Kids & Sugar

I still get those emails from Baby Center weekly regarding how my child is progressing as in what to expect and that sort of thing. They're short but informative and I usually glean something from at least one of the articles that are contained therein.

One such article was about a new study on kids cereal. It talks about how there are only a few handful of cereals that could be considered 'healthy' or nutritionally based for our kids. It 'spoke' to me because lately I've been having struggles getting Slade to eat his veggies but anything sweet he'll gladly indulge in (not that I let him indulge, mind you, but I do give him some of both worlds. I have not given him the really sugary ones that the article points out as being the worst because come on, they really do taste like straight sugar and I don't want to use up Slade's precious tummy space on them.

When I got married and Mark saw how I really ate (a diet that had an evolutionary basis on what foods could fit into a kitchen shared by 5 other roommates coupled with my erratic eating habits besides) he told me that I ate like a 2 year old and I needed to step it up. I ate infrequently, not always very healthy, and there are many a common food that I just never developed a palate for- much to my mother's dismay. As a child you'd find me sitting at the dinner table alone at 8pm while my parents waited me out trying to get me to eat my food. After I threw up spinach my mom just gave up. I eat healthy, just sparingly.

Now that I have a child who is growing quickly but has a small stomach I try to be very careful about what I allow into his body and I try to expose him to as many good foods as possible so that he can develop a taste for them early on as I apparently never did. Unfortunately for him he never tasted many of the healthy foods in my breast milk so he has yet to develop a taste for them now, but I continue to keep exposing him to them in hopes that one day he'll want to be more like his father and eat it all no matter what. (I can just hear Teresa laughing at me saying I watch what Slade eats b/c she is still better than I and does not condescend to feed Maya fruit snacks, Twizzlers, or Doritos just yet but hey- I do it sparingly, I promise!). The genes in my family would work against Slade but the gene's in Marks' are in his favor, so though he may look nothing like his father, perhaps he will obtain something useful otherwise from him.

Anyhow, I was not surprised to learn that Fruit Loops had 50-60% sugar versus the 1% or whatever it was of Cheerios. I worry every day about whether or not Slade has gotten a sufficient amount of his food groups every day according to what he should be in taking for his age group (protein, dairy, breads, combination foods, veggies, fruits, iron...) and I completely have a meltdown over dinner often when he'd rather throw his broccoli on the floor than put some in his mouth...but such is life. Until he figures it out I've got some multi-vitamins to fill in some of the gap and I'll just keep being a veggie pushin momma until he learns to love them! These days I'm all about length of naps, how many times he poops (the consistency, amount, color, etc...), if he's getting enough reading, playing, socializing, exposure to sunlight.... Am I the only mother who goes bonkers over such things? On another note, am I the only mother whose son refuses to sit in a shopping cart at his age? He fights me the whole shopping trip- oh the stares!