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Get Your Children to Eat Vegetables
These days, I see lots of obese children in my clinic. Many of them are addicted to TV and video games, to chips and pop and sugary breakfast cereals. And most of them eat two or three meals a day which have meat as the main dish. Lunch is hot dogs or bologna.* Dinner is a slab of beef or half a chicken. It's rare for the portions to be as small as a deck of playing cards - the serving size recommended by most experts. My young patients eat two or three times that much at a sitting. And many of their parents approve.
Parents often think children need more protein than they really do. A child who's walking only needs about one half gram of protein per pound of body weight. So a 30 pound 3-year-old only needs about 15 grams of protein a day. A single hard-boiled egg has about 6 grams. Two tablespoons of smooth peanut butter supply another 8 grams. It doesn't take very much protein-rich food to meet a child's protein needs.
Of course, meat has protein, too. A broiled hamburger made with ¼ lb of lean beef (80% lean) supplies 29 grams of protein. Notice that this is nearly twice as much protein as a normal 3-year-old needs for a whole day. And with its protein, the burger packs about 20 grams of fat, including 7 grams of saturated fat, and a big dose (103 mg) of cholesterol.
A little meat isn't necessarily a bad thing. But the point is, it isn't necessary either. Children can get all the protein they need from beans, nuts, eggs, and whole grains, without any of the artery-clogging fats. Egg yolks do have cholesterol, but it turns out this is safer than the cholesterol in meat. And, a diet with less meat also costs less. I can buy a one-pound bag of dried kidney beans for about 90 cents. Soaked overnight and boiled for 30 minutes, it makes about 3 pounds of beans, good for about 124 grams of protein. The same amount of protein from good hamburger will set you back $2, if not more.
There are lots of ways to get your children to eat more vegetables and less meat. You don't have to nag, plead, reward, punish or bribe. All you have to do is cook with less meat, and learn to enjoy what you cook. And you don't have to change all at once, either. You can start a bit at a time, putting a little less meat on the plate, and a little more vegetables, beans, and whole grains. After a while your kids will stop complaining and you'll all be healthier, and richer, too.
*My nutritionist friend tells me that bologna has so much fat that it isn't even counted as meat, it's counted as fat!
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The title was "how to get your child to eat more vegetables" but the actual topic was "how to use the obesity epidemic to advocate for vegetarianism".
And what would be wrong with vegetarianism? Why is it so important to you that children consume meat?
We eat far more now than we ever have and in North America we eat more than twice the average of the world even when considering we push the average up with our high consumption. We are gluttons.
Check out the 20 minute video of Mark Bittman (who writes for the New York Times) talking about how meat consumption is killing us in many ways. The planet, our bodies, and more. Not to mention modern methods of raising these animals are intensely cruel:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/ta lks/view/id/263
It's a societal pressure pushed by industry but in the next few years the costs are going to skyrocket so there's all the more reason to start easing up on it and treat it as a condiment or even avoid it completely.
Meat does not displace fruits and veggies unless it is served in excess to the detriment of fruits and veggies.
I do not believe it is "important" for a child to consume meat. I do however believe that when discussing the problems with the Standard American Diet and childhood obesity, meat itself is not the problem. A child never became obese on a diet of boneless skinless chicken breast, 93% lean beef, or salmon and broccoli.
Meat is a choice. Vegetarianism is a perfectly legitimate choice as well. However meat can and does fit perfectly fine in a nutritiusly dense whole food diet.
It isn't difficult to make good choices within any food category. The problems over all are the poor choices not the category.