slice of real American or Kraft Deluxe Sharp Cheddar. As you introduce new foods at home, keep in mind the different kinds of cheeses like Monterrey Jack, Colby, Swiss, Mozzarella, and Provolone. According to your child’s preferences, pack several slices of cheese for a serving of dairy along with a peanut butter sandwich. If your child does not like cheese, try a yogurt of your child’s preference.

Know the kinds of vegetables that your child will eat. Carrot and celery sticks are a widely used snack. Also try raisins, apple slices, orange slices, banana halves, and even pickles. Though prepackaged fruit servings are sold in grocery stores, it is often better and more nutritional to cut the fruit and vegetables yourself. Don’t be afraid to pack nontraditional fruits such as watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries, fresh pineapple, and kiwi slices. With such yummy things to eat, your child’s lunch may be subject to a bit of envy from other children and even teachers.

Other ideas include dry cereal like Cheerios or Chex, peanuts, granola bars, or baked chips. These serve as the “chips” part of a packed lunch. Check the nutritional content of the packages before you decide which types of “chips” to pack. Make your own Chex mix with pretzels, Cheez-Its, yogurt raisins, Cheerios, peanuts, dried cranberries, banana chips, etc. There are so many possible combinations. Add some M&Ms to the mix and alleviate the need for a dessert. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone eats so everyone has an opinion about food. But if health is the objective, mere opinion doesn’t count nor does fad or majority rule.

Most people think the average cooked diet based upon official food pyramids is just fine. Some eat predominantly fast food. Others advocate veganism (eating only plant foods), or lacto-ova vegetarianism (plants plus milk and eggs). There are also proponents of special foods such as fresh juices, soybean products and macrobiotic cooked grains and rice.

Everyone can make arguments on behalf of their beliefs. They can cite examples of people who have escaped disease and lived long. Some argue morality and ethics, such as those who say sentient animal life should not be sacrificed for food. Others set their eating practices by the standards of holy writ that eschew certain forms of foods and sanctify others. Others just eat what tastes good and that’s logic enough for them.

Eating beliefs seem to take on an almost religious character. People feel guarded and pretty zealous about food and don’t like others meddling. But since health is intimately linked to what we take into our mouths, thinking, honest reflection and willingness to change are in order.

It is easy to be deceived because wrong food choices may not manifest their full impact until late in life. Nutrition can even pass through genetically to affect later generations. In this regard, food ideas are also like religion in that hundreds of different sects can each claim to have the truth. But none of them needs to fear disproof since adjudication will not occur until everyone is dead and gone to the afterlife.

The body is extremely adaptable and will attempt to survive on whatever it is given. If the food is incorrect there is usually no immediate harm. But the body will eventually be stressed beyond its ability to adapt, resulting in disease, degeneration and loss of vitality. Unfortunately, such consequences are so far removed in time from the eating regimen that caused them that few understand the relationship.

So be careful before subscribing to bold claims about what is or is not good to eat. The true test of any health idea lies too far out into the future. Our best hope then is to be well grounded philosophically before we slide our legs under the dinner table.

How do we develop a healthy eating philosophy and sort through all of the competing eating ideas? I am going to explain here a very simple principle that is so reasonable you need not even look for proofs. Follow along with me and see if you don’t agree.

Consider the following three premises:

1. Just like a tree is genetically adapted to absorb certain nutrients from soil, and a lion is genetically adapted to thrive on prey, and a deer is genetically adapted to browse on vegetation, so too, are humans genetically adapted to certain kinds of food.

2. The majority of foods we are presently exposed to are a product of the Agricultural/Industrial Revolution and occupy a small part of the genetic history of humans. (Refer back to the 276-mile time-line in which only a few inches represent industrial-type eating practices.)

3. The natural, genetically adapted to food for humans must predate them. In other words, how could humans exist before the food they needed to survive existed? We were completely developed biologically prior to agriculture and any method of food processing. That means whatever diet archetypal humans ate was the perfect diet because that was the diet responsible for the existence and development of the incredibly complex human organism. That diet was the milieu, the environmental nutritional womb, if you will, from which we sprung.

If you consider these three premises, the logical conclusion derived from them is that the best food for humans is that food which they would be able to eat as is, as it is found in nature.

Our tissues were designed to be bathed in food nutrients derived from natural living foods, not with dyes, preservatives, synthetics, nutritiously barren starches and refined sugars and oils. Make no mistake; if we are not eating according to this principle, our bodies are in constant deficiency, imbalance and toxin exposure. The result of generations ignoring this principle is an epidemic of obesity, chronic degenerative diseases and the exhaustion of our digestive processes.

A feature of all natural food is that it is raw – alive if you will. This is consistent with the Law of Biogenesis that says life can only come from preexisting life. Life begets life. In spite of scientists’ dreams to the contrary, we have never observed life springing from non-life, nor have we ever even been able to create life from non-life in a laboratory. If we eat living foods, we enhance our own life. If we eat dead, devitalized foods we become devitalized and dead. Granted, this will not happen all at once, but as the adaptive reserves are exhausted we become just like the dead food we eat.

So a fundamental feature of our natural diet was that it was raw. Yes, even the meats, organs, eggs and insects – raw. Remember, we’re far back in time, even before the use of fire (much less the microwave, stove, oven, grill, deep fryer or extruder). Studies of the diets of past cultures and today’s still-primitive societies reveals that they ate exactly as their genes and the environment dictated.

We were not suddenly dropped from outer space onto Earth with fry pans, matches and rotisseries. We began on the forest floor, not in a line to a fast food counter. We had only our natural bodies in a natural world, exactly like every other creature. Every other organism on Earth eats raw foods exactly like they are found in nature. Do you think nature doesn’t notice our decision to change all that?

Would tofu qualify? No, because tofu is found nowhere in nature. Would oatmeal porridge qualify? No, because oatmeal porridge is found nowhere in nature. Would hamburgers, French fries, pop, breakfast cereals, granola, canned foods, candy, sports drinks, muscle building powders, vitamins and minerals, mashed potatoes, carrot cake, croissants, bagels, Jolly Ranchers, Ding Dongs, Cocoa Krispies, Good ‘n Plentys or Fig Newtons qualify? No. None of these are found as such in nature.

For those of you who are by now panicking (if not gagging) at the thought of eating raw foods, yes, there is danger of food-borne pathogens. But if you are careful and clean, the danger is far less than the danger of a lifetime eating devitalized processed foods. Raw natural foods must be safe or our ancestors would have not survived and we would not exist!

It is a choice. When faced with a choice, why not opt for the wisdom of nature? Is it not strange we are the only creatures on the planet to cook our foods? Is it a wonder, given this, that we succumb with every imaginable chronic degenerative disease virtually unknown in creatures eating the raw natural diet? Read the rest of this entry »