Cow, Bucket, Milk, Farm to Table Game

[Ed Note:  This is a guest post from Angelle Batten, HHC, MEd, of NourishMD.com]

We have a family ritual of giving thanks before each meal. Sometimes it’s rather routine, and other times it feels more alive. During those times, we often talk about the food we’re about to eat (or maybe have all ready started to eat before everyone else if you’re one of my eight-year old sons). We talk about how nature has such a variety of colors – how could there be so many shades of green? Or, about how a particular food was grown – on a vine, in the ground, on a tree? Maybe how an animal was raised – did it get a chance to wander around the farm and eat the kind of food that would have made it healthy and happy, or did it suffer on a farm without seeing the light of day and get force fed grains instead of grass? These feel like some of the most important conversations we have. I want my children to make the connection between their food and their health and the health of the planet. I want them to be grateful for their food. I want them to begin to feel a responsibility to themselves and to our Earth when making choices about what to eat.

A few years ago, I was teaching a group of elementary school children about where different foods come from. When I asked where hamburger comes from, a little boy shouted, “McDonalds!” And he was serious. When I pushed him to think about where McDonalds gets the meat to make the hamburgers, he wasn’t sure. I’ve since realized that lots of children are not aware of where food comes from and it gets even more complicated when so much of the food kids are eating is actually Fake Food – from a science lab or a factory farm.

There are a zillion things we are trying to teach our kids and we each prioritize them differently. One of the things I know though is that you want your child to be healthy. Another thing I know is that what your child eats either contributes to his or her health or to creating illness. So, maybe this season, with the abundance of fresh and local foods, you’ll be inspired to think even more about where your food is coming from and also how to ‘eat a little closer to home’.

One way to teach your child more about where food comes from and how it gets to your table is the Farm-to-Table game.   

While sitting around the dinner table, you say a farm-related word such as "cow".  The next person says a word connected to the previous one.  Continue taking turns until you finally reach the word table.  For example:  cow, farmer, milk, cheese, store, refrigerator, lunchbox, table.  Connect as many words as you can before you reach the final destination of the table.  Then go back and fill in some steps. i.e. add grass before cow and bucket before milk, etc. Help your child learn about all the people, equipment, and places involved in getting REAL food from farm to table. 

Eating locally – from your own garden, a farmers’ market, a CSA, or a roadside farmer’s stand – gives you so many opportunities to have conversations with your children about where our food comes from, how it affects our health and about how farming practices impact the health of our planet. The more conversations we can have with our kids, about anything, the healthier and happier they will be. Talk, eat, and enjoy each other’s company even more than usual this season.

Angelle is a Holistic Health and Parenting Coach who helps parents navigate how to feed their families REAL food and solve health and parenting problems holistically.  Along with Dr. Susan McCreadie, a holistic pediatrician, she shares her expertise and her own parenting journey at www.NourishMD.com.  It’s not always pretty, but it’s always REAL!

Kids Need Healthy Bugs in Their Stomach

photo credit: truth about health

[Ed Note:  This is a guest post from Dr. Susan McCreadie of NourishMD.com]

I often feel like a broken record in my office:

a healthy digestive tract is essential for health.  

A little background on this topic - then I'll talk about how sugar throws off a healthy balanced gut.

We are living organisms and hosts to billions of microorganisms [bugs]; they are on our skin, in our respiratory tract, and line our gastrointestinal and genitourinary systems.  

100,000 billion bacteria live in our digestive tract - 

that is 10 times MORE than ALL the cells in your body!

What are all these bugs doing there?  They are stimulating a healthy immune system, decreasing inflammation throughout the body, and promoting an effective gut barrier (keeping the disease causing organisms and more out).  The beneficial bacteria can also help lower cholesterol, reduce allergy symptoms (eczema, asthma, hay fever, food allergies).  But there's MORE - beneficial bacteria also help prevent diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome and lactose intolerance.

The question is:  Does your gut have plenty of these healthy bacteria?

The food we eat dictates the type of flora in our intestines.  For example, breastfed babies have mostly bifidobacterium (1 type of beneficial bacteria), and after food introduction, the flora changes.  By 2 years of age, a child's flora is similar to an adult.  

Fruits & veggies are important to keeping beneficial bacteria counts HIGH

You knew it had to be true - yes it all comes down to eating lots of fruits & veggies.  The reason why one of the risk factors for colorectal cancer is a diet high in meat and low in fruits & vegetables is because with higher meat consumption, other bacteria such as bacteroides predominate.  

It's all about balance.  Which brings me back around to sugar.  Like meat, sugar isn't bad - it's just too much sugar throws off this healthy balance of beneficial bacteria.  Other critters like some forms of yeast and non-beneficial bacteria may become a problem with too much sugar in one's diet.

The goal is to tip the balance in favor of beneficial bacteria/yeast; this makes it difficult for the harmful competitors to survive!

Hip-hip hooray to veggies! In my family I make sure to prep veggies every week so they are always available for snacks and meals.  Some of the veggie prep I do regularly includes washing and chopping cucumbers,  celery and carrots; steaming broccoli and baking sweet potato fries.  Spending a little time each week doing this means my three girls (and I) will be feeding those healthy bugs inside every single day!

Dr. Susan McCreadie is a board certified pediatrician who practices holistically.  You can find her along with Angelle Batten, HHC, MEd, at www.NourishMD.com.  She shares her expertise and her own parenting journey – not always pretty, but always REAL!

Summer Adventure to Heal Allergies, Asthma and Migraines

this is what the boys toothbrush drawer looks like

Have you noticed I haven't been posting many recipes or any kind of posts of late?  Sorry about that.  I've been distracted by all the learning and preparing  that goes on before you make a major diet shift.

Today we start an elimination diet, a very restrictive elimination diet.  This diet will change the landscape of breakfast, lunch and dinner around here for a while.  I'm embracing all the change.  Our whole family is doing this elimination diet as an alternative to all the steroids my sons inhale and squirt every day to keep them out of the hospital during the pollen months.

In the 2010 allergy season, big boo woke up abruptly with a deep cough that made it hard to go back to sleep.  He missed many days of school, and we spend a good bit of time at the allergist office.  One visit the doc said "I'm glad you brought him in this morning, any longer and he'd be in the hospital with a collapsed lung."  In the 2011 allergy season, little boo had many nights where he woke up coughing and I thought it was croup.  Little boo has has croup ever 4-8 weeks since he was one.  I was told he'd grow out of it by 4, but  he's 5 now and croup episodes seemed to be getting worse.  It wasn't just that seal cough, now his breathing was gurgley.  It sounded like he was breathing water.  One night was particularly scary, when he woke up he couldn't stop coughing.  We tossed our shoes on and ran to urgent care.  I was told they'd stabilize his breathing and then transfer him to the hospital where he'd be admitted for more breathing treatments.  Luckily, even though his blood pulse oxygen level was low at 87%, he responded well to the nebulizers and oral steroids and he was able to go home home with the directions to head right back to the ER if his breathing began to get labored again.  Both boys, narrow miss of hospital.  Eek.

The boys and I also suffer with frequent headaches.  Mine are actually less frequent, than when I was a kid but more of them are migraines.  There don't seem to be too many days when one of the three of us don't have headaches.  When little boo was 4 he started getting migraines.  That broke my heart.  If there is any way for me to give him a life without migraines, I'm doing it.  Migraines are a kill joy.  I suspect food triggers, so we'll see if we can solve that mystery too while we're on the elimination diet.   

Angry about Food
I've spent many months wondering why our clean diet hasn't been enough to keep my kiddos healthy.  I've questioned whether or not the resources we've spent both in money and time to prepare food from scratch have been worth it.  Why go to the trouble to eat clean food, if you don't benefit with good health? Here we are with asthma, allergies and chronic headaches.  If clean food doesn't work, then what does?  After reading Dr Bock's book and Dr Natasha Campbell McBride's book, I actually feel overjoyed that my family has invested in food the way we have.  I believe now that if I hadn't been so careful about what we eat, my kids health would have deteriorated faster and instead of involving mostly their respiratory system it might have impacted their neurological function more.  Thankfully we are not dealing with learning disorders, both boys are at or above school milestones and don't seem to have any trouble functioning in the school environment. 

As an asthma parent you hear all the time that kids grow out of their allergies/asthma.  Of course I hope that's the case for them.  And if they don't?  Little boo didn't grow out of croup when he was supposed to.  I'm not very hopeful they are going to follow that path.   What if they are the kids who don't grow out of asthma/allergies?  Like the kids who approach early adult hood and all the sudden the steroids they've been sucking up all their childhood stop working and the fall prey to a virus or pneumonia and end up sick sick sick in the hospital or worse, dead.   I can't leave their health in the hands of fate, hope and Rx drugs. 

I don't want my kids to maybe grow out of allergies and asthma.  I want them to heal from allergies and asthma.  Is that possible?  I don't know.  Some people claim to be healed from allergies/asthma after they remove trigger  foods from their diet and/or heal their gut dysbiosis.

I'm placing my faith in the healing powers of the human body, and food to put our allergies and asthma behind us.  I honestly don't know if we can heal and get off all the puffers, immunotherapy, steroids and nose squirts.  I don't know if it's possible for my kids to enjoy spring instead of spending the cool, blooming months hacking and wheezing and working hard to stay out of the hospital.   But I have a lot more hope that their bodies can heal than in the Rx drugs getting us through the 15-20 or more allergy seasons between now and the age where they might grow out of asthma.  My dad had mild asthma.  It onset in early adolescence and by the time he was in his mid 20s he could leave his puffers behind.    Big boo was diagnosed at 3 years old, and Little boo at 4 years old.  They have almost a decade on daily meds before they even get to the point where their grandpa started taking medication.  The medications don't control symptoms forever. 

Blog Posts May Be Spotty
I can't predict what this summer will be like for us.  I know I've got a busy business to operate and a lot of learning to do in the kitchen.  I know we'll all be busy getting healed.  Anything that isn't work or healing related may get shoved to the back burner, including the Food with Kid Appeal Blog.  I'm sure I'll eventually write about our experience on the healing diet, but I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to share as it's happening.   If our bodies do a truly amazing thing, and heal from allergies, and headaches I won't be able to keep it a secret.  It's hard not to share understanding, especially the kind of understanding that could relieve many families of the fear, anxiety and discomforts of living with a chronic illness.

GAPS program
The elimination diet we're following is the GAPS program which is based on the SCD diet with a few added directives.  GAPS and SCD are well written about so if you're curious about our healing diet, you can poke around and read many of the online resources covering these programs.

What are You Cooking?
There is always an open invitation for readers and bloggers alike to share stories of your recipes, your feeding the family challenges and successes.  See here for more details on how to submit a guest post, story or article.