Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Written by Lisa Fuhrman for the September 2006 edition of Healthy Times:

Pack these healthful and tasty natural entrees in your child’s lunch box, and you will be giving them a priceless gift.

Roll-ups and vegetable wraps
Take a whole grain flat bread or tortilla and spread a favorite Fuhrman-style dressing or sauce over half of the round roll-up. Then add a thin layer of chopped or shredded raw veggies such as lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, red cabbage, and cucumber.

Bananas
Bananas are a school lunch dream. They can be served straight, right in their own protective and fun packaging. They can be sliced or mashed onto whole-grain bread, with nut butter, apple butter, or a prune whip. Try it with raw almond butter or raw cashew butter, as they are more nutritious and healthful than roasted peanut butter. It’s even better if you add some shredded romaine lettuce to the banana-nut sandwich.

Rice-bean burgers
Healthful burgers on whole wheat buns are always accepted as a school lunch, and no other kid can tell it’s not a meat burger. Try a simple burger made with ingredients such as oats, brown rice, lentils, red onions, chopped nuts, nutritional yeast, and egg white, and some ketchup or other spices. There are hundreds of ways to make a great veggie burger.

Fresh Fruit
Few people think of fresh fruit as a main dish for children’s lunches, but fruit can be the centerpiece of the lunch. Children love bags of grapes, cherries, or strawberries. My kids even like shredded raw apple, mixed with raisins, shredded carrots, and shredded lettuce. A little sauce made with raw cashews, orange juice, lemon, and maybe some blood orange vinegar is a hit with the kids.

Nuts and seeds
Throw in a small bag of raw nuts or sunflower seeds. Ask your child if they want some extra to share with friends. My kids’ favorite is macadamia nuts, which I buy in the shell. They taste incredibly fresh and sweet when you crack them yourself, compared to the ones already shelled. I put them in a heavy clear plastic bag and lay them out flat on the floor of the garage or driveway and then hit each nut firmly with a hammer through the bag. Then, after emptying the mix of broken shells and nuts into a plate, I separate out the nuts, discarding the shells. My children love to help pick out (and eat as they go!) the nuts. It gives them something productive to do and helps make lunchtime a pleasure instead of a stressor.

Dried fruits
Dried black figs, hard bread dates, some unsweetened dried papaya or dried persimmon—what kid doesn’t love these natural candies? Make sure your children floss and brush their teeth when they come home from school. Dried fruits can stick between teeth, causing cavities. Dried fruits also can be soaked overnight in juice or nut milks and then used like jam on the side of sandwich or pita with some nut butter. Make sure the dried fruits you get are unfumigated, unsulfured and unsweetened.

Check out Jaffe Brothers Natural Foods for quality dried fruits and nuts.

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From the September 2006 edition of Dr. Fuhrman’s Healthy Times:

If you already have an overweight child, make some changes in your family life. To solve the problem of childhood obesity, we first need to change parental behavior. This will require you adopt a new way of thinking. As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

1. Don’t make the major interactions with your child be about body weight. Interact about other issues.


2. Set up weekly family discussion meetings. Make an agenda for the meeting. All members can present topics for discussion. Discuss health issues as a family each week. Give each family member equal attention and equal concern and discuss the reasons for the new family health initiative and how all members will benefit. Do not focus more attention on the overweight family member. Study and discuss parts of my book Disease-Proof Your Child or other valuable health sources at family meetings. Have the children participate.

3. Parents tell me that when they listen to the audio book of Disease-Proof Your Child as they ride around in the car, it rubs off on the kids and spurs discussion on dietary issues.

4. Plan fun, physical activities for the family. Devise solutions for more exercise for the whole family. Get involved with some type of physical activity, taking up a sport, hiking, running, climbing, or any other activity that involves movement. All must participate, not only the overweight child. Parents cannot just watch; they must model a healthy attitude about fitness and physical fun.

5. Make dietary goals that the entire family understands and can agree to adopt. Lay out an eating plan for dinners and school lunches that promotes long-term health.

6. Praise your child for issues not related to weight loss or gain. Make other issues as important, such as school work, ethics, care for others, attitude towards learning, and development skills.

7. Don’t reward behavior with unhealthful food. Show your kids and others that treats on special occasions can be healthful and still taste good. Set a good example at birthday parties. Get junk food out of the house, and try to have the entire family supportive of this action. Creatively try to get the whole family to make the promise to “say NO to junk food.”

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Now, if preschool puberty didn’t scare you, what about children with clogged arteries? I realize it seems a little out of place, but Canadian researchers have determined obese children, and children with high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, may already have fatty build-up in their arteries that could lead to heart attacks later in life. Robert Preidt of HealthDay News reports:

"Obesity puts children at risk for high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol levels. Children's diets have changed dramatically, influenced by television commercials and the convenience of fast foods," researcher Dr. Sanaz Piran, an internal medicine resident at McMaster University said. "Children are eating too much fatty and processed foods. Parents need to involve their kids in regular exercise activities and cut down on fatty meals, emphasizing healthy food such as vegetables."

Can you picture father and son heading off to the pharmacy to refill their cholesterol-lowering medication together? No pun intended, but that’s a hard pill to swallow. Dr. Piran makes a lot of important observations, but I really like her recommendation of a family-oriented approach to cardiovascular disease prevention. Kind of sounds Fuhrmanesque to me.

In a previous post Dr. Fuhrman explains that getting children to eat more healthfully is contingent on the parents playing by the rules too. Meaning—parents, if you want your kids to eat their broccoli, you better eat yours! More from the post:

Here is the most important: No rules only for children. If the parents are not willing to follow the rules set for the house, they should not be imposed on the children. Don’t argue about what your children should and shouldn’t be eating; discuss this in private. As parents, we must be consistent, but not perfect. Likewise, it is okay for the children to be consistent, but not prefer either. For example, if the parents decide that an unhealthy food or a restaurant meal is acceptable for the children once per week, then that goes for the adults, too. Setting an example supported by both parents is the most important and most effective way for your children to develop a healthy attitude toward food.

Now, if you have any doubts about the precursors of heart disease developing in young children, take a gander at this post. In it Dr. Fuhrman explains what we eat as children can follow us into adulthood:

There is considerable evidence that the lipoprotein abnormalities (high LDL and low HDL) that are linked to heart attack deaths in adulthood begin to develop in early childhood and that higher cholesterol levels eventually get “set” by early food habits.1 What we eat during our childhood affects our lifetime cholesterol levels. For many, changing the diet to a plant-based, low-saturated-fat diet in later life does not result in the favorable cholesterol levels that would have been seen if the dietary improvements were started much earlier in life.

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Do you know what toxic hunger is? No, it’s not a comic book villain or a professional wrestler. In Disease-Proof You Child Dr. Fuhrman explains toxic hunger results from feeding children so much calorie-rich food so frequently that children learn to disconnect eating from hunger. Guilty! How many of you, in the past, have gone out for Chinese food at two in the morning?

Dr. Fuhrman believes toxic hunger contributes to obesity and causes people to become bona fide food addicts. From Disease-Proof Your Child:

After enough time goes by continually consuming more calories than they need, children will feel discomfort when they do not have food constantly in their stomach. They must keep their digestive tract going all the time, because the minute it empties, they feel uncomfortable. By the time they become an overweight adult, they are true food addicts.

And the symptoms of food addiction sure smack of drug withdrawals—not that I know what those are like! Here’s more from Dr. Fuhrman’s book:

A few hours after eating, feeling weak, headachy, tired, mentally dull, and stomach cramping or discomfort is not true hunger! These symptoms of stomach cramping and fluttering, headaches and fatigue that begin when digestion is completed I call “toxic hunger” because these symptoms only occur in those who have been eating a toxic diet. These are withdrawal symptoms from an unhealthful diet, and this discomfort is mistakenly interpreted as the need to eat more frequently and take in more calories. Continual eating stops the discomfort, just like frequent coffee drinking stops the headaches from caffeine withdrawal. Your body can’t withdraw from (detoxify and repair) your toxic dietary habits and digest a meal simultaneously. By eating, this detox process is stopped. When we consume a toxic, disease-promoting, our body reacts in an attempt to remove or deal with the damage this unhealthful diet could cause. This concept is called withdrawal. The body attempts to detoxify from a harmful, low-nutrient diet and we feel the symptoms of toxic hunger. We build up more waste products in our cells when we eat unhealthfully, and when the body is not busy digesting, it can attempt to withdraw from or initiate repair mechanisms that result in these uncomfortable symptoms. The disease-building diet most Americans eat drives these symptoms, and these symptoms promote overeating.

So, with all this in mind, get a load of this new report. Researchers found that overweight children are more likely to binge eat than other kids, and, these hefty eaters are hungry again more than an hour sooner than their peers. Reuters has more:

"Children who report binge-eating behaviors appear to have deficits in appetite regulation that put them at risk for the development of obesity," write Margaret C. Mirch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues.

Mirch explains the key to changing this behavior is to teach them to recognize and respond to only true hunger. Not sure what true hunger is? Let’s check back with Disease-Proof Your Child:

True hunger is felt in the neck and throat; where thirst is felt, hunger is a subtle sensation, and when you feel it, almost any food tastes food and satisfies you. True hunger is not felt in the head or belly. When you eat when you are truly hungry, your ability to taste is maximized and food truly tastes better. True hunger marks the time when the digestive juices are ready to be released and the enzyme-secreting glands have had time to refill and are ready for action. Healthy digestion, no indigestion, results. When we eat only when hungry, we also prevent ourselves from becoming overweight and maximize our chances for a long, disease-free life.

Now, if you need help getting your own kids to eat better, check out this podcast: Dr. Fuhrman on Getting Children to Eat Well

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Now, I thought most teenagers were downing bacon double-cheeseburger right and left, but, I’m wrong. For me it wasn’t until college that I really began to notice many of my peers becoming vegans, vegetarians, or limited meat-eaters—even so, I still knew plenty of kids that gorged on fried eggs, Taylor ham, and bacon. So I was surprised to read that many teenagers are going vegetarian.

Jennifer Nelson of The Washington Post explains some high school kids are getting hip to meat-free or meat-restricted diets. The real shocker is parents are more accepting than you might think. Heck, if at sixteen I had told my mother I didn’t want to eat meat anymore, she’d have put me up for adoption! But for many kids this just isn’t the case:

Reaching the point where a family embraces vegetarianism can be a slow process, though. When Cathie and Dean Winters's son, also named Dean, of Boulder City, Nev., started refusing meat around age 7, his parents differed in their responses. Cathie Winters was more accepting, having experimented with vegetarianism in her youth, but, she says, "my husband is a meat-and-potatoes man, so he went nuts."

According to Nelson the Winters family ended up consulting with a doctor to ensure their son’s new diet would provide adequate nutrition. When the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with a well-balanced vegetarian diet, husband Dean became more accepting.

In truth, before I even encountered Dr. Fuhrman’s work, I never ate an insane amount of meat, and I always ate my fair share of vegetables. So even back then I never really identified with the “meat-and-potatoes” style of eating—to me it sounds like a softer way of saying Standard American Diet.

So, what of the claim by the Winters’ doctor that a well-balanced vegetarian diet can support proper nutrition. Does it sound Fuhrman-ish to you? It should. Check out this excerpt from Disease-Proof Your Child:

Research shows that those who avoid meat and diary have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity, which are the leading causes of death in American.1 But when we take a close look at the data, it appears that those who weren’t as strict at avoiding animal products entirely had longevity statistics that were equally impressive—as long as they consumed high volumes of a variety of unrefined plant foods. In other words, you can achieve the benefits of a vegetarian diet without being a total vegan, and the science available seems to support this.

Pretty encouraging right? So for many of the kids mentioned in Nelson’s article who are still eating small amounts of meat, like an occasional egg or fish, according to Dr. Fuhrman they too can enjoy the benefits a vegetable-based diet has to offer.
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I admit, kind of a dramatic title, but not without merit. In Disease-Proof Your Child Dr. Fuhrman points out that an unhealthy diet early in life sets the stage for coronary atherosclerosis and heart disease later in life. He’s a refresher from the book:

There is considerable evidence that the lipoprotein abnormalities (high LDL and low HDL) that are linked to heart attack deaths in adulthood begin to develop in early childhood and that higher cholesterol levels eventually get “set” by early food habits.1 What we eat during our childhood affects our lifetime cholesterol levels. For many, changing the diet to a plant-based, low-saturated-fat diet in later life does not result in the favorable cholesterol levels that would have been seen if the dietary improvements were started much earlier in life.

And don't forget exercise. According to Reuters a new study has revealed teens that get a minimum of ninety minutes of exercise three times a week reduce their cardiovascular risk. The results are pretty amazing, here’s an excerpt:

After six months, tests showed that the exercisers had improved the flexibility of their arteries, allowing these vessels to carry more oxygen-rich blood. Moreover, the already expanded inner layer of their arteries had shrunk.

The exercisers also lowered their cholesterol levels and blood pressure and lost weight.

Good thing my folks had me playing soccer and little league when I was a kid. The researchers do point out that primary obstacle to all this is teen’s low perseverance and motivation to exercise. Maybe you could just do what my father did, hold my Nintendo hostage until I worked up a sweat.
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