This Is Health Food?
Being a dinosaur, I have a seven-day subscription to the dead-tree edition of my local paper, the Herald Times. Over all I think well of the HT, but Wednesdays always try my soul. Why? Because Wednesday is the day the food section of the paper comes out. And invariably, it is festival of reduced fat recipes, recommendations to eat less meat, how to add fiber, all that junk. I recognize that I live in a lefty-trendy state university town, with a high per capita population of vegetarians, and a whole lot of people who have swallowed the whole grain agenda hook, line and sinker, so there's a demand for this stuff. But it's still depressing.
Every few weeks, the Wednesday paper also comes with an insert called "Relish," a food magazine put out by the Publishing Group of America, whoever they are. There was a Relish magazine in my paper this morning. It was the Breakfast Issue. While it had an egg and a strip of bacon on the front (plus some other stuff,) on the very first page was an article "4 ways to make a high-fiber breakfast kids will like." Three of those four involved adding sugar:
* They suggested turning whole wheat bread into cinnamon toast -- hardly revolutionary.
* You could, they said, top a bowl of oatmeal with a Hershey's Kiss. This sounds pretty nasty to me, but then as a kid I was more a brown-sugar-on-oatmeal kind of girl.
* They also suggest mixing bran cereal with pre-sweetened cereal.
In other words, fiber is inherently yucky, so mix it with a bunch of sugar so your kid will eat it.
Two pages later, there's an article called "Bananas and Oatmeal -- All Dressed Up," showcasing a recipe for Oatmeal Cake With Crunchy Topping. To get your kids to eat that all-important oatmeal, with its fiber, you are supposed to add, among other ingredients, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and 1 1/2 cups of self-rising white flour. The resulting cake had a big 2 grams of that magical fiber -- out of 34 total grams of carb. Protein? Just 4 grams. Boy, that'll keep them going, huh? This has Recipe For a Trip to the Principal's Office written all over it.
This all puts me in mind of an article I wrote last summer called It's Not All About What You Eat, in which I compared the current boom of fiber or vitamin laced sugar-bombs to the high-proof "vitamin tonic" called Hadacol. The clear message is "sugar is great, so long as it gets your kid to eat some fiber." I'm here to tell you that fiber is nowhere near as important to your child's health -- or yours, for that matter -- as not eating sugar. Or white flour, for that matter.
It's just so totally wrong-headed, I find myself wondering if I could sell parents fiber-laced liquor, and convince them it was good for their kids.
By the way, that fourth recipe for making fiber more appealing to your kids? Spreading mashed avocado on toast, instead of butter. The kid would get one more gram of fiber from 1/4 avocado, it's true, and I'm a big avocado fan. But how many 3rd graders do you know who would rather have avocado on their toast than good old butter?
You know what you could give the kid that would add as much fiber as any of these suggestions? Some berries. A half-cup of raspberries contains 7 grams of carb, 4 of which are fiber. 10 strawberries have 8 grams, with 3 grams of fiber. Throw in some eggs or cheese, or add that fruit to a vanilla-whey-protein-laced smoothie, and you'll have a high protein, low carb breakfast that will keep your kid, as the ad says -- full and focused all morning.
