You may have heard that this is a particularly tough flu season. Simple actions like choosing healthy foods can boost the immunity of yourself and your family to give all of you the best chance of fighting off flu and colds.

Your Immune System

Your immune system defends your body against disease by ridding your body of foreign invaders. Your immune system is not a constant, though. Your actions can boost or inhibit your immunity. If your body is already struggling because you are tired, for example, you will have more difficulty fighting off a cold.

The simplest way to boost your immunity this winter is to understand which foods provide your body with the nutrients it needs to function well.

Basic Immunity-building Pantry

Foods help your immune system through the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients that help the system function. The most important immunity building vitamins are: Beta carotene (increases number of cells fighting infection), Vitamin C (increases white blood cells and antibodies), and Vitamin E (increases B-cells that destroy bacteria). Immunity building minerals are zinc (helps white blood cells reproduce quickly) and selenium (increases fighting cells). Don’t run out and buy a supplement pill, though. You can get all of these vitamins and minerals in food.

Stock your pantry with colorful fruits and vegetables. Carrots and sweet potatoes have beta carotene. Citrus has vitamin C. Blueberries, cranberries, pomegranate seeds, cherries, and other dark blue, purple, and red fruits are high in antioxidants, which reduce inflammation. Elderberries are particularly good for helping you fight colds and flu as an antiviral an antioxidant. Mushrooms have selenium and many other minerals an vitamins. Garlic is a great flu fighter with antioxidants and other immune-building properties.

Choose a variety of proteins. Beans, nuts, fish, and lean meats can all contribute toward your immune-boosting diet. Almonds provide vitamin E. Salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Sunflower seeds have selenium, as do many nuts, whole grains, and seeds.

Add herbs and spices to your foods. Medicinal herbs, like echinacea, goldenseal, and astragalus, are all immune boosters that fight viruses or increase the efficiency of white blood cells. You don’t want to add these to your foods, though. Culinary spices, like cayenne, oregano, and ginger, are also bacteria fighters. Use them fresh if you can, but use them in any form. Even black pepper can give you a little immune boost.

Every Day Foods

The range of immunity building foods is broad. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to tell you that only 5 or 10 or 50 of them are best for you because there is enough variety for you to choose your favorites. Still, I am going to suggest a few foods that will help you build immunity every day.

Smoothies. Start your morning with smoothies. Add dark fruits and vegetables, almond milk or yoghurt as a base, a few ice cubes to make it cool and reduce the intensity. That’s it! Just choose a colorful collection every morning.

Soup. With lunch, have a cup of soup every day. Chicken or vegetable broth both make a good base, but make sure you add garlic, perhaps ginger, lots of herbs and spices, and a few colorful vegetables.

Salad. With dinner every night, have leafy greens. Spinach and romaine lettuce are both very nutritious. Choose your dressing carefully. Better yet, make your own from olive oil, vinegar, and herbs. Each of these gives you a little boost. Maybe sometimes you have cooked kale with cider vinegar instead, but make sure you eat leafy greens every day.

Whole Grains. If you are going to eat cereal or bread, make them rich and nutty. The variety of grains, nuts, and seeds will help you over time.

Doesn’t that seem simple? It is. Boosting your immunity really isn’t difficult to understand or to do. These choices are easy to make every day, and the benefits build over time.

Keep in Mind

Avoid processed ingredients like white sugar and bleached wheat flour. Just avoiding those two will help you avoid many processed foods that have been drained of most nutritional value.

Get enough sleep. Yes, that isn’t a food, but rest is important enough to the healthy functioning of your immune system that you can undermine all of the good work you do with nutritious food by not getting enough sleep. Sleep for your health.

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During pregnancy, you need more vitamins and minerals, more protein, more omega-3 fatty acids, more amino acids. You need more than just extra calories; you need nutrient-dense extra calories.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I met a midwife in my town who was over 90 years old. She had attended births for even some of my older friends and acquaintances. She was the grandmother protector of all midwives in town. Her only hard rule for eating during pregnancy was her requirement that a pregnant woman have at least one leaf of romaine lettuce every day. That made me laugh, but I ate the lettuce every day. It turns out that romaine is nutrient-, protein-, vitamin-, and mineral-dense. My midwife, considerably younger, asked all of her patients to drink tea every day, and she started every office visit with stinging nettle tea. So, I also drank a lot of nettle tea, raspberry leaf tea, and oat straw tea, all of which both science and tradition tell us are very good for a pregnant woman.

To boost your nutrition during pregnancy, in addition to eating home-cooked whole foods, drink tea. You can switch teas depending on your needs in the moment, and you will help yourself and your baby.

Feeling Queasy?
Ginger and mint. If you are experiencing morning sickness or mild nausea, during pregnancy or any other time, both ginger and mint can help settle your stomach. When I was a child, at the first hint of me having a stomach ache, my mother went outside to pick mint from around our house and made tea. She continued to do this for me then for my children.

Organic Morning Wellness Tea from Earth Mama Angel Baby includes ginger and spearmint along with a hint of peppermint, chamomile and lemon balm.

Feeling Anxious?
Lemon balm and chamomile. Lemon balm, especially with other herbs, can help reduce the feeling of stress and anxiety, and chamomile is so gently calming that many mothers use it with their babies and children as well.

Organic Peaceful Mama Tea from Earth Mama Angel Baby includes tension easing lemon balm, calcium rich oat straw, calming chamomile, and a whiff of red raspberry leaf and orange peel.

Getting Ready for the Birth?
Red Raspberry Leaf. The nutritious properties of red raspberry leaf are great for all women, but it is particularly good as a tonic for muscles of the pelvic area.

Third Trimester Tea from Earth Mama Angel Baby includes 100% organic herbs, including red raspberry leaf (an all-around great pregnancy herb), iron-rich stinging nettle, calming chamomile and rosehips (both full of vitamins and bioflavonoids), and calcium filled oat straw.

Drinking herbal teas is a gentle, easy way to ensure that you are getting more of the vitamins and minerals you need during pregnancy from natural foods. Better nutrition is good for you and for your baby. Drink up!

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Have you been told to avoid certain foods while you are breastfeeding? If so, let’s back up and ask why. Unless there is a specific reason YOU, your baby, or your family should not be exposed to certain foods, you don’t need a list of foods to avoid. You don’t need to avoid any foods if both you and your baby are happy.

The rules of good nutrition still apply. Favor unprocessed, whole foods. Buy organic any foods that are known to have the most pesticide residues. Get your vitamins and minerals from food sources when possible. Eat a lot of dark, colorful vegetables and fruits for the micronutrients.

If you wonder whether you are getting enough nutrition from your foods, sip tea while you are nursing. (Though, be careful never to hold a hot cup of tea over your baby. One kick and you can have an ugly accident. Let the tea cool off before you drink it.) If your milk supply is adequate, you could choose to drink nutrient-packed Third Trimester Tea from Earth Mama Angel Baby. This is a blend of red raspberry leaf, stinging nettle, chamomile, rose hips, and oat straw. All of these are great during pregnancy and during nursing. If you need to boost your milk production, Organic Milkmaid Tea included traditional herbal galactagogues, including fennel, fenugreek, anise seed and caraway seed, and mineral packed nettle and red raspberry leaf. Don’t drink this one while pregnant or if you already have enough milk. Whether you sip tea or water, having a drink nearby while you are nursing helps you to get enough water.

Will eating a lot of garlic flavour your breastmilk? Sure it will, but that isn’t a problem, if your baby likes garlic-flavoured breastmilk.

Can you eat peanuts and other nut butters? Sure, if you don’t have a history of peanut allergies in your family and your baby isn’t bothered. It won’t cause your baby to develop an allergy, and nuts (along with avocados, olives, salmon, and other oily foods) give you healthy fats you need.

Most of the foods that you might have heard you shouldn’t eat while breastfeeding (minus the nasty foods none of us should eat), is being eaten right now by a breastfeeding mother who is experiencing no problems. Your reactions and your babies reactions can be different.

If your baby is feeling gassy or having an unexplained diaper rash, the food you eat could potentially be the cause. You can eliminate foods that have been known to cause problems with some breastfeeding babies, then you can re-introduce slowly to check whether that was really the problem.

In the end, the only food my first baby seemed sensitive to me eating was tomatoes. Other foods often put in the same category, oranges and lemons, caused no problems at all. I don’t love tomatoes myself, so it was no hardship to give them up, and it helped my daughter avoid diaper rash. My second child had no sensitivities, and he still has no food sensitivities.

Your baby will be different. Start by assuming you can eat anything unless you have a family history of specific allergies. I found that it helped to keep a journal of my food and my baby’s reactions when I thought there might be a problem. I continued that same journal once I introduced solid foods. If you have already dealt with allergies, you are probably familiar with the idea of keeping a food journal of foods eaten and symptoms noticed. If you do have allergies, look over La Leche League’s list of articles on allergies and breastfeeding for specific help.

If you notice no discomfort in your baby, go ahead and eat curry, chocolate, and whatever else you love.

For more details on the foods that you don’t necessarily need to avoid while breastfeeding, read Kelly Mom’s post on foods to eat while nursing. She busts breastfeeding food myths with science.

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Have you heard “The Toxic Truth about Sugar”? Last week, a group of scientists published their research on sugar in the journal Nature. Sugar, they found, can trigger “liver toxicity and a host of other chronic diseases.” They suggest using the models of intervention used to reduce alcohol and tobacco use to similarly reduce sugar use.

A lot of our customers talk about how they have created sugar-free nutrition for their families. This isn’t just a would-be-nice dream. When you consider the damage sugar can cause, keeping your children away from sugar becomes a high priority for their current and future health.

So, where do you start?

Know Sugar When You See It

Start in your pantry. Look at every food item and train yourself to find the hidden sugars that you didn’t even realize were hiding in your kitchen. Look for:

• Agave Nectar
• Brown Sugar
• Cane Crystals
• Corn Sugar
• Corn Sweetener
• Corn Syrup
• Crystalline Fructose
• Dextrin
• Dextrose
• Evaporated Cane Juice
• Fructose
• Fruit Juice Concentrate
• Galactose
• Glucose
• High-fructose Corn Syrup
• Honey
• Hydrogenated Starch
• Invert Sugar
• Lactose
• Malt Syrup
• Maltose
• Mannitol
• Maple Syrup
• Molasses
• Polyols
• Raw Sugar
• Sorbitol
• Sorghum
• Sucrose
• Sugar
• Syrup
• Turbinado Sugar
• Xylitol

That might not even be all of the hidden sugars. I compiled the list from several sources calling attention to added sugar on food labels.

And, Know Where Those Sugars Hide

Next step, look beyond the obvious places to find places that you just can’t believe would have added sugars. Look for sugar in toothpaste, cough syrup, chewing gum, mints, flavoured yogurt, vitamin water, bottled tea, juice drinks, packaged cereals, instant cereals, granola bars, applesauce, preserved fruit, salad dressing, barbeque sauce, tomato sauce, baked beans, soup, sugar-cured meats, as well, of course, as candies, cakes, and everything else you already know has sugar in it.

Have you found sugars in most of your canned, boxed, bottled, and otherwise packaged foods? To avoid the hidden sugars, start your family’s sugar-free journey by giving up prepared and packaged foods. It’s a simple and essential move.

Maybe you still want sweets (like the gooey sugar-free brownies we linked to on Saturday on the Making Love in the Kitchen blog). There are an abundance of websites and cookbooks that will help you find substitute sweets or sweets with less sugar, but they are still sweets.

Stop Looking for Substitutes

In the end, I suggest that rather than looking for substitutes to satisfy a sweet tooth, you get to the root of the problem and eat without the sweet. Pull your family’s natural human appetite for sweets back to levels the body can handle and satisfy that appetite with natural sweeteners like fruit, dairy, or even a bit of honey or maple syrup.

Start now so your children won’t expect sweets. By now, I mean even if you are just pregnant. Start from the first minute and the minute before that to bring your family’s nutritional focus to whole foods. Help your young children value the tasty, natural flavors of fresh foods without additives. (Read “My Sugar-free Son” at Mothering.com.)

Families are going sugar free by managing then shifting expectations about sweets. The amount of sugar consumed by the average North American is staggering. You don’t have to accept that as normal or inevitable for your children. Start with substitutions then move on to a whole new way of looking at food. You’ll feel great, and your children will grow without the hindrance of all of those toxic calories.

Image © Giedrius Zaleckas | Dreamstime.com

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Where does Nature Mom go when she needs allergy-free recipes and clear reasoning for changing her eating habits? Making Love in the Kitchen with Meghan Telpner.

I seriously can’t recommend her site/blog enough. And if you are lucky enough to be local (she’s in Toronto), her cooking classes completely changed my boring, tasteless cooking void of all our allergy foods. I’m still learning everyday.

1. Don’t Take No for an Answer

A diagnosis of disease is not the last word. You have control of your health. It’s best if you start now, before allergy or disease force you to change your habits. If you are already facing disease, nutrition-dense foods will only help. No, I’m not claiming that you should forgo allopathic medicine, but you can improve body and mind through diet.

This is one of the most important lessons I learn from Meghan Telpner. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and chose meditation, acupuncture, and a whole foods diet rather than surgery or medication. After six years, she is symptom free. During that time, she became a certified nutritionist and opened her own cooking school in Toronto.

2. Create a Guide that Excites You

For Meghan, her creed is her philosophy of living. Her creed is the image you see above. You might find this inspiring, but I want to tell you that part of the power of this creed is you flipping the switch and realizing that YOU can and you MUST create your own beautiful philosophy of living so that you are realizing your own dreams. Start here if you like, but stretch it, test it, try out a few new things, and build a philosophy that makes your heart sing.

3. You Can Still Eat Brownies

Are you worried that your food will be boring if you remove sugar and other processed ingredients? Really? Well, stop that right now. If anything, conventional, processed foods are a crutch that keeps you from being creative with food. If you need to be convinced that you will be fine in a future with healthful foods, Butternut Squash Ooo-eee Goo-eee Brownies will ease your transition.

When you hang out on the Parenting by Nature Facebook page, you will find that Nature Mom and others mention Making Love in the Kitchen a lot. Join us!

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You might wonder whether you need to eat more, eat different foods, or drink more water during lactation. How much does your nutrition effect your baby? What should you eat while you are breastfeeding?

The short answer is very simple: your normal healthy diet is good already.

That’s the catch, though. Many of us don’t eat a consistently healthy diet. You probably watched what you ate during pregnancy, and you should continue to make the most healthy choices during breastfeeding. This is a good time to solidify eating habits that will serve you and your family well over time.

In recent years, research has confirmed that even if some nutrients are missing in a woman’s daily diet, she will still produce milk that will help her child grow. There is very little difference in the milk of healthy mothers and mothers who are severely malnourished.

Sheri Lyn Parpia Khan, “Maternal Nutrition during Breastfeeding,” NEW BEGINNINGS 21:2 (March-April 2004), 44.

A Good Diet

A good diet for breastfeeding women looks a lot like a good diet for the whole family. The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine did a thorough analysis of Nutrition During Lactation. In their recommendations for clinical implementation of their guidelines, they offered the following “Special Recommendations for Lactating Women.”

• Avoid diets and medications that promise rapid weight loss.
• Eat a wide variety of breads and cereal grains, fruits, vegetables, milk products, and meats or meat alternates each day.
• Take three or more servings of milk products daily.
• Make a greater effort to eat vitamin-A-rich vegetables or fruit often. Examples of vitamin-A-rich foods include carrots, spinach or other cooked greens, sweet potatoes, and cantaloupe.
• Be sure to drink when you are thirsty· You will need more fluid than usual.
• If you drink coffee or other caffeinated beverages, such as cola, do so in moderation. Two servings daily are unlikely to harm the infant. Caffeine passes into the milk.

Nutrition During Pregnancy and Lactation: An Implementation Guide, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, 1992.

Even this advice needs to be looked at carefully, since a vegetarian mother will likely get her calcium from almonds, spinach, or other calcium-rich foods rather than from animal milk. You don’t need to drink cow’s milk to make human milk.

Supplements

You aren’t likely to need vitamin supplements if you eat a nutrient-dense diet. Again, whether your usual diet is giving you the nutrition you need can be an issue. You may want to evaluate your overall food intake to see how it compares with daily recommendations and adjust to increase your intake of particular kinds of foods.

Lactating women who meet the RDA for energy are likely to meet the RDA for all nutrients except calcium and zinc if the nutrient density of their diets is close to the average for young U.S. women.

Nutrition During Lactation, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, 1991.

Drink Water

The usual advice is to drink more water, but you don’t need to over-think (or over-drink) this. Your body will tell you when you need more water. Drink when you are thirsty. To be sure that you have water available when you are thirsty, keep water close by at your usual nursing stations. Keep a water bottle in your diaper bag. If the water is available, you can easily drink when you feel the need.

Does it have to be water? No. Your body will work with whatever fluids you drink, though you should avoid sweet and caffeinated drinks as you would when pregnant. That is just part of a healthy diet.

Image © Lightkeeper | Dreamstime.com

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The problem that astonishes me the most—and slaps me in the face through experience— is what happens to a child’s attention when they drink liquid candy. I can see that a child jacked-up on sugar will not be able to pay as much attention to their learning. For some children—for my children— sugar and the other ingredients in soda send them into a temporary state of buzzing from thing to thing, distracted and unable to retain information let alone engage a subject and their own natural curiosity. That’s just the surface. There is a lot more going on when children drink soda.

The Issues

Among the issues that come up in arguments against children’s excessive consumption of soft drinks are:

• intake high calorie, calories empty of nutrition
• replace nutritious calories, including, according to AAP. the calcium that comes from milk consumption (though there are many other sources of calcium in a well-balanced diet than cow’s milk)
• not replacing but just adding on calories, which has made soda consumption a major risk factor in obesity
• intake of refined sugar and other processed food-like substances
• intake of substances not naturally occurring in the foods that your body has evolved to process
• overload the body with too much to process, which for some can mean Type-2 (formerly called adult-onset) diabetes
• intake of caffeine with jitteriness and increased heart rate similar to that adults experience
• the diuretic effect of caffeine, which can lead to dehydration
• risk of heart disease
• development of dental caries and enamel erosion (AAP)
• intake of high-fructose corn syrup
• intake of artificial sweeteners

The American Beverage Association counters each of these points (and why wouldn’t they) with a series of eye-rollingly unlikely scenarios that would actually build a child’s health through the consumption of soft drinks. Rather than accepting and accommodating excuses, why not just start over with the nutritious foods and drinks we know our children need?

The Problems with Soda in School

Among the problems with soda in schools are the nutrition issues (taking in the bad and replacing the good), the attention issues (setting up a physiological reality that does not prepare children to learn), and the commercialization and brand experimentation issues (that gives over their consumption habits and brand loyalty for life). These are not small or simple issues, and those fighting to keep soda in schools work hard through lobbying and public relations to convince us that everything is just fine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement on “Soft Drinks in Schools” in which they specifically addressed vending contracts and nutrition policies. Not surprisingly, national soft drink associations have disputed the policy from pediatricians in the past five and a half years since the statement was released. AAP reaffirmed this policy earlier this year, so the pediatricians have not backed down. See the full statement for details and recommendations.

Contracts with school districts for exclusive soft drink rights encourage consumption directly and indirectly. School officials and parents need to become well informed about the health implications of vended drinks in school before making a decision about student access to them. A clearly defined, district-wide policy that restricts the sale of soft drinks will safeguard against health problems as a result of overconsumption.

One of the most often used arguments against removing soda vending machines from schools is funding. How will schools survive without vending machine contracts, we’re asked. Soda is a cop out for school funding, a short-term gain that creates several short-term and long-term problems. Though removing the crutch of soda can create short-term funding issues, the long-term gains in putting funding back were it belongs are worth the change.

The problems and the solutions seem clear enough. The arguments in favor of leaving vending machines in schools fail to persuade most. Implementation of solutions, however, is slow.

Bans on Soda in Schools

Health effects of soda are similar for adults and children, but efforts to curb soda drinking have focused on children, specifically on children in schools since these somewhat closed environments have been the locations of the aggressive marketing campaigns to capture a brand-loyal (and substance addicted) audience while they are young and vulnerable.

Bans and limitations of soda in schools are well underway over the past decade. Policies have come about through industry initiatives, medical association pressure, legislative and regulatory moves at every level of government, school board or school district policy, and decisions made in individual schools.

Bipartisan efforts on the federal level in the U.S. to either ban junk food and soda (1999) or even just issue guidelines (2004) have met with bipartisan defeat. So, the regulation of junk foods and sweet drinks has gone more local as school-by-school and now state-by-state guidelines and laws are put in place to limit children’s consumption of these empty and even (destructive) food-like substances. In every case, those who support a ban are up against heavily funded lobbying by the manufacturers of those junk food-substitutes.

The two most influential actions in recent efforts to ban sodas in schools have been the AAP statement in 2004 and the compromises worked out by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation in 2006.

In Canada, the soft drink industry itself (Refreshments Canada) pulled out of schools in 2004 following the AAP statement. That is, they pulled out of some schools—elementary and junior high schools.

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a partnership between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, pinpointed soda in schools as a major risk factor for obesity, and they set out to make a change. The Alliance, major soft drink producers, and the American Beverage Association created “School Beverage Guidelines” and a program to educate school children about those guidelines. The Alliance and their co-leader California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger have continued to push this agenda for the past three years. Though limitations on soda sales in schools were welcomed by children’s health activists, for many this compromise with the soda producers themselves didn’t go far enough in ensuring that children eat only nutritious foods in schools. Some have even claimed that there has been no change in soda consumption with removal of sodas from schools. The full results aren’t in yet, though. The experiment is complete and the reporting has begun. Results will be available in 2010.

Now that sodas have been banned from many schools, it appears that the next step may be to tax sodas.

How to Help Your Children Understand Soda

Some of the news coverage of regulations and limits of soda in schools claims that these efforts don’t or won’t result in lower soda intake by children. You can stock your shelves with all of the right foods and drinks, but the people who will ultimately control what your children eat and drink while they are away from you are your children themselves. I’m not sure just calling soda liquid candy will be deterrent enough—that might actually work against your healthy goals.

If you want your children to drink less soda, explain why. Condition your children to make nutritious choices. Better yet, especially with younger children who might not understand a big “why not drink soda” discussion with abstract rules or requests, show them why.

In my family, we don’t have a hard rule against simple sugars or refined sugars. I know my children will make their own decisions, so I help them understand my reasons for wanting them to limit their own intake. When my son has overloaded on sugar and ended up emotional and bouncing around from thing to thing, he recognizes how much he dislikes the situation. He doesn’t like the feeling, so he chooses water given a choice of drinks. Until he forgets again. I do remind him, but the self-regulatory impulse is much stronger that the outside regulation by parents or school or government, so I encourage its development.

To help my kids understand what they were drinking in sodas, we experimented. We use Lawrence Hall of Science GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) books. The year we studied chemistry, we used Secret Formulas (grade level 1-3) to explore sweetness of drinks. Cola is one of the secret formulas kids investigate in this book. Through taste tests and experimentation we reached the shocking realization that there are 17 teaspoons of sugar in every 20-ounce serving of soda. By that point, my children were just grossed out by sodas.

What Should You Do to Ensure Healthy Foods at School?

Just because there are school lunch limitations in place in your schools does not mean that these limitations reach snack foods that compete with school lunch, called within the industry “competitive foods.” You still need to be part of the solution at home and in your child’s school. If you expect that your child will eat nutritious foods, you will have to be vigilant and active in making that happen.

Resources:

• American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on School Health published a policy statement “Soft Drinks in Schools” on January 1, 2004. PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 1 January 2004, pp. 152-154. They reaffirmed this policy May 5, 2009. PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 5 May 2009, pp. 1421-1422.
• California Center for Public Health Advocacy, “Soda Fact Sheet,” September 2009. Clear, simple list of facts and numbers from medical journals.
• Michael F. Jacobsen, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming Americans’ Health, June 2005.

Image © David Gallaher | Dreamstime.com

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“Would you like eggs and toast for breakfast?”

“No, Mama. I don’t want scrambled eggs again.”

I think fast, because I know I need to sell the eggs. My husband has convinced them that soft-boiled eggs with toast fingers is a special treat, but I was looking for a quick breakfast that day.

“How about quick eggs that you can dip your toast into?”

Skeptical, they went along. Only a couple of minutes later, I served them hot, soft eggs and toast.

“These are eggs sunny side up.”

I think eating eggs sunny side up is a bit like eating some kind of cookies. Everyone has their own right way. Now that my kids have eaten the same kind of eggs three times in one week (no, I’m not kidding), they each have their own sunnyside groove.

My son went with the traditional dipping of toast fingers.

My daughter, though, puts hers whole on one slice of toast, carefully nibbles around the edge to the center, then pops the whole yolk in one bite.

I cut up peach while the eggs were cooking (I’m pushing the peaches this week, too).

That was two eggs two ways for two children, and we have a nutritious breakfast in about four minutes.

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Today, my son decided he didn’t want to eat lunch at all. I suggested he just have a smoothie. It worked! I even let him choose and didn’t try to sneak in a broccoli stem or a handful of beans. He choose peaches from our neighbors’ tree, a banana, and coconut. He and his dad opened a coconut a few days ago, and he’s been trying to figure out how to use up all of that nice coconut flesh. When I asked him what he liked best about it, though, it wasn’t the two special ingredients but the banana.

My son’s favorite smoothie is anything with a banana.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered smoothie tools as well as the intense nutrition blast of dark purple smoothies, earthy orange smoothies, and easy green smoothies. Have you experimented? What do you like? What is your child’s favorite smoothie?

We would love to share your recipes and tips for this easy, nutritious meal.

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In preparation, I have been rereading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). I have the recorded book on my iPod and the book on our homeschool table. I’m still in the middle of the first meal: corn syrup, corn-fed creatures, a dizzying array of corn-derived additives, all in a car fueled by ethanol made from industrial corn.

It’s tough to say no when children want sweet and fat foods. We evolved as humans to desire both, but the exploitation of the desire for sweet and fat and the changes in our culture and in own bodies should be enough to inspire any parent to create positive, healthy eating patterns for children.

One of the points I have tried to make in my Monday Morning Smoothie series is that the nutrients of vegetables and fruits is more easily available and in higher quality when we eat foods raw. Cooking changes nutrition—not that this is bad (though I do count many raw foodists among my friends), since many foods are made more digestible by cooking. Industrial processes of breaking down natural foods into components that can be reconstituted in the form of food, though, has had a vast negative effect on the health of the people of our planet. We suffer a long list of food-related or food-exacerbated diseases as a result of the industrialization of our food chain—diabetes, heart disease, eye disease, autoimmune diseases, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, osteoporosis, and, not the least, obesity.

When I read that children don’t want to eat healthy lunches created through programs like Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners and Slow Food USA’s Schools Project, I think the media coverage is more than a little superficial.

In my limited experience in my little homeschool of two students, I find that when children are given accurate nutritional information they are able to overcome the exploitive advertisements of fats, sugars, and processed goo as food and make their own choices. I encourage, but I don’t (often) enforce. They generally eat in moderation.

When my daughter said that she felt happier and more energetic all last week than this week, I pointed out that we were having vegetable-rich smoothies every mid-morning last week. This week, we slacked off a bit (well, a lot actually). She really felt the difference, and now she is the one who is leading the way with reminders.

I think what it takes is not anti-sugar or anti-snack food propaganda, at least not with children who are older like mine, but enough information that children can make their own informed decisions. Maybe the kids who reported that they thought healthy school lunches were “yuck” weren’t given enough context. It’s tough to make decisions that delay gratification, especially for children but still true for any of us. The chain of consequence isn’t necessarily as simple as, “Hey, kids, if you drink that high-fructose corn syrup soda, you have a better chance of getting diabetes.” Actually, the link between high-fructose corn syrup and diabetes has been made quiet clearly through studies, so maybe it is just a matter of making the connections for kids.

When food is engineered to get past our defenses, we need to equip our children with stronger defenses.

What to do as your children head back to school? Find out what they are eating for lunch. If you don’t like it, meet with other parents and start a healthy school campaign. Sustainable Table has a great article on school lunch referencing a lot of information and educational materials you can use to make a change for your children. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has an excellent collection of resources you can use to start your own local campaign.

• You can send your children to school with foods closer to their natural state, real whole foods.
• You can give your children accurate information about nutrition, so they will make their own better choices.
• You can encourage your schools to improve nutrition and reduce the amount of processed food offered to children. Take small steps if they worry about big steps.
• You can get many more ideas at the Green Moms Blog Carnival, the August Green Schools edition hosted by Organic Mania.

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