Raise Healthy, Vibrant Children: Act Now to Protect Their Future

By Cheryl Meyer

"There are two things we should give to our children. One is roots, the other is wings." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have discussed the Standard American Diet and how it is interrupting our health, and I also wrote an article to share the solution to regain our health, to eat REAL WHOLE FOODS of the entire rainbow from a farm as close to us as possible.

However, I would be remiss not to write an article about food and how the Standard American Diet disrupts our children’s health and future.

And it all goes back to you, the parent. I don’t say this to shame; because advertising tells us that processed food is considered nutritious, cheap, and convenient, so it seems appealing. However, I hope to get your attention now so that you know how to change your health habits regarding food. You were not responsible for what you did not know yesterday. Now that you know this, you need to reckon with the fact that healthy eating habits in the family begin with you. This way, you can influence your children's eating so that they have a better tomorrow.

This should be a big enough WHY to change how you shop for food and to encourage you to COOK real, organic, whole foods. If you are a parent or a prospective parent, please protect your children and start only eating healthy food in your home. Children mimic what they see you doing.

I dug in and started researching children’s health when I came across a post from Moms Across America that showed how 54% of our children now have a chronic illness. That certainly stopped me in my tracks. It does not have to be this way, so I wrote an entire section about children and their health in my second book. (Feeling Good, Living Low Toxin)

Whole organic food can make our children well, but the Standard American diet makes them sick. Children are getting 80% of their food processed. Low income chilcren are getting 100% of their food processed.

Let me share a few of the statistics with you.

A majority of our children are chronically ill. These are the frightening statistics:

• 45% are overweight-Obesity is a cellular disfunction.

• 47% of our children are diagnosed with learning disabilities. 2021 Study by the NCLD (National Center of Learning Disabilities) (See Ad for Dr. Suki Stone, who teaches children with learning disabilities to read without phonics in 14 days or less).

From 2009 to 2021, depression has significantly grown among our teens. According to a CDC study, the share of American high-school students who say they feel "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" rose from 26% to 44%.

The #2 cause of death for teens is depression and suicide.

23% of children in the US are taking Psychiatric Drugs.

15% of our children have fatty liver disease.

11% of our children have asthma.

10% of our children have ADHD.

8% of our children have food allergies. Although there are no statistics on how many of our children have food sensitivities, estimates are as high as 20%.

• 5% of our children have seizures.

•2% of our males have autism.

• By the time our children are 5. they han have as many as 7 pounds of chemicals in their little bodies.

Here are a few more stunning facts:

•Newborns are born with more than 287 toxins inherited from their mothers' bodies through the umbilical cord. Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals. 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause congenital disabilities or abnormal development in animal tests. The toxins are from both the mother and the father's bodies.

• 25% of teenages are prediabetic. This is not a result of “personal choice” - because our rigged food system is loaded with sugar, causing insulin resistance. Observational evidence shows associations of prediabetes with early forms of nephropathy, chronic kidney disease, small fiber neuropathy, diabetic retinopathy, and increased risk of macrovascular disease. Prediabetes, typically defined as blood glucose levels above normal but below diabetes thresholds, is a risk state that defines a high chance of developing diabetes.

• 18% of kids have a developmental disability- Calley Means, Harvard MBA, Past executive with Coke Corp, and whistleblower.

• Fatty streaks, the first stage of atherosclerosis, were found in the arteries of 100% of kids by age 10. (Https:// www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/5-356-1319(69)89929-7/fulltext)Dr. Michael Gregor, author of How Not to Die, “For those of us older than ten years of age, the choice likely isn’t whether to eat healthy to prevent heart disease. It’s whether or not we want to reverse the heart disease we likely already have.” ~

Michael Gregor, MD

The list goes on and on. Two new studies have shown that 88% of our population is metabolically unfit. This leaves us wide open to getting pandemic cases of flu, other illnesses, and chronic illnesses.

“We have convinced younger Americans that rampant fatigue, obesity, anxiety, depression, and infertility is a normal part of daily life that are curable with drugs instead of warning signs of larger cellular dysfunction that can only be cured by root cause solutions.” ~ Calley Means

So, what can we do about this?

It begins with the lifestyle habits of the parents.

The new thinking in Epigenetics is that chronic diseases may be in our genetics, but we can turn those genes on or leave them off with what we eat and our other lifestyle habits. In other words, chronic diseases only run in families because lifestyle habits run in families.

Toxic load for a child begins before conception. Therefore, the baby is bown with a significant toxic load right from the start. Toxic load leads to inflammation which leads to chronic illness.

So, if you and your spouse’s life were laden with toxins when you conceived, if you were not eating “clean” and were around a lot of toxins in your food, your cosmetics, your water, your cleaning supplies, and in your home, pre-birth, this all gets passed to your child.

Once born, limiting toxins in the child's food and environment is also important.

• “A developing child’s chemical exposures are greater pound for-pound than those of adults.

• “An immature, porous blood-brain barrier allows higher chemical exposures to the developing brain.

• “Children have lower levels of some chemical-binding proteins, allowing more of a chemical to reach ‘target organs.’

• “A baby’s organs and systems are rapidly developing, and thus are often more vulnerable to damage from chemical exposure.'

• “Systems that detoxify and excrete industrial chemicals are not fully developed.

• “The longer future life span of a child compared to an adult allows more time for adverse effects to arise"- Mark Hyman MD

And as noted above, by the time a child is 5, they have eaten 7 pounds of toxins, according to Mark Hymen, MD a leading functional practitioner. No wonder or children are getting ill. Their little bodies can not handle all these toxins.

Remember, Big Food, Big Chemical, Big Pharma, and Big Ag are in business to make a profit. They are in not in business to promote health. The solution is for you to control what you and your family eat and for you to eliminate the toxins in your environment.

In my article about processed foods, I explained how corrupted our food has become. So, stop eating processed foods and fast foods. Please read my article about processed food in this magazine for the full picture. The operating code our children are eating is corrupt if they consume the SAD.

What we feed our children the Rainbow Diet, 75% of the foods eater are fruits and vegetables, and we ensure that the child eats the full spectrum of colors of whole foods. Go back and read the article in this magazine on how to harness the power of eating the rainbow to get complete guidelines on how to do this for your future health and the health of your children. Then enroll your children in the process.

Once the child breaks the addiction to the SAD and the CRAP, they will enjoy the fruits and vegetables in their meals.

In addition, by cooking and eating real, whole foods, you avoid food additives that hinder learning. The SAD has additives, food coloring, preservatives, artificial flavors, and other harmful chemicals that add no value and are addictive. These ingredients impede your child's health. Studies show that these additives are partially responsible for ADHD and learning disabilities.

It is also possible that your child has a food sensitivity that interrupts their learning. Food sensitivities differ from an allergy, creating inflammation that causes a leaky gut, leading to autoimmune disease, heart disease, fatty liver disease, cancer, and other Chronic Diseases.

“A healthy diet can profoundly affect children's health, helping them maintain a healthy weight, have strong immune systems, avoid certain health problems, stabilize their moods, and sharpen their minds. A healthy diet can also profoundly affect a child's sense of mental and emotional well-being, helping to prevent conditions, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and ADHD.

Include omega-3 oils, which are crucial for cognizance, and your child will have the nutrition to improve his energy and ability to learn. "The identification of the nature and extent of the role of nutrition is important because it is one factor that we can modify in order to optimize cognitive development." Jeanne Segal, PhD and Lawrence Robinson.

Include exercise and foster good sleeping habits; you are now on your way to rearing a healthy child.

Eating the rainbow impacts the child’s mood. What we eat is also what our gut microbiome eat. The gut-brain axis determines our mood. The gut organisms that we foster send chemical signals to our brains. Since we are what we eat, we must emphasize eating plenty of plant foods to help our children be healthy and happy.

It would be best to make food fun when your child is small. Make faces and pictures out of food on their plate and let them eat them with their fingers. You can find examples of food art on Pinterest. My cookbooks have examples of fun ways to serve food to toddlers and early elementary school-age children. Available in my website store.

Offer new foods each meal but allow your child to choose whether to eat them. If they pass, server it again the next day and then the next until they try the food. Eating diversity is also important.

WHY ORGANIC?

Your family does not need a dose of perticides of herbicides in their food. "Cides" (means kills) are used in conventional farming.

How to start:

You can pulverize organic, real food from the entire rainbow to feed your infant or toddles with a couple of kitchen machines. A Bullet would do that trick or what I call my mini chop by Cuisinart will; it is a small food

processor that I use to chop herbs and garlic for cooking, but it is also the ideal size for making baby food with real fruits and vegetables high in phytonutrients. There are several organic cookbooks for infants and toddlers available on Amazon. This way, you feed your child all the building blocks their body needs to replenish. Every cell has a shelf life, so you want the best possible building supplies in your child’s body for their growing years. You also want every cell in your child’s body nourished with real phytonutrients and essential nutrients.

By making your child's food, you avoid heavy toxic metals and all the sugar, GMOs, Omega-6 oils, synthetic ingredients, and additives added to the food.

• A healthy diet will help the child's body ward off disease and help them build a healthy immune system. It protects their hormones, restores balance, and lowers insulin resistance. As a result, they have healthy “happy” hormones, dopamine, serotonin, GABA, and thyroid hormones. In addition, by not eating all the sugar in processed food, their hunger hormones, Leptin and Ghrelin, function properly so they do not overeat.

• A recent study showed that most baby and toddler food had suspicious ingredients Not disclosed toxic metals in the food. First the liver tries to handle them until they are too great a quantity in the body and then the liver send them off to be stored in the babies bones and fat. Eventually they start leaching out and circulate through the child's body again. The toxic impact on the body continues over the months and years to come.

• As the child ages, it does not take any longer to prepare and cook real organic, whole foods than to jump in the car to go to a fast food restaurant, and the rewards are enormous. You are now preparing nutritious home-cooked meals. With planning and experience, there is a rhythm to cooking real food, and the outcome is worth it.

• When you are cooking, add vegetables and fruit to everything. I add spinach everywhere, including my eggs and my smoothies. And I add bananas to baked goods and smoothies. The more colors of the rainbow you can feed your child, and the more vegetables and fruits you encourage them to eat, is a win for your child’s health. Your child needs the diversity of many foods in each color range because the gifts vary. This also ensures that your child gets adequate fiber from the plant food. Fiber has many benefits. The toxins evicted from the liver jump on board and ride out of your digestive system. They feed the good gut bacteria in your gut. They fill your body up so that you eat less food. Fiber helps you maintain healthy sugar levels in your blood, and then help you maintain a healthy weight. The SAD is devoid of healthy fiber.

THESE ARE THE KEYS TO GOOD HEALTH> REMEMBER, CHILDREN ARE LITTLE PITCHERS.

1.. Stop allowing your children to eat processed and fast food. Stop eating it yourself. Instead talk to them about why are are not eating or serving it. Make it positive. You want them to be little superheros.

2. Never offer sugary foods as a treat or as a reward. That connects that sugar is a reward for good behavior.

3. If you are serving processed foods, you are electing to feed the for convenience and not for nutrition and their health. Plan ahead with car food in case your child gets hungry. I always carry apples, peanut butter packs (or almond butter packs), nuts, seeds, and healthy protein bars. If I get caught without any of that, I stop at a grocer and buy Applegate organic lunch meats, a head of lettuce and an organic tomato, and make a healthy "sandwich" for the child. I teach this and other tips in my Ditch the SAD class.

4. Encourage your child to help you in the kitchen. Let them choose what they want in their school lunch, but only offer healthy choices. Then, take them shopping for food with you. Please encourage them to be Mommy’s helper in buying healthy food. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store so that they are choosing mostly from whole foods.

5. Even at a young age, teach them to read labels. I had one mom share that her child at 3 would pick up a box, glide their finger across the ingredients and then put the box back on the shelf. They were mimicking their mother's behavior. This continued when they could read the box.

6. Cook for your children. Control what you are feeding them and yourself. Cooking is an act of love.

7. It does not take that long to make food with real lie food. And the benefits are enormous. You do not have to cook fancy' you must use quality ingredients.

8. Eliminate all the toxins you can from your and your child's lives.

9. Give them real food that grew in the earth.

10. Sit around the dinner table for the years your child has at home. Be the example that they can follow with what you eat. Share your meals, which encourage love and community. Please encourage your child to share their day with you, and then respond with the values you want to instill in them.

11. Do not dictate what the child should eat or how much the child should eat. Instead offer choices but make them all healthy options.

12. Teach them to stop eating when they are 80% full.

13. Teach your child to be grateful for the food, for the world it grew in, for the plants and the animals that they are lucky enough to eat, and to be thankful for the people that helped get it to your table. It could be saying "grace" or just a declaration of gratitude but gratitude is an essential ritual for your family to practice. Gratitude also fosters happiness.

14. Keep a healthy snack basket on the kitchen counter.

15. Put healthy dips and cut up organic veggies at eye level when your child opens up the fridge to eat. (I not possibilities in my two cookbooks for sale on my website in the store.)

15. Put healthy dips and cut up organic veggies at eye level when your child opens up the fridge to eat. (I note possibilities in my two cookbooks for sale on my website.)

16. Only serve healthy desserts, berries with coconut whipped cream, apples, cherries, pears, citrus fruits, and bananas—dark organic, sustainable chocolate. Make occasional treats with almond flour and coconut sugar (low glycemic).

Other things to include in your and your childʼs life:

1. Go to your local farms. Make friends with your farmer. Take your children.

2. Go to the ranch and purchase your meat. Talk to the rancher and understand his commitment to health.

3. Take your children to pick fruit in season. You can take them apple, pear, and cherry picking in California. Let your kids get their hands into the dirt. You probably have some local fruit growing in your area. Research and take advantage of whatever is available in your area.

4. Google U Pick Farms. I see several states that have them. Look for Birthday Parties at the Farm, Pick-Your-Own Produce, Educational School Tours, not to mention special harvest festivals, and many have farm-to-table dinners at the farm.

5. Look for places where you can watch cheese get made. The first time I saw cheese made was in Tillamook, Oregon. There is also a place in the Seattle Pike Street Market where you can watch cheese making.

6. Explore Public Markets like the Seattle Pike Street and Grand Central Market in LA because they may have other foods you and your children are unfamiliar with. I used to love to see the Geoduck clams in Seattle’s open market. They are fascinating and delicious and create quite a bit of humor just seeing them. (Look them up. *smile*)

7. When I lived in the Seattle area, we used to go clamming. What a fun excursion that was. We would look for little holes in the sand and dig like crazy. Then, when we got the clams home, we would soak them overnight so that they would spit out their sand and then steam them for dinner the next night.

8. Take your children fishing. If there are trout in yoru streams and rivers, go trout fishing. If you live close to an ocean, take them saltwater fishing.

9. If you live in New England, you can take a licensed boat and catch your lobster.

10. In Louisiana, you can catch your crawdads.

11. There are also catch-and-cook programs around the United States. For example, in Louisiana, you can catch and cook game fish. In Seattle you can can catch and cook salmon. In British Columbia Canada, you can catch and cook Sturgeon, and wow, are they big.

Limit sugar and refined carbohydrates in your child’s diet. Sugar is addictive, so limit what they get to eat. Sugar impacts every organ in the body negatively, so stay away as much as possible. Refined carbohydrates turn to sugar and therefore are not healthy as well.

Teach your children why you are feeding them the food they are eating. By doing all the above, you teach them where food comes from and how it gets on the table for them to eat. Please encourage them to ask questions. Do not dictate so that when they get out into the world, they understand the advantages of eating real food, and allow them to follow the example of how you eat.

Garden with them. You have several options here. You can till and plant a small plot in your backyard. You can buy a tower and garden on your patio (See below for how). You can grow herbs on your windowsill. Let your children have the joy of planting seeds and then watching the fruits of their labor. They will be thrilled to eat food they have participated in growing.

It is hard to imagine where food comes from unless you’ve been digging holes in the trenches, planting seeds, bulbs, sprouts, or seedlings; then watching these plants that kids can pick and eat.

These are some fun and easy projects to get you started:

1. Start scrap gardens with them. Growing the tops of carrots, the bottoms of lettuce and romaine, garlic cloves, and avocado seeds. Buy organic celery. Cut off the stem. (Eat the stalks. They are great for dips or nut butters as an after-school snack.) Place the celery bottom in water. It only takes a couple of days to start to grow roots. You can then take it outdoors and plant it in the dirt. You could also plant it in a container on your patio.

2. Kitchen scrap gardening. I am sure that you know that you can put toothpicks into an avocado seed, put it over a glass with the seed in the water, and it will start to grow a mini avocado plant. But did you know you could do scrap gardening with many other scraps? You can take the seeds of citrus and plant them (and yep, they will grow). You can cut a 1-inch piece of carrot, and its top will grow. Put it onto pebbles. You can also do this with a scooped-out top of pineapple again on pebbles until it starts to root. You can do this with lettuce, basil, fennel, cilantro, onions, and more. Make this a fun project to do with your child. You can grow garlic and herbs.

3. Finally, you could try tower gardening. Juice Plus sells a tower you can plant and have fixings for your salads anytime.

I just read some people have them in their living rooms. Although I do not recommend Juice Plus itself because I want you to eat the whole real organic plant, I love the concept of their tower, and it would be a great way to grow veggies with your children. There are also inexpensive greenhouses available that might work. Then, depending on where you live during warmer times of the year, you could do backyard gardening with your children or join a community garden.

Please work with your school district to start gardens where children grow food for their lunch program.

5. Check out my ideas for a gardening birthday party for your child described in my book, Feeling Good Living Low Toxin. The idea is to make parties fun occasions instead of just focusing on sugary treats.

Bring up your child to be the leader of the pack that eats healthy food. Bring them up to be "Junior Veggie Rangers™, eating veggies to grow up strong and healthy and to be future superheroes.

Lower the toxic load in their environment. Look up foods, cleaners, personal care products, fragrances, and water in the EWG.org database and trade out products for lower toxic items. For example, eliminate plastic for water bottles and storage. Instead, get your child their own stainless steel water bottle. Each toxin eliminated is a step closer to health. Toxins impact the child’s brain and slow down the ability to read. In addition, toxins interfere with blood sugar levels and maintaining a healthy weight.

Take the TOSS THE TOXINS course advertised in this magazine and clean up your environment to make a safe environment for your child. Environmental toxin experts wrote it. Enroll your child in the process.

Finally, form a community of like-minded parents who want to raise healthier children and only serve organic, real food to their children. Hold your ground. You are not dictating how other children should eat, but you sure can dictate how your child should eat. It is easier with parents with similar health commitments.

Have a conversation with your child before they go to a party, feed them before they go, and offer some non-food reward for after the party, something for your child to look forward to, like going to a farm, or an aquarium, or into the woods with you for an adventure, or to the beach or the shore. For example, one Mom told me that when offered pop rocks, her child did not eat them and brought them home for the mom to decide if they should put them into their mouth.

I listened to a podcast with a group of fathers talking about their children going to parties starting at 3 and eating sugary cake, cookies, and other processed, sugary, dead food. When they declined the food for their child, they got the evil eye. Of course, if you have a supportive community of like-minded parents, you can avoid those situations and the sugar bomb parties. But no matter what, hold to your convictions of what you want your child to eat.

For example, have the party at your house for Halloween and make the event activity oriented. They all still dress up in costumes, but instead of eating 15 candy bars, they bob for apples, eat food art made with veggies, go on a scavenger hunt, play games, and have a jolly good time. Sugar and fun are not synonymous. And if all the parents are on the same playing field, the support within the group is worth it.

Get creative. After all, we are talking about your children’s long-term and future health.

• A healthy diet will help disease and help them build a healthy immune system. It protects their hormones, restores balance, and lowers insulin resistance. As a result, they have healthy “happy” hormones, dopamine, serotonin, GABA, and thyroid hormones. In addition, by not eating all the sugar in processed food, their hunger hormones, Lectin and Ghrelin, function properly so they do not overeat.