Persuading kids to become good eaters

Posted on June 3, 2012 by bilrob

Persuading kids to become good eaters

Ever tell your kids that spinach will give them big muscles, and carrots, laser vision?

Or resorted to the “you’re-not-going-to-grow” line when they won’t eat their greens?

We barter, beg, frighten and preach to get our children to eat right. But instead of trying to convince kids that healthy food is good for them, wouldn’t it be easier and less stressful to simply convince them that it’s good?

“What speaks to kids? That vegetables prevent heart disease or that jicama is crunchy, sweet and refreshing?” asks Sanna Delmonico during a presentation at last month’s Healthy Flavors, Healthy Kids conference held at the Culinary Institute of America San Antonio campus.

Delmonico, a nutrition instructor at the CIA in Napa Valley, Calif., said using positive messages when talking to kids about food and nutrition may be too abstract for them.

“Nutrition can be interesting stuff, but what’s more concrete and compelling is the food itself — the food is delicious, and it’s colorful, and it’s tactile and involves every sense,” Delmonico says during a subsequent telephone interview.

So instead of telling kids that Brussels sprouts have lots of vitamin C and K and fiber, and that they can’t have a cookie unless they eat them, frame a food as something they wouldn’t want to miss.

Delmonico suggests using phrases such as:

“Doesn’t it look good?”

“Have you tried it?”

“Look at how colorful and delicious it is.”

In short, encourage your kids to enjoy healthy foods for the flavors and pleasures they bring.

It’s the repeated, positive food experiences that will get kids to become so-called “good eaters,” Delmonico says. “You change behavior through the enjoyment of foods.”

To enhance the experience, get children involved in all aspects of food prep, including shopping, gardening and cooking. “They can peel garlic, rip lettuce or set the table. The more they’re involved, the more they’re likely to try things,” she says.

To keep the peace, serve at least one food everyone likes and, when introducing a new food, serve it with something kids already know and enjoy. “If they’re familiar with carrots, maybe serve carrots with a food they’re not sure about, like parsnips,” says Delmonico.

“Sometimes they learn to like things slowly, but that’s OK,” she says.

Meanwhile, relax if they skip on the unfamiliar vegetable and keep the focus on family and conversation. “The point of the family meal is to reconnect with the most important people in your life. It should be an enjoyable time, not a time to struggle over Brussels sprouts,” says Delmonico.

Think about the long-term goal, she says. “Is the goal to get them to eat five bites of Brussels sprouts on this day and at this particular meal or to be a healthful eater in their lifetime?”

What won’t help is being a short-order cook when they don’t like your dinner menu. Not only is it too much work for adults, but when there’s always mac and cheese, why would they try anything else?

“It doesn’t help kids expand and push themselves,” Delmonico says. “If they can fall back on the familiar, there’s no incentive.”

Claudia Zapata is a registered dietitian. Her column appears every other Sunday in Taste. Email Claudia at [email protected], follow her on Twitter at @ClaudiaZapata and on Facebook at Claudia Zapata, MS, RD.

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Cooking the World's Largest Cabbage

Posted on May 18, 2012 by bilrob

Cooking the World’s Largest Cabbage

For the last year or so I have been opening my mind to new possibilities. Yes, I joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), which has introduced me to many veggies I have never seen before, let alone cooked. That’s why my family now eats stuff like parsnips and fennel, two veggies we’d never heard of, let alone eaten. They are delicious, by the way. (Well the fennel I still have issues with; I mean it smells like licorice but isn’t candy. Isn’t that false advertising?)

But last week I had a challenge unlike any I’ve ever had. I opened the veggie box and inside was the largest cabbage head I have ever seen. I’m not kidding. I don’t where they grew that cabbage (it’s all local), but that thing was bigger than a human head. It was humongous. And scary. I mean, what was I, a non-cook, supposed to do with the World’s Largest Head of Cabbage?

And then a voice inside my head, a really stupid voice, said, “That’s easy; stuffed cabbage rolls!” And pretty soon all the voices in my head joined in, chanting, “Stuffed cabbage rolls!” (Yeah, I might have issues that go way beyond super big cabbage heads, but let’s not go there now.)

Anyway, after a small argument with my voices, I found a recipe on the Food Network website labeled “easy.” Hello? I’m telling you those people at Food Network are big, fat liars. Clearly, in Food Network land, “easy” means “you should be a 4-star Michelin chef before attempting this recipe.” Or it could mean “sucker.” I could go either way on this, but I am leaning toward “sucker.”

So one hour and five pans on the stove later, I was no closer to making an actual stuffed cabbage roll than I was to being president of the United States. My kitchen looked like it had been bombed by a very large cabbage and was covered in splatters from the meat that I was supposed to use for stuffing.

But at that point I was not letting that cabbage win. It was obviously a contest of wills and I would not break.

By then, I was ready to stuff. I got the cabbage out of the pot and I realized that it looked like slimy space boogers. It was falling apart and oozing over the plate. Yeah. Turns out there is a HUGE difference between “blanching the cabbage” and “boiling the holy crap out of it until it resembles something an alien would pull out of his nose.”

Have I mentioned it was now a personal war between the cabbage and me? Because it was on like Donkey Kong, people.

So I grabbed the cabbage and tried to stuff it. I don’t mind admitting that at one point in the stuffing process I considered taping the rolls together with packing tape. Of course I didn’t do that. I mean, it was already inedible. I didn’t need to add poison to the mix. I managed to slap some cabbage and some meat/rice mixture into a pan, cover it with tomato sauce and bake it. And that’s when I realized that cooked cabbage is not the most appetizing smell on earth. Basically, my house smelled like a dozen teenage boys were suffering the after effects of a chili-eating contest.

And yet, I was not going to pick up fast food. I was not allowing that dang cabbage to beat me. Because I am stubborn. And probably not as smart as I think I am.

At dinner I brought out my stuffed cabbage rolls. And Harry and Junior put it on their plates. And Junior (who eats anything and everything) poked it a bit and asked, “Is it alive?” And Harry looked at and said, “Oh, it looks good.” But the look on his face said, “Good Lord it looks like alien space boogers took over our dinner.”

And we ate it anyway. Because by that point, nobody was leaving the dinner table without doing so. After all, I wasn’t going to allow that cabbage to beat me. No matter what it smelled like.

But the next time I get a cabbage in my CSA box, I’m making cole slaw.

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Alarm after Chinese vegetable dealers caught spraying cabbage with toxic chemicals

Posted on May 9, 2012 by bilrob

Alarm after Chinese vegetable dealers caught spraying cabbage with toxic chemicals

Source: NewsCore

QINGZHOU, China — Authorities in China’s eastern Shandong province were Tuesday investigating claims that vegetable sellers were spraying cabbage with formaldehyde to keep it fresh.

Reports of the claims first emerged online over the weekend, Xinhua news agency reported, adding that while the probe was conducted on a local level, in Qingzhou city, the practice was far more widespread and encompassed other provinces.

“It’s a common practice to keep the cabbages fresh,” Shandong farmer Yin Lihua said. “Otherwise, the vegetables stacked tightly in their trucks would rot in two to three days.”

Cabbage is a staple of the Chinese dining table, especially in the country’s north, which includes the capital city Beijing.

In Heilongjiang province, 1,000 miles (1,600km) northeast of Shandong, vegetable seller Zhao Mingli was caught spraying cabbage with formaldehyde.

“I just did what everyone else was doing for three or four years. Vegetable dealers in other parts of Shandong and Hebei do the same,” Zhao said.

Formaldehyde was also reportedly used on mushrooms and seafood by various sellers.

Liu Shengtian, deputy chief of Qingzhou’s agricultural bureau, told Xinhua that cabbage dealers had been urged to use refrigerated trucks for storage and transport.

Liu said it was unclear how sellers who use formaldehyde could be held accountable as there was no provision for such a situation in current regulations and laws.

“It’s crucial to fix these loopholes in order to better regulate market behavior for public health considerations,” Zhao Jinshan, a Shandong-based specialist on food safety and disease control, said.

Formaldehyde — commonly used as a preservative for laboratory specimens and embalming — can be fatal if ingested and is also a cancer-causing substance, AFP reported.

China’s government has repeatedly vowed to improve food safety as people grow increasingly alarmed about the quality of what they eat, but scandals still occur due to weak enforcement and unscrupulous business practices.

Milk was at the center of one of China’s biggest food safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products to give the appearance of higher protein content. The crisis also sparked panic in other countries that imported Chinese milk.

Last year, authorities in China arrested more than 30 people over the sale of cooking oil made with leftovers taken from gutters.

More recently, employees of a leading Chinese poultry company sold diseased ducks to consumers, while a major dairy producer sold milk with high levels of a cancer-causing toxin, caused by cows eating moldy feed.

Read More: Alarm after Chinese vegetable dealers caught spraying cabbage with toxic formaldehyde

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Vegetables help breast cancer survival rate

Posted on April 10, 2012 by bilrob

Vegetables help breast cancer survival rate

Chinese women who ate plenty of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower – cruciferous vegetables – were found to have better breast cancer survival rates compared to other breast cancer patients, researchers explained at the AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) Annual Meeting 2012, Chicago, USA.

Sarah J. Nechuta, M.P.H., Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., said:

“Breast cancer survivors can follow the general nutritional guidelines of eating vegetables daily and may consider increasing intake of cruciferous vegetables, such as greens, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli, as part of a healthy diet.”

Nechuta and team set out to determine what impact cruciferous vegetables might have on breast cancer survival. They gathered data on the Shanghai Breast Cancer Survival Study, involving 4,886 patients who had survived breast cancer from stages 1 to 4, during 2002-2006.

They made adjustments for lifestyle factors, clinical features and demographics, and found that the consumption of cruciferous vegetables during the first three years after a diagnosis of breast cancer was linked to a lower risk of dying from cancer, a lower total mortality risk (dying from anything), as well as a recurrence in a dose-response pattern.

The researchers explained:

“Across increasing quartiles of cruciferous vegetable consumption, risk for total mortality decreased by 27% to 62%, risk for breast cancer-specific mortality decreased by 22% to 62%, and risk for recurrence decreased by 21% to 35%.”

Nechuta explained that as vegetable consumption patterns in China are different from those in the USA and other western countries, adjustments will need to be made when considering these findings and applying them to breast cancer survivors in America or Europe.

Nechuta said:

“Commonly consumed cruciferous vegetables in China include turnips, Chinese cabbage/bok choy and greens, while broccoli and brussels sprouts are the more commonly consumed cruciferous vegetables in the United States and other Western countries. Second, the amount of intake among Chinese women is much higher than that of U.S. women.
The level of bioactive compounds such as isothiocyanates and indoles, proposed to play a role in the anticancer effects of cruciferous vegetables, depend on both the amount and type of cruciferous vegetables consumed.”

In order to have a better understanding of the link between cruciferous vegetable consumption and breast cancer outcomes, Nechuta says future studies should focus on bioactive compounds, including isothiocyanates and other host factors that impact on the effects of these biological compounds.

Written by Christian Nordqvist

Healthy Lifestyle – with Bill & Sheila

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Persuading kids to become good eaters