Do you feed your little ones 'crap'?

[DetentionGrrrl]

I was amazed yesterday at the amount of rubbish food i saw people feeding babies and toddlers- has the world gone mad?!

2 kids got on the bus (max ages 3 / 4)at 10am, both eating full size chocolate bars AND crisps, then saw toddlers with McDonalds in their pushchairs, and my personal favourite...a baby of no more than 3mths being spoon fed ICE-CREAM in her pram!!

And when i say ice cream, i'm not talking about the MNer who fed some to their 11mth old in a heatwave, i'm talking about the little baby i saw yesterday being fed some in the rain...

Just realised, maybe the woman from the bus is on here

runs to lock front door for fear of a beating

Greenlumpytonsilsgain, wrt some of ingredients listed for ribena:
Malic acid is found in apples
Calcium hydroxide is also known as slake lime and occurs naturally in fresh water. It is used to regulate acidity in food.
Similarly, Calcium carbonate is naturally occuring and can be bought in health food shops as tablets for those wanting to increas their calcium intake.
Citric acid is found naturally in critric fruit and is a natural anti-oxidant and preservative
Xanthan Gum is a naturally produced polysaccharide (produced by the fermentation of sucrose or glucose by a bacterium). Used to increase viscosity of fluids, used in salad dressings, sauces, toothpaste etc ? it holds colloids together.
Potassium sorbate is the salt of potassium and sorbic acid. Sorbic acid occurs naturally in fruit is obtained from the berries of mountain ash and is a natural preservative. It is also broken down in the body into carbon dioxide and water in the Kreb Cycle. The potassium salt is made because it is more soluble than sorbic acid.
Anthocyanins are plant pigment (pansies, petunia etc) and are powerful antioxidants (primitive man use to eat them). Besides chlorophyll, anthocyanins are probably the most important group of visible plant pigments.

(so better not admit what we have dipped dummies in in the past!)

Forgot to say that the only ingredient I disapproved of was aspartame and that is why I buy the full sugar version of anything.

My stepfather tried to sneak a bit of meringue into ds1 when he was only a few months old. DH had expressly said "NO!" because it is just sugar and raw egg, and he wasn't weaned yet! The stupid old fool decided he knew better. DH was furious (as was I, but it was DH who just stopped him in time)

Thread here for anyone interested

Yes, speedymama, I did say in an earlier post that it's the "light" and "sugar-free" versions that worry me, because people buy them believing they are a healthier option when in fact they are full of aspartame/acesulfame K.

I do buy the odd bottle of additive-free squash (just concentrated juice and sugar and a couple of the natural additives you mention in your post) for my children. I have tried repeatedly to make the point that there is a difference between a food which is basically OK but should be eaten in moderation - such as chocolate or crisps - and a food/drink which is laden with harmful chemicals and shouldn't/needn't be consumed at all.

My children don't subsist on organic goats' cheese and rocket either, believe it or not. As I said earlier, every parent has to draw their own lines.

Wow Speedymamma, thanks for that. Fancy starting a new thread with the things that we worry about but needn't. I didn't know half of that stuff.

Could you just answer my is vegetable oil the same as hydrogenated vegetable oil which is the same as transfats query. Thats the only thing I tend to worry about.

(Also what is it about aspartame that we should steer clear of).

I try so hard with good eating. I just don't understand the chemicals that you've described - but now I do. Thamk you!

Hell yes, sometimes

There ARE children who eat a diet of unmitigated crap.

I used to teach nutrition to Year 8, and they would keep a food diary to show what they ate over five days. Then they'd divide those foods up into different groups. Balanced? Hell no.

But the idea of a BALANCED diet is IMO lost in the handwringing over children's nutrition. We would then plan a week's woth of menus for the school canteen (NOT followed up in those pre-Jamie Oliver days) and the children took a lot of convincing that you could eat healthily without salads every day with fruit for pudding. We planned pizzas, apple crumble and custard, even chips sometimes. And I tried to get them to see that it was indeed about BALANCING what they ate.

We then wrote a letter to the head outlining our ideas for the canteen, which always went down like a lead balloon .

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that we were allocated one lesson for nutrition, to reflect it's NC status. I took a week, and always got a bollocking for it (except when I was HOD ). Now, in an ideal world it shouldn't have to be done like this in school, but it IS necessary, because so many children either eat crap all the time, or have bizarre notions of what REALLY constitutes healthy eating from the media and sad to say some parents. The furore over obesity in children actually made things more tricky as children who ate rubbish but weren't fat took some persuading that their diets could do with some tweaking too.

We are sending our children mixed messages about food IMO.

Aaargh Rogue apostrophe . My apologies....

I agree with that post bbs. I think banning children from bringing birthday cake into school to share with their friends is a bit silly, for example. That's the problem with any blanket policy though, it is a blunt instrument and will be misinterpreted and applied wrongly in some instances with ridiculous results. I have seen some posts in MN complaining that parents have been reprimanded for sending a small plain cake in a child's lunchbox, when the school dinner mnu for that day was serving cake with custard for dessert! It doesn't help.

What the hell is a brain licker?

Emmatom

Vegetable oil" is a generic term used used to label a cooking oil product that is a blend of a variety of oils often based on palm oil, corn, soybean or sunflower oils. Vegetable oils contain alkenes which are chemical compounds with double bonds (healthy monosaturated fat). Adding hydrogen to these double bonds is known as hydrogenation and turns the oil into a solid by raising its melting point. This solid is trans fat and even though it revolutionised the food processing industry by increasing shelf life, it has been highly damaging for the consumer in that the body is unable to break down this unnatural solid fat, especially when ingested in large quantities. Hence rising problems with blocked arteries etc.

If you use pure vegetable oil, ensure that it has not been hydrogenated. I personally use olive oil or sunflower oil.

"There is no such thing as a bad food only a bad diet."

Yes this is the statement I really disagree with. If you want to feed your children utter crap which has no nutritional value whatsoever then if is not my business, but don't talk crap about "there is no such thing as a bad food". Of course there ruddy is.

yum yum

Franny, it depends on your perspective. If you eat solely for nutrition then you will avoid anything you perceive to be nutritionally empty e.g. Gillian Mckeith (yuk!) If however, you eat for pleasure and nutrition, then if you derive pleasure from indulging now and again in your favourite bad food (right now I cannot think of any bad food) there is nothing wrong with that, imo.

So you think the occasional Brain Licker is absolutely fine then?

Personally I'd rather they drank dog piss, at least I know what's in it

Thanks for your reply Speedymamma. I am now wiser!

I don't class a brain licker as food, so my comment "everything in moderation" was aimed at actual food products not industrial waste marketed as 'food'.

I was going to say "yes", but looking at what you consider to be 'crap', then "no" I don't feed them crap.

No, it doesn't depend on your perspective, it depends on what crap the food contains. If it is made from ingredients you might find in your kitchen, then even if it is laden with fat and sugar, it's a food - a good food, a nice food, a treat, something that is pleasant to eat and fine to have as part of our diet. If it is full of trans fats, artificial sweeteners, additives, colourings, flavourings, industrial thickeners etc, it is not a good food. It isn't hard to work out the difference.

Message withdrawn

Yes, I do worry about what is in medicines and do what I can to minimise it - buying the non-sugar-free Calpol for example. But if medical need dictated that a child had to have a medicine and it contained something horrible as well as the active ingredient, I would put up with it (if I had more time I moght write to the manufacturer and ask for an explanation of the purpose of the ofending chemical's presence).

A Brain Licker/Jumbo Super-Sour Radioactive Bubblegum Eyeball is never necessary though, is it? It's just swallowing poison for the sake of it. I can't see why anyone would want to let their child do that.

hmm the non suagr calpol ha dmore crap in ti aruguable
oh god REMOVE ME FORM THSI THRESAD TO NORMAL LIFE