Rebellion is most certainly part of a teenager’s job description. Its part of our kid’s journey to become independent adults. As a parent of two teens and a twenty year old, I’ve endured my share of this energy over the years.

An anguished parent of a teenager reached out to me today. Her teen-aged son has a job working at a food store and is eating huge amounts of junk food as a result. This mom wanted some help in finding a way to get her kid to see the light about chemicalized processed packaged food. After all, at home she cooks great food from scratch using real ingredients.

The toxic food environment is everywhere, and the older our kids get, the more they are immersed in it. At a certain point, all we can do is cook really good food, don’t preach (too much) and hope that at some point our kids realize that our food values are worthwhile.

But if you want to do a little  gentle preaching with your teen, here are some ideas on how to go about it.

ZITS: Connect the dots between clear skin and clean food. Mark Hyman’s recent piece about Ance and Sugar is worth a read. Perhaps a 21-day elimination diet that includes lots of fresh water (and no Gatorade or diet soda) will show some results that will keep your teen eating clean.

MANIPULATIVE MARKETING: Teenagers hate being taken advantage of. Once they learn more  about the $4.2 BILLION dollars spent to lure them to eat junk food,  they might re-think their choices.

ADD/ADHD: If your teen has a hard time staying focused, junk food may be the culprit. Recent research in the Lancet medical journal suggests that ADHD can be induced by food. In the new study, kids with ADHD were put on a “restricted elimination diet” containing only rice, meat, vegetables, pears and water for five weeks. The authors found that ADHD symptoms were reduced in 78 per cent of children placed on the diet.  5 weeks of clean food may result in your teen getting more homework done in less time. It is well worth looking into.

My Junk Food E-book

My E-book, Winning the Junk Food War will give you further support and inspiration to fight the good fight with your tweens and teens. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

But  always remember, at the end of the day, your best bet is to invest in a good meal made at home from excellent ingredients. Our walk is more powerful than our talk!

Don't kid yourself! Twinkies are not a weight loss panacea!

I’ve received numerous emails and Facebook requests about the big news: a nutrition professor at  Kansas State University has allegedly lost close to 30 pounds by eating a low calorie diet that includes significant amounts of Twinkies for 8 weeks. The media circus is spinning with this news, if you haven’t already heard about it, you will very soon.

Professor Haub, along with the American Dietetic Association, cite this as proof positive that calories count.  The food industry loves nothing more than promoting the mythology that calories matter above all else. Here in America, we are over focused on calories, fat and carbs. And we’re fatter than ever.

We have a billion dollar diet industry that thrives on American’s gullibility and lack of common sense when it comes to food. 80-90% of all weight lost through dieting is regained. Weight Watchers is a great example of this phenomenon. People tell me Weight Watchers is great, they’ve gone 5 or 6 times over the years, losing the same 5-20 pounds over and over again.

As nutritional anthropologist Liz Snyder reminded me, Jenny Craig is owned by Nestle, Wt Watchers by the same co. that owns Keebler foods. Your yo-yo diet is their ponzi scheme!

Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Calorie counting is one of those insane things. Not to mention it takes all the fun out of eating food.

Back to the Twinkie guy. Here’s the deal. He’s been eating Twinkies  (and a protein shake and a multivitamin) every day for 8 weeks. His weight is down, for now.  His cholesterol has slightly improved,  which could be a result of his drinking whole milk. After all, saturated fat has been shown to improve HDL levels.

Bottom line? The real story will be 6 months to a year from now. Will the weight stay off?  Will he end up with a “unrelated” health issue? Will the news media follow that story or will we all be onto the next “big news”? Our collective attention span is too short to follow this story to the real conclusion.

To call it now and say this guy actually lost the 26 pounds is like calling a baseball game after 2 innings. The game isn’t over yet.

Before any of you go running to the store to get your share of Twinkies, you might want to take a look at this book: Trinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. At least then, you’ll know what you’re eating.

Foam pumpkins: made in China

The first week of the free Halloween Costume Swap at my local farmer’s market was a great success. All of the costumes that I started the day with were quickly gone and replaced by many others. Word had gotten out via Patch, New Castle NOW, Facebook and even Twitter.  Some of the PTAs were able to get an anoucement into  their weekly news briefs. Both parents and kids visited the tent happy to swap their Halloween gear in exchange for pre-owned costumes for this year.

Many were thrilled at the prospects of not having to visit Target or Party City for this year’s costume. Most parents are pressed for both time and money these days.  There’s a deeper and darker issue that not so many parents here in our comfortable suburban hamlet are not fully aware of: the environmental impact of all of these cheaply made costumes and goodies is huge.

Halloween is now our second biggest consumer event, only the Christmas season is bigger. We spend millions of dollars on plastic wrapped polyester costumes, cheap plastic decorations and so much more. When it comes down to waste, Halloween is a big mess. Most of our goodies end up in the landfill or, here in Westchester, incinerated in Peekskill.  Most of the products we buy are made from petroleum and manufactured thousands of miles away in China. Our disposable culture is catching up to us as cheap oil and space in the landfills starts to run low.

I’m reminded of a movie that I borrowed from the Westchester Library System called Mardi Gras: Made in China.  The movie followed the life-cycle of Mardi Gras beads from a small factory in Fuzhou, China, to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  Here’s the trailer, you definitely don’t want your kids seeing this.

This is why we really must seriously consider the 3 Rs – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle every day and every holiday.  There’s just gotta be a better way.

The Halloween Costume Swap will continue at Chappaqua’s TABLE Farm Market every Saturday in October at the Chappaqua Train Station from 10am to 1pm. Spend your money on fresh veggies instead of Halloween costumes! See you there.

Now that the Girl Scout Cookie sales have started, I can’t sit by and stay silent about the atrocities that these well meaning scouts are innocently perpetrating on their families, their friends and even the planet. I’m well aware that these cookies have a place in the hearts and minds of so many people. My mom was a  troop leader and the cookie chair when I was a kid. When I was a much younger, more naive mom, I was part of the cookie craze. My daughter got a big fancy badge one year because we staked out her sister’s child care center and sold them out of the back of my van!  I’m no longer that young and innocent. Now that I know what I know about the ingredients of Girl Scout cookies, I can’t eat them, I don’t let my kids eat them and I really want to encourage you not to buy or eat them either.

This is not about childhood obesity or that word, “moderation”.  I’m fine with a few cookies every now and then. I’ll buy Tate’s cookies or whip up a batch of my own.  It’s not about the calories or even the fat grams in Girl Scout cookies.

Here’s a link to the Nutrition information for this years Girl Scout cookies. It’s not the nutrition information, the calories or grams of trans fats that I’m concerned about.  Its the INGREDIENTS. You’ll need to magnify the page to be able to read them. For the most part, they got rid of any High Fructose Corn Syrup. Little Brownie Bakers knows that moms no longer tolerate HFCS as an ingredient. They’ve replaced it with sugar. It’s not the corn syrup or the sugar that is keeping me and my kids away from these cookies.

It’s the poor quality oils that will keep me from buying Girl Scout cookies.

The Tagalongs, Thin Mints, Samoas and DoSiDos contain cottonseed oil. Let’s start with the fact that cotton is not a food. My pal, Dr. Andrew Weil says no way is cottonseed oil okay. It is loaded with pesticide residue, cotton is one of the most highly sprayed crops. Since cotton crops are under far less chemical regulation that other other crops used specifically for food, many pesticides or chemicals can be used on cotton crops that are illegal for use on food crops, how creepy is that? This oil is super cheap, so a cookie company looking to make a super cheap product will use this ingredient. In addition to the pesticide residue, cottonseed oil is extremely high in inflammatory Omega 6 oil. The ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in cottonseed oil is 259:1. For optimal health, we want a ratio of 2 parts Omega 6 to 1 part Omega 3.  If you’re trying to increase your Omega 3 for health reasons, and you eat an edible foodlike substance like a Girl Scout Cookie made with cottonseed oil, you’ll have to guzzle a gallon of fish oil or flaxseed oil to balance out our omega 6:3 ratio!  Plain and simple: cottonseed oil is a hazardous ingredient that you don’t want your family ingesting.

Besides personal health, Girl Scout cookies endanger planetary health as well. That’s a bold statement, huh?  The more I’ve learned about food and food systems, the more I’ve learned about our fragile environment. Here’s why I make that statement. Every single flavor of Girl Scout Cookies this year contains Palm Oil. What’s so bad about palm oil? While it is a saturated fat, that’s not why I don’t want my kids to be eating it. I use lots of saturated fats in my cooking: butter, coconut oil even some duck fat and occasional bacon grease! Saturated fat is not the issue.

The issue is environmental. To grow palm oil, we destroy rain forests. Its not just about destroying the  planet’s  most biodiverse  ecosystems which are home to millions of plant and animal species, including highly endangered orangutans, clouded leopards, and sun bears. Its about creating runaway climate change that will impact our future on this planet. I’m not making this up- read more about it here from the Rainforest Action Network.

Now that my girls are older, I can look forward to the future when I will be a grandma. I hope to take the time to bake cookies with my grandkids, just like my grandma did with me. If we keep plowing down rainforests in the name of cheap oil to put in cheap cookies, I might never get a chance to see grandkids.

Parents of scouts: please don’t have your kids sell these cookies. Take some time, make some real cookies, make a donation to the Girl Scouts, it’s a great organization. I’d like to see their cookies go extinct. There are so many other worthwhile fundraisers that are good for people and for the planet. Please pass this on to anyone you know who  cares about the fate of the earth and hopes to have grandkids one day.

She is fed up with school food and is taking it personally. Very personally.  An unidentified teacher somewhere in the mid-west has started a horrifying stunt. She will be eating (and photographing) her school’s lunch every day this year.  I greatly admire her bravery to put her health on the line to make a point.  School lunch in the USA is in need of a huge overhaul.

Thanks to the large number of concerned parents and health professionals here in the blogosphere, I expect that her  journey, which is reminiscent of  Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me film, will grow a huge following. The timing couldn’t be better.  The nation is starting to focus on the state of school lunch as  Congress is expected to update child nutrition programs this spring.  The re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act will impact the health of 31 million children.

This  school lunch conversation needs to go beyond calorie counts and fat grams. We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, the photos being uploaded daily to the Fed Up: School Lunch Project blog tell a lot. Viewing today’s posted lunch of a “bagel dog” along with some pale anemic looking tater tots made my stomach queasy and makes me wonder more about the health and well being of  kids who are eating this every day.

Our kids deserve real food in schools, not packaged processed chemicalized fare. We need to teach them more than just the USDA food pyramid by incorporating school gardens and food based education through out the curriculum. This is a most worthwhile investment in their future. Real food is preventative healthcare which will save all of us enormous amounts of money in the future.

What can you do to make some waves like this teacher?

Have kids and parents write letters: Slow Food’s Time for Lunch campaign offers some great tools that will help you to get this message across.  Letter writing can have a big impact that legislators can’t ignore.  Legislators who already understand the importance of better school food can refer to letters as evidence of support.

Visit your kids cafeteria and have some lunch. Better School Food has an action plan and a handy checklist that you can bring to the school cafeteria. Bring your camera to lunch and send the photos to your legislator. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Yesterday, I received numerous emails from clients and friends telling me about Oprah’s free coupons for the new KFC Grilled Chicken. A free dinner: 2 pieces of chicken, 2 sides and a biscuit. It was such a huge promotion, this free meal, that the Oprah.com site experienced record high traffic.

Oprah seemed to think this was healthier than the fried version of KFC. Oprah apparently liked the idea of “grilled” vs. fried along with their claims of less fat and salt. Is it healthier? How does one go about figuring out what is healthy or healthIER?

Here are some ways I evaluate food to determine if a food is hazardous to your health.

#1 READ THE INGREDIENTS!
It took me a while, after some searching, I was able to find the ingredients on the KFC website. Not the “Nutrition Information” which just tells calories, fat grams and other manipulated info, the ingredients!
Here are the ingredients in the new KFC “grilled chicken” from their website. I put the hazardous ingredients in Bold so you can find them easily:

KFC® Grilled Chicken: Fresh Chicken Marinated with: Salt, Sodium Phosphate, and Monosodium Glutamate Seasoned with: Maltodextrin, Salt, Bleached Wheat Flour, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil, Monosodium Glutamate, Spices, Palm Oil, Natural Flavor, Garlic Powder, Soy Sauce (Soybean, Wheat, Salt), Chicken Fat, Chicken Broth,Autolyzed Yeast, Beef Powder, Rendered Beef Fat, Extractives of Turmeric, Dehydrated Carrot, Onion Powder, and Not More Than 2% Each of Calcium Silicate and Silicon Dioxide Added as Anticaking Agents. Contains Wheat and Soy.

Looks like this food is swimming in MSG! If you’re not concerned about MSG? Perhaps you should be! Here’s a link to a short piece about the Hidden Dangers of MSG

Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oils are on my “never eat” list. I’m sure that Dr. Oz would agree with me. Hydrogenated oils are unhealthful at any level. This is a great example of how meaningless the term “Trans Fat Free” can be. Oprah obviously got sucked in, just like millions of eaters every day.

Also, keep in mind that cotton is not a food crop, its heavily sprayed with pesticides and is extremely high in inflammatory Omega 6 fats. Cottonseed oil is not an ingredient fit for human consumption in my book!

Looking beyond ingredients, let’s ask a few more questions about Oprah’s grilled chicken.
Where were these chickens raised? In a factory farm? What were these chickens fed? Genetically modified corn or soybean meal with pesticide residues?Were they fed antibiotics to make them grow faster? Chickens are meant to run around outside and eat bugs and peck around on the ground? Did they ever see the light of day? Were their beaks clipped off? Factory Farms create huge environmental problems here in the US and in countries like Mexico and others. In addition to creating huge sources of pollution, they make for ideal breeding grounds for new strains of flu.

Perhaps we should change the name from KFC to KFFC: Kentucky Factory Farmed Chicken!

What can you do if you feel that Oprah was not doing her viewers a favor by offering a free meal of KFC? Ask Oprah do a show on the health hazards of MSG and the environmental hazards of factory farming! Tell her, no thanks for the free meal. Let her know at www.oprah.com