Yes, you read that right; it does say 'talking'. You have probably heard or read about how important it is to eat a variety of Real Foods and to make sure to have foods of different colors. Well, as it turns out, that's even more important than you may realize. Sure, when you eat lots of different colored foods, naturally colored that is, you are getting a variety of vitamins and minerals. Most recently, however, scientists have discovered that equally as important to those vitamins and minerals, and maybe even more important, are the phytonutrients in Real Foods. All of those natural colors in fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains are key to great health.
"If on a daily basis you incorporate at least seven different colors, you are much more likely to get a wide variety of these nutrients that are healing, that prevent degenerative disease, and that will go to work on every tissue, cell and organ of the body," says nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD, coauthor of The Fat Flush Plan (McGraw-Hill, 2002). You see, the crazy thing is that those colors or phytonutrients actually talk to our cells. That's right, they pass along information. Information that leads our bodies toward health or leads us toward illness.
Just before you are about to feed your child a meal or a snack, stop and imagine you are at a fork in the road. One arrow points to a path marked 'Health and Happiness' and the other points to the opposite path, marked 'Illness'. Making the choice in our head is obvious, isn't it? In reality, it's not always as easy. We have busy lives and convenience is important. The problem is convenience is causing us too often to send our kids down the path toward 'Illness'.
As moms, we need to realize that each time we feed our children (and ourselves) we have an opportunity to move toward health. When we feed our kids real fruits, vegetables and other whole foods, our cells are happy. The opposite is true when we feed our children processed, artificial junk foods. The cells are not happy. It's like the wires get crossed. The body's cells get the wrong information. Confusion in the cells is not a good thing. The body's cells are constantly saying "wrong number, please try again" all day long for many children. They are getting the wrong information from the foods they are being fed from adults who love them. This confusion at the cellular level leads to dis-ease: allergies, ADD, eczema, obesity, asthma, moodiness, poor behavior, diabetes, cancer and more.
So, what can you do? Just like so many moms are doing, you can make a choice to move in the direction of health. Maybe you will start with breakfasts or with snacks or maybe you are the mom who will take on the whole thing at once. Either way, each time you prepare something for your child to eat, you can stop and imagine that fork in the road. Picturing health for your child will help you realize that the extra few minutes it takes to pack snacks for the car or sporting event, or to make a healthy breakfast, or to pack homemade lunches is, as Amy says, "worth it". If your children are used to processed foods, you will have to both educate them about how their bodies need Real Foods and you will have to be consistent. Give them choices, but make the choices all Real Foods. You may have some tantrums at first, but being consistent about things that affect our kids' health and safety are a huge part of parenting; not the most fun part usually, but probably one of the most important parts. Our kids deserve that kind of conscientious parenting.
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