Getting Kids to Try New and Healthy Foods

What is a "veggie"? What are "med"s? What does "so fun" mean? What is "proactive"? Why do we insist on corruping the English language with this mindless garbage? Anyone who uses this infantile gibberish should get a hard slap in the face. Just for the hell of it.

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Veganism Is Direct Action!

"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983).

"A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."

I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today.

According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.

Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.

The following points and facts are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by the mother-daughter writing team of Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

--Albert Einstein

"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly nine billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers.

"Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals.

"Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."

--Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement

When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.

Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.

A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.

Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.

"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses.

"If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."

--Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."

---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease

Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.

The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.

Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.

Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."

--Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."

--William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study

"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings..."

--Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology

Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only ten percent per year, it would free at least twelve million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed sixty million people.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is nearly 75 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is challenging those who think they can still be "meat-eating environmentalists" to go veg, if they really care about the planet.

peta2 is now the largest youth movement of any social change organization in the world.

peta2 has 267,000 friends on MySpace and 91,000 Facebook fans.

A few years ago, PETA was the top-ranked charity when a poll asked teenagers what nonprofit group they would most want to work for. PETA won by more than a 2 to 1 margin over the second place finisher, The American Red Cross, with more votes than the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity combined.

“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in an interview with PETA's Animal Times magazine from 2001, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it.

"Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”

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well a good way to get your kids to eat their vegetable is to raise them vegetarians..were a vegetarian family and have a almost 2 year old..shes never eaten meat in her life and she doesnt care..she LOVES her veggies..cooked or raw! i hardly have a problem with her eating her vegetable since she has been raised on eating them..if you start them off when they are babies they will love it when they are older..plus get rid of the junk food..kids dont want to eat vegetables if they have junk food around to eat and your willing to give it to them if they wont eat...my mom always said "they'll eat if they are hungry" and thats true..when my daughter doesnt like what i made for her i just move her plate away from her..keep her in her seat and then 5-10minutes later give it back to her..she ends up eating it..the worst thing you can do is give in to your kids (when it comes to food)...you have to remember your the parent and the one in charge..if you start to bend and make them whatever they want then they will never eat whats good for them

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My picky eater wanted a Laptop Lunches bento box to take to school for lunch since that's what his friends were using. I hesitated at first but he actually eats what I pack him for lunch now! They say you eat with your eyes first and this has definitely helped me with him. Their bento boxes are bright colors and everything is presented nicely in a box that they open and eat from. Everything has their own containers, so nothing has to touch and nothing gets soggy or squished. They also have a full library of great lunch ideas that have given me a ton of inspiration so that I can keep lunches interesting every day. Who really wants to eat the same thing every day? Now that he tries the healthy foods I pack for his lunch, he's even becoming more adventurous with dinner. You should check out their site: www.laptoplunches.com.

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When you have a child that is sensitve to strong flavors, different textures it is really hard to get them to try anything new. It also isn't always the parents fault. My son ate lots of things as a baby and then started daycare. Thier idea of food is like many of the school cafeterias. Chicken fingers and fries as a veggie. He wouldn't eat something so they didn't push it. When he was a baby he ate if he spit it out it went back in. They told me they can't do that because the child can't be forced to do anything. UGGGGG.
His school doesn't serve food but he does bring a lunch. They have so many restrictions it is very hard to pack a lunch. No Peanuts, nuts, or any other high allergy food. So no citrus, no wheat no milk(?) no strawberries ect. Do they enforce it? Sometimes yes sometimes no. Next year there is a new principal , I am hoping this one is a little more resonable.

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Well, with the advent of Frankenfoods being stocked in our grocery stores, in recent years, with compliments, by Monsanto, the chief GMO architect of foods and veggies with little or no value... I'd say, grow your own or buy ' organic veggies' only. Much safer.
Wash all foods prior to eating. Pesticides etc. need to be removed.
Bon Appeitit.....

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Free Samples are offered for a limited time so when they are posted please take advantage of the offer before it is gone. Look online for "123 Get Samples" where I was able to get healthy product samples.

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At Learning ZoneXpress one of our main goals is to try to get kids to eat healthy foods. Your suggestion to get them started young is a great one. We have a program called Learning About Nutrition through Activities or LANA for short. It’s geared toward young kids and includes lesson plans for child care centers & parents. The books and plush fruit and vegetables (such as Billy Blueberry) encourage kids to try new foods and think of it as a fun adventure. We have found great success with making nutritious food fun.

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