Paleo and primal

[Daughteroughter]

I have been reading about paleo and primal diets has anyone tried them?

Oh, talking of learning from one's elders - has anyone read Nourishing Traditions and if so, would you recommend? I keep dithering over buying it...

Not yet, tea. The gnoll credo by J.Stanton was fun!

Favadi

Just want to add on the sweets thing, I never actually buy the stuff. It's all the stuff out of party bags or given by relatives. For example, she's still eating the selection box she got for Christmas.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a society where sweets and chocolate are used as a reward and as presents. I'm amazed at how many sweets they get at school or children bring in to share when it's their birthday. It's a tricky line between giving your child/ren healthy food and letting them be the same as their peers. Roast chicken is still more of a treat than chocolate though!

I did not want to derail the thread and all my children are big enough to buy any junk food they like but I am fairly anti sugar and I don't think I have given it as a reward to children but certainly two of my boys sometimes do come back with chocolate to be eaten after a meal if football is on...... We have no sugar at home except one child has honey he puts on his yoghurt so I suppose that's a sweet thing.

We do "sugar pushing" watching. Last year their school had some charity thing and the teacher suggested crispy creme donuts - I think each boy ended up with a box each. Then on the ski slopes there was Nutella (food of the devil) on the nursery slopes with an exhibition and free samples. If that were cocaine or cigarettes being given out on the slops rather than sugar it would not be allowed. Then our gym a few months ago had free sweets in a bowl as you entered and existed as indeed had every table at a course I gave this week - sugar peddled at every turn.

There was an interesting series of programmes about sugar and other addictions - Addicted to Pleasure - last year which looked at the history of the sugar trade - how sugar was discovered, brought to the West, a rare food of the Elizabethan age occasionally the rich had it no one else and then the setting up of the slave colonies in the sugar islands like Jamaica, people trafficked in effect to feed the West's sugar addiction, then it became cheaper so by the time you get to Victorian England even servants can afford their regular fixes of tea with sugar to keep them going through their days.

I remember that documentary, Xenia.
Ds (the would be sugar addict) reacts to so many of these products, he'd rather not risk it! dd has never had a sweet tooth but she was horrified at some of her uni flat-mates not knowing what a carbohydrate is!

On the note of big industry peddling sugar and wheat, some of you might find this article interesting. Apologies in advance as the article is from a econo-political blog.

How do you get a child not to kick back against no sweets if their friends have sweets though? The only child I know who isn't allowed sweets is now at secondary school and apparently spends his daily bus money on sweets his mother doesn't know about.

I agree queen I am amazed at the amount of sugary sweets that come home from school. We have a sweet tin and everything gets dumped in there - I never offer it out, they ask for sweets maybe once or twice a week and when they ask they are expecting a couple of sweets not a whole packet. I often have to bin sweets as they go off.

People warned me against demonising sugar and restricting it because they said it would encourage binge like behaviour when my kids were exposed to unlimited quantities of sugar....everyone knew a story about the child whose health conscious parents had restricted sugar and the child ended up overweight and obsessed with all things sweet as a consequence.

I think half the battle with sugar is breaking the routine, the automatic sugar response - the expectation that a meal always finishes with something sweet.

As a compromise we have a pudding every Sunday - not a Paleo one but it has to be gluten free. Tomorrow it will be homemade 85% cocao chocolate ice cream with raspberries - it will be high in sugar but it will contain lots of nutrients too, for my very skinny kids I'm ok with that.

I use to have always at hand something ds could have instead. My aunt used to send me the purest liquorice which looked like little sweets (google liquirizia purissima), some was kept by the teacher as a reward. Little packets of raisins. Some health shops sell xylitol sweets (also available on line). He never felt/feels deprived, as he could also share. The amazing thing he has always been able to say no to bought treats when at other people's, as he new I would have something exciting at home for him. Exotic fruits are expensive, so we buy them as a treat or reward.
In secondary school dd went through a phase of buying rubbish, so I started to bake for all her friends too. Soon dd was baking for herself and friends, before long others copied. In sixth form dd and her friends used to buy lunch together, where one was buying salad, one was buy a bag of fruit, someone else nuts or ham...It would cost them less than £2 each. Much cheaper than any sandwich or canteen!

Just popping in to say hello and catch up with the thread. Hope everyone's well?
It's the second half of the month again so I'm back to living frugally... But managed to cobble together a delicious cheap breakfast. Bought some salmon trimmings from morrisons for 68p so had a salmon omelette - it was amazing!

I would rather give my dcs sugar than give them xylitol or other sugar alcohols, stevia - except in leaf form or any of the other low calorie sweeteners - I'm just not convinced they are completely safe.

I don't think it's easy to give advice on what people do with individual children. People just have to take their own decisions. We did have a good few years when the older children were young when they did not have sweets and I never gave anyone under 2 anything sweet in my life. However oldest child is 28 sand over the last nearly 30 years we have all kinds of different things at home. You just have to do what feels right for you.

I do not agree that children who are only fed healthy foods at home then become fat and adore sugar however. I think some people have a genetic inclination to be sugar addicts and others can take or leave chocolate and sweets.

I have had small children visiting this house refusing to believe there was no sugar, biscuits, chocolate or crisps in the house and I have let them go through every drawer. However we have always had birthday cake at parties. I don't live in isolation with the children on my pacific island feeding them only eggs fish and veg but some parents do choose that kind of thing. Ben Fogle has a TV series at the moment on C5 about people living in isolated places.

As children get older they have to take their own decisions. Two of my sons got fitter last summer, changed what they ate - their decision. They now eat vast amounts of grapes and other fruit which I am happy to fund and lucky enough to be able to fund as that's better than doritos and junk food although loads of fruit is still basically a fructose hit, better than sweets but still in the wilds we would have occasionally in season come across fruit not had it all the time.

I agree with Stuff - it can be cheap to eat well. My boys had takeaway pizza which they do on Friday nights at present. You could eat for a week on what that one meal costs.

Oops, sorry - I just blundered into the middle of a big discussion.
Out of interest, is there anone here who doesn't find sugar appealing? I've never had much of a sweet tooth and really don't have much sugar in my diet at all. Last weekend I bought some 70% chocolate and just had a square or two each evening.

But carbs! If I had had a big bag of Doritos or something - well I would have eaten them all in one sitting. I can totally see how people fill their diets with these carbs - that's what I've been doing my whole life!

I agree with you about sugar alcohols, snow but xylitol is one with a twist, which is why I use it and it's also frequently used in paleo toothpastes.

Thank you all for this, really, I'm finding it so helpful. I've always found the stealth-sugar thing so...SINISTER.

What do you mean Xylitol is one with a twist? I'm quite cynical about products marketing themselves as Paleo. Like a lot of things "Paleo" there are mixed opinions on sugar alcohols - I'm not convinced that it's a natural food stuff and I avoid it especially for the kids but others prefer it because it doesn't have a huge insulin response like sugar and doesn't have the negative dental effects either.

Xylitol is recognised for its medicinal benefits. In particular, it has the ability to halt and even reverse caries. If you google paleo toothpaste, there will be many recipes here is one. I only purchase xylitol extracted from the Birch tree.
Since ancient times, man has chewed on Birch bark tar for several reasons including sore throat and toothache(article1 ) ( article2 ).

I'm hoping this link works, otherwise a search of xylitol in destistry using google scholar will show miriads of research papers (for sanity I clicked the from 2013 choice on the side bar).

Kids and sweets... One of the ways to make crappy sweets less attractive to them, is to give them really good quality, healthier ones when they do have them (my kids are teens to preschool, and this works fairly well because they are surrounded by junk food at every turn, and need to learn to deal with it).

The toddler gets 85% choc, just like the rest of the family, just a square or two, sometimes melted over dates (these are great with coffee btw), yes, a sweet treat, but strong flavours which is the important part- the teens, who make a lot of their own food choices now, think "normal" chocolate tastes terrible.

IMO, although sugar is bad, it is not the devil (in small amounts anyway) wheat is much worse- and the combination of the two in processed foods is deadly.

An interesting mouse study last year fed two groups of mice a very high carbohydrate, low fat diet. In one group, the carbohydrate was from gluten containing grains, the other group had the same amount of carbs, but with no gluten containing grains.
Both groups of mice got fat, but the ones eating gluten containing grains got much fatter, and very sick with diabetes, and lots of inflammatory diseases. I thought that was very interesting.

There is no need to use anything like Xylitol in my view. I suggest in general just for for simple natural things people would have eaten for a miliion years and that would not include Xylitol. "If man made it don't eat it". That is all you need to know.

However the main thing is for most people to try to eat on the whole a healthier diet. That's all you need. I have always liked fairly plain foods so fish, veg etc with no sauce is my ideal and if a restaurant has put sauce or gravy on it means I don't like so it's really easy for me to eat pretty natural foods and I never seem to get ill either so I'm very lucky.

We've had mixed results with that strategy raw dcs can now fully appreciate quality food and junk.....it will be interesting to see how adolescence goes.

Had a lovely lunch - smoked mackerel with roasted butternut squash and bacon (I roasted the seeds while the squash was roasting - what a treat, dd said they tasted like pop corn)....adapted from a Nigel Slater recipe. Ds happily ate his but dd found it to be a little too challenging so I made her a bacon, avocado and spinach salad - she was deeply suspicious of the spinach but didn't do too bad with it in the end.

Dinner Steak with onions, mushrooms, sweet potato fries/white potato for dcs.

Roast chicken stuffed with a meat and nut stuffing for us tonight (with carrots roast in the pan with the chicken), and a pile of mixed salad leaves. Fairly "normal" food really, but without any added crap.

No gravy, as we typically don't bother, just spoon a bit of the roasting pan juices on to the meat after serving- I'm with Xenia on that one- especially when eating out its just easier to say no gravy/salad dressing/sauce, unless you make it yourself you can pretty much guarantee its going to be full of stuff you are trying to avoid.

Now and again, when the boys are wanting gravy, I will stir a bit of cream through the juices in the roasting pan and reduce it down a little, which give a nice spoonful of strong rich sauce- about a hundred times better than Bisto or whatever .

Xenia I agree with the "if man made don't eat it" as a good guiding principle... HOWEVER I'm making an exception for potato vodka, agave tequila, coffee and chocolate!

Although.. Are coffee and chocolate "made" or just "cooked" I wonder !

How do you get a child not to kick back against no sweets if their friends have sweets though?

Eliza I hope you find a solution to your quest. I understand your plight as I had to go through something similar due to allergic reactions. Not easy to explain to a young child. I'm sure eventually you will no longer have to be inventive and baking becomes a rare thing too.

The only child I know who isn't allowed sweets is now at secondary school and apparently spends his daily bus money on sweets his mother doesn't know about.

A personal experience.
I was brought up on a Mediterranean diet with fresh locally sourced ingredients and with sweets, cakes and ice-cream to be very much a rare occasion. Despite the omnipresence of pasta (again pizza was rare: the cheap night out as large group!), I was always slim. After being brainwashed about the low fat, exposed to the constant 'pasta as a main meal' and my kids being fed utter rubbish at their friend's house I changed my buying and cooking habits and gained 35kg. I lost 30kg by returning to my original diet minus the pasta.
Growing up, I never felt cheated anticipating dad's return from a hunt of deer or bore; I loved walking down the garden and 'stealing' fruit/nuts; an excursion to the port to buy a case of whatever the boat brought in was just lovely. My children relish the same opportunity (minus their dad going hunting).

Of course. The point is most people eat an absolutely disgusting diet of processed food. If you even change that by 20% you are doing really well and if by 80% you are almost home and dry and it is silly to get hung up on 100% perfection etc.

I don't eat chocolate and I always hated coffee and caffeine but I think I am just lucky that I naturally have always liked plain foods (fussy eater as a child always hated all "wet" foods, gravy, sauce etc) and was not too keen on the taste of alcohol.

It is perfectionists who put people off changing how they eat. Any change for the better is worth doing.

Bore=Boar