I read an article today about a new campaign that Dr. Greene, a prominent pediatrician in the States, has launched. It’s called the ‘WhiteOut’ campaign. He is saying that feeding babies rice cereal is probably one of the reasons childhood obesity is on the rise.
When I had S I started him on rice cereal at 4 months old. He could barely sit up, but that was what I was told to do. He had rice cereal on its own for a while then I introduced other foods mixed in with the rice. When J was born they had just recommended that parents wait till 6 months before giving babies solids, I made it to 5 months then when my extended family caught on that I hadn’t fed her yet they fed her for me! so then I started J on rice cereal, as one does. When B was born I was determined to wait till 6 months before feeding him. He developed eczema so that made it even more important to wait the full 6 months (since babies with eczema tend to have food allergies). When he was 6 months I gave him… you guessed it, rice cereal.
A few days after B started solids, I met an amazing woman who has been a maternity nanny for years and is in the process of writing a book about her method. She asked me why I was giving him baby rice? and why I didn’t just give him proper food? vegetables, fruits? I said “mixed with baby rice?” all confused and stuff. She said “No! Just food”. Come to think of it, my sister gave her daughters porridge I think and never rice cereal.
You see, in hind sight it all makes sense! Obviously whole grain is better for kids than white anything. Baby rice has nearly no nutritional value, and yet it is all we give our kids when they start eating. We get them used to having high starch high fructose foods right from the start that all basically just turn to sugar in the stomach!
I am having a flash back of this woman my mother used to know who was into macrobiotics. And every time she would visit something would be banned from our house…Oh how we hated her.
And now… as we say in arabic “سخرية القدر” I am going to make my kids eat brown everything as much as possible. I used to do this before, then I became lax. I feel like it’s stupid not to really, because this is the time where I do have control over what they eat so if I start them on it now they might get used to it and see no difference. And if they don’t get used to it at least for the few years that I have them I can try and keep them as healthy as possible.
A nutritionalist told me once that she lives her life by the 80-20 rule which is if you do 80% of the things right, your body can cope with the 20% you’re doing wrong. That make sense to me because God knows I hate healthy anything. I’m gonna have to go brown as well :( at least when I’m with the kids…
S is going to freak out big time… will keep you updated.
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