“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until
then, I just ate.”
--Julia Child
If your goal
is to develop high blood pressure, eating too much sodium is a sure path to get
it. Do you eat out often at fast food
restaurants? A McDonald's quarter pounder with
cheese and bacon has 1,510 mg of sodium and 32 grams of fat. A 4-piece order of chicken McNuggets
contains 460 mg of sodium, 13 grams of fat, and 4 grams of sugar. How many kids eat just 4 McNuggets? A BBQ
Bacon Whopper from Burger King has 1,540 mg and sodium and a heartstopping 51
grams of fat.
To boost sales and
profits, food manufacturers employ food scientists to create
foods loaded with salt, sugar, and fat that are intentionally designed to be highly addictive. Foods high in salt, sugar, and fat are a sure
path to disease.
The average
American consumes 4,000-8,000 mg of sodium every day. The recommendation for most Americans is to
consume less than 1,500 mg a day.
With the
popularity of fast food eating choices and the extinction of home economics classes
in high school, many people have stopped cooking.
I talk with people every day who tell me they don’t know how to
cook. People think they don’t have time
to cook. But yet people don’t hesitate
to waste hours on mindless social media.
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| Picking vegetables at Shining Light Garden with Kevin O'Dare at recent Growing Healthy Kids' workshop. |
Protecting
the health of kids by ensuring they have access to real food is central to the
mission of Growing Healthy Kids. All kids
deserve better than a future of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart
attacks because of highly processed fast foods acting like the Sirens in Homer’s
Odyssey. When I ask kids who wants to
grow up and get diabetes or high blood pressure, no one raises their hand.
In our Growing Healthy Kids’ workshops, we empower and inspire kids and parents to eat
real food by teaching them how easy it is to prepare and cook real food. We connect kids with farmers so they can
learn what real food is and where it comes from. We teach them that organic is best, when food
is grown without anything that came from a laboratory. Kids learn to flavor foods with herbs and
spices instead of salt, fat, and sugar. When
a kiddo learns how to make a healthy lentil or tomato soup in one of our
workshops and comes back for seconds and thirds of a soup they made, I know we are
making a difference.
Give a man a
fish and you feed him for a day. Teach
him how to fish and he can feed himself for the rest of his life. Or as I like to say, teach a child how to
order in a restaurant and she can eat one meal. Introduce a child to local farmers and
teach her how to cook 10 basic recipes and she can feed herself for the rest of
her life.
With love,
Nancy
Heinrich, MPH
Founder and
Wellness Architect
Growing Healthy
Kids, Inc.
