Throw Away Your Television
With more than one-third of America’s children overweight, we have TV to thank (more importantly, our choice to indulge in it). Throw away your television (or at least leave it mostly off) for two reasons. One, kids are burning fewer calories because they aren’t exercising while they watch hours of TV. Most parents [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →Avoid Soft Drinks
One of the most important statistics, I believe, related to the obesity epidemic, is this one: Teen boys are drinking three times as much soda as they did 30 years ago, and teen girls are drinking more than double. I hope parents will avoid soft drinks, because of two critical factors they may [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →Childhood Obesity Facts
Before I go on to list some sobering childhood obesity facts, here’s the one that hits me hardest: Yale University found that overweight children are routinely teased and bullied by peers and even teachers and parents. That’s now 35 percent of all kids, half of whom qualify as obese. The Yale study [...]
3 Comments • Continue Reading →Avoiding Childhood Obesity
I’ve been reviewing recent data on the phenomenon that threatens to bankrupt us all and damage our quality of life: the well known childhood obesity epidemic. My web site intends to be nurturing and positive about diet, toward avoiding childhood obesity. But occasionally, I think a good dose of reality (call it fear [...]
1 Comment • Continue Reading →Making those Thanksgiving mashed potatoes nutritious
I’ve been experimenting with low-glycemic index foods mixed with those high-GI foods people crave, for my book 12 Steps to Whole Foods. Everyone knows that mashed potatoes spike your blood sugar, but what you may not know is that more than any other food, green foods stabilize your blood sugar. So, you’re smart [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →Freebie composting (also, Bob dies)
We’ve had a beautiful Indian summer in Utah, and the last couple of weeks, I’ve come home from my Saturday run past my neighbors bagging their leaves. I asked them to drop the bags off at my house instead of the dump, and we layered them in our compost boxes as the “brown” layer [...]
Leave a comment • Continue Reading →Sugar is the nice girl’s cocaine
I’ve said before that sugar is more addictive than cocaine (I’m not making this up—earlier research has documented this phenomenon). A new study in today’s paper, conducted in France, has been presented to the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. Rats offered a choice between cocaine and sugar chose [...]
2 Comments • Continue Reading →Nutrition activity for kids
Need a nutrition activity for kids? Have them watch my new three-minute green smoothie demo on YouTube. If you like it, give me five stars so I can bump out all those weird and totally inferior green smoothie demos. I wonder how fast YOU could do it if you weren’t talking the [...]
5 Comments • Continue Reading →A Halloween tip for moms
My kids have all the usual fun trick or treating. I wouldn’t deny them that. Then, when they get home, I bribe them. Twenty bucks buys a big bag of sugar from each kid, which then gets upended into the garbage in the garage or handed out en masse to those scary [...]
2 Comments • Continue Reading →Whole Food Green Drink—how all this craziness got started
My friend Kari was laughing the other day about the crazy accidental beginnings of GreenSmoothieGirl. I’d forgotten all about it. It was a little like that old commercial of the girl with the chocolate bar running smack into the guy with the jar of peanut butter—WHAM! A star is born. I was [...]
2 Comments • Continue Reading →