The bad news is that our kids consume way too much sugar and other sweeteners every day.
The bad news is that processed foods high in sugar and sweeteners are bad for our kids and bad for the environment. They require more energy to produce, more packaging, more chemicals, more genetically engineered crops.
The bad news is that our taste buds acquire and grow addicted to certain tastes. So if you eat a lot of sweetened food, unsweetened food doesn’t taste as appealing.
The good news is that we can train our taste buds to appreciate more subtle tastes. This takes time and effort, but just as a person who quits smoking can regain their sense of taste and smell more fully, so can the rest of us regain a wider palate of tastes when we eliminate processed foods from our diets. Rather than cut all sweetened food cold turkey, Enviro Girl successfully chose 5 foods to substitute unsweetened and minimally processed to reform her family’s taste buds.
1. Peanut butter. She began by cutting in pure peanut butter in with Skippy Creamy. Incrementally, her children switched entirely over to peanut butter with no added sugar or HFCS.
2. Applesauce. Fruit is naturally sweet. Enviro Girl never adds sugar to the family’s homemade applesauce and everyone eats it with a smile.
3. Macaroni & cheese. Instead of Kraft’s, Enviro Girl switched to Annie’s Macaroni & Cheese products. No added sugar, whole grains, organic ingredients.
4. Instead of buying the kids cookies to snack on, Enviro Girl buys Annie’s Bunny Grahams and Cheddar Bunnies. They satisfy the urge for carbohydrates without unnecessary saltiness and sweetness. Enviro Girl never buys boxes of crackers or cookies without checking the labels. Graham crackers and Wheat Thins are just as palatable to kids as Oreos and Hostess Cakes.
5. When her kids want fruity snacks, Enviro Girl feeds them fruit. Not canned fruit. Not fruit floating in fruit-flavored gelatin. Not fruit by the foot or fruit roll ups or fruit snacks. Just fruit. By the age of five Enviro Girl’s kids recognized how “watermelon” flavored taffy and “raspberry” flavored Sno-Cones tasted “fake.” They knew this because their palates had been trained to recognize real tastes found in nature, not manufactured tastes.
6. To quench thirst, Enviro Girl gives her kids a choice of water, milk or 100% fruit juice. Soda and Kool Aid and other sweet drinks are only consumed on special occasions, usually at other people’s houses. Surprisingly, Enviro Girl’s kids prefer water or milk when asked.
7. The condiments in Enviro Girl’s cupboards are as pure and natural as she can buy them–100% maple syrup, organic ketchup, butter, organic salad dressings without added sugar (often she makes her own). Check those labels–many innocuous sauces and sides have sugar added, from BBQ sauce to mayonnaise.
Enviro Girl knows kids can be picky eaters. She lets her kids eat Halloween candy and birthday cakes. She’s not a zealot, but she controls the pantry and the fridge at her house and her kids eat what they find in those places. She’d never recommend eliminating ALL sugar because she thinks kids would revolt and hate healthy food instead of embracing a healthy balance. And remember, if the label says “sugar free,” that’s no guarantee. A lot of other sweetners take the place of sugar in processed foods, so read the ingredients.
Share with us, reader. What healthy alternatives do you feed your family? What junk food would we never find in your pantry?
You’d never find any kind of fake fruit, but you will find cookies and ice cream. I’ve found the sugar challenge to actually get harder as my kids have become teenagers. Soda used to be a rare, special-occasion treat, now, for my 15-year-old son especially, it’s an almost daily after-school snack — especially since they sell them in his high school’s vending machines. And gatorade is at all the sports practices/games. I just have to hope that they know the nutritional basics I’ve been trying to teach them, and that they’ll make the right choices as they get older.
I’m really working on fresh fruits and cooking from scratch. The hardest sell is my teenager; he doesn’t think fresh food is cool or sweet.
A couple years ago, I started making a conscious effort to eliminate HFCS from my kitchen and pantry. It’s been made easier by the fact that I shop almost exclusively at organic grocery stores and the farmers’ market. Still, HFCS is sneaky and insidious and still occasionally slips into our house — usually when my husband stops by a conventional grocery store to pick up a few things.
I’ve discussed the evils of HFCS with my children, who are in agreement that it’s to be avoided. A great moment occurred a few weeks ago when my family was on vacation and we stopped at a gas station and went into the convenience store for juice. Without my prompting, my girls carefully read the labels on the bottles of juice and correctly identified which contained HFCS and which juice was pure and therefore safe to drink.
Oh gah. Those bunnies are like crack. We go through at least a box a week… my kids have no idea what “animal crackers” are. When asked if he’d like a few at the doctor last week, the boy responded “You mean bunnies?” *snerk*
I’ve craved to Ye Olde Blue Box on occasion, but am happy to report the fam prefers the homemade version of mac & cheese.
HFCS – we shall hunt you down and eliminate you!