Thursday 27 October 2011

Super size vs super skinny

Naptime means 4od and a cuppa. Today I stumbled across Supersize vs superskinny, something I haven't seen in years.

According the the intro of the show, 12 million people are overweight and the same number of people suffer from eating disorders. As the narrator said, the UK has a terrible relationship with food.

Has anyone thought that perhaps all of our food hang-ups come from the fact that we are constantly being given advice about what we should and shouldn't eat? Every generation, dietary recommendations seem to change so that public knowledge is awash with conflicting information. When my mother was pregnant, she was told to eat plenty of liver. I was told that liver could potentially harm my baby.

Having the NHS to dole out treatment and advice is brilliant, but its also taken away a degree of responsibility from us. We no longer have to think about what we're eating. We don't need to consider what we're putting in our bodies because someone else will do it for us. When we are left to our own devices after school, after pregnancy, we do not know how to moderate because moderation was never a factor in the foods we were brought up on.

At the moment, I am repeatedly told that Daughter should get no sugar, no salt and limited fat whilst weaning. But if I do this, she will grow up afraid of those things. They will become poignant and forbidden. She will either fear them, or over-indulge because she does not know that they can exist within a diet in moderation. Remember, fruit is sugar, meat is salt and milk is fat. As long as she grows accustomed to a diet which balances all of these things, I see no reason why she shouldn't be fine. 

2 comments:

  1. Right On. the endless food rules -- and the impossibility of following them all -- drive me nuts and are, i firmly believe, exactly the wrong way to encourage health.

    i just wrote a couple of long posts about feeding our 8-month-old, and one of my commenters sent me your link. glad to know i'm not the only one thinking these things!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your banana method is genius! I shamefully stole it and whenever I'm out feeding Daughter a banana, people comment on how smart it is! :) Thank you for sharing!

    ReplyDelete