Living organic with children – green your insides

Parents today are raising children in a very different world. Living organic was once a normal part of living. Now however, food is injected and sprayed (funnily, so are many of our celebrity idols!), water is laden with chemicals, as are many of the products we use, from deodorants and shampoos to furniture and paint. There are many stressors accompanying our modern lifestyle and parents are right to be alarmed because children are particularly vulnerable to them.

My mother likes to remind me, “Things aren’t the way they used to be.” She’s right.

One simple way to strengthen our children is to build their digestive health. It is estimated that approximately 70 per cent of our immune cells reside in our colon (bowel). Our modern lifestyle compromises this digestive strength every day and eating more organic vegetables is one way to encourage a balance of friendly bacteria in the gut. In Lunchbox Solutions and Ticklish: New Ways to Help Your Child Learn, Love & Play, I discuss lots of practical tips on getting children to eat a broad, healthy diet and how parents can help their children thrive in a modern world.

Some parents are in the habit of hiding vegetables in pasta sauces and bread crumb mixes just so their children consume their daily intake. In Lunchbox Solutions we explore the benefits of being upfront with children about food and we provide ideas on how to promote “green insides” in a way that helps children become responsible for their own diet. With good communication, it is possible to infuse meaning and value into the concept of healthy eating for the whole family. We really can green our insides!

If we want our children to fall in love with fruit and vegetables, then one of the first things we can do is make the switch to organic produce.

These fruit and vegetables may not always look as pretty as the super-sized strawberries or glossy waxed apples in supermarkets, but they taste so much better. Commercially grown produce tends to have an unnatural shelf life, is nutrient-poor, grown with pesticides and chemicals and and may even be genetically modified. Frighteningly, these foods may also be irradiated (exposed to radiation).

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Written for The Goodness Magazine by Dr Jennifer Barham-Floreani, author of Well Adjusted Babies.

Enjoy reading the rest of this article – how to go organic, learning about prioritizing on a tight budget, more on the dirty dozen and so much more in the
July 2014 Issue of Healthy Mama Magazine (formally The Goodness Mag).

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