Feeding Your Child: Junk Food

by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., author of Feeding: The Brazelton Way

Stacked high in supermarkets, convenience stores, and even drug stores and gas stations—and tempting your children as they wait in the checkout line—junk food is everywhere. It's in the fast food restaurants on the strip malls that have overtaken many neighborhoods, and it's on television, selling itself to your children. Junk food even masquerades as "healthy," "low-fat," and "all-natural" food.

What is a parent to do?

First, it helps to understand what you are up against. Our children's tastes are overwhelmed by the advertising they see on television. But you don't have to let them watch it! Rent videos, watch commercial-free stations, read books together to protect your child from being lured into the sugar, salt, and fat habits that come with soda pop, chips, candy, sweetened cereals, fast food burgers and pizzas. The average young child spends more time in front of the television than she does in school. Active sports and active play are being replaced by television viewing for many young children. Television-watching time should also be limited to prevent weight gain caused by inactivity. Never let a child eat while watching television—or see you doing it!

Fast food chains everywhere make junk food attractive to children and parents with toy surprises, playgrounds, waving balloon figures, drive-through lanes, and cheap and ready short orders. Busy parents fall for them, especially when a child wears them down with begging and whining. Take-out dinners are easy. No preparation, and no clean-up for tired parents. Of course it is harder to make dinner at home, and harder still to get the children to help. But how much more rewarding!

Children find fast food restaurants exciting. Tomato ketchup on the hamburger. Lots of little packages to open up, spill—and throw away. Doughnuts and buns, sweet carbonated drinks, fries with salt (and often added sugar!), and plenty of fat all become an unhealthy habit. Very soon, a child won't eat unless she can have sweetened drinks, salty foods with ketchup, and desserts—all readily available, and all advertised on TV at every break.

Once a child's taste buds have become accustomed to these overpowering tastes, you may have lost her to these foods. These foods and others like them are likely to lead to cavities, obesity, and diabetes. They fill a child up with "empty calories" and do not offer the vitamins and other nutrients children need for the healthy development of their brains and bodies. Healthy foods—with less salt, less sugar, fewer and healthier fats, and more varied tastes and textures—won't stand a chance when in direct competition with junk food.

Don't make a big deal about it, but stock your kitchen with appealing foods that are also nutritious, not junk food. Your children will probably get plenty of junk food at their friends' homes, and even in some schools where the big soda pop and fast food companies have bought their way in. Simply say, "Chips and soda are fine once in a while, but we don't need them every day." Say much more, and you'll only pique your child's interest in these forbidden fruits. There is no harm in an occasional ice cream cone or handful of chips. The trouble with junk food is that it can all too easily take over and turn into a junk food diet. This can certainly be avoided since there are plenty of healthy recipes—in cookbooks and on the Internet—for easy-to-make, affordable, and most important of all, tasty snacks and meals to appeal to children.

We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic in the United States, and childhood diabetes, too, is on the rise. Inactivity is one reason, but junk food is also one of the main causes.

Very busy families who rely on take-out dinners should know that some are healthier than others: salad, fruit salads, certain ethnic foods such as Chinese dishes with vegetables and steamed rice (brown is better than white), and Greek specialties such as stuffed grape leaves, pita bread and hummus, or "wraps" with lean meat, chopped vegetables, and cheese.

Excerpted from:

Excerpted from Feeding: The Brazelton Way © 2004 by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., and Joshua D. Sparrow, M.D. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Perseus.

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