What Not to Cook (and Eat)
There are a lot of foods in this world that taste absolutely great, but for health concerns we don’t eat them. Or we are very conscious of their dangerous contents and limit the frequency of eating them.
One great thing about eating organic and healthy, whole grain food every day is that occasionally you can splurge with the junk food and not feel like you’re killing yourself with every bite. Nor will you become obese from eating most wholesome foods, so the occasional lapse is probably OK.
That’s how we prefer to see it. The wholesome foods fill our plates most of the time and the indulgences sneak in only on rare occasions. That’s what we try to teach our kids.
Eggs
Eggs are not a suitable breakfast for your kids every day! Eggs are a great food, but when eaten too often, clog up your arteries with cholesterol. We limit eggs to twice a week, at the most. People with heart disease may want to avoid eggs entirely. Here’s a recipe for Tofu Scramble that mimics a scrambled eggs breakfast.
As long ago as 1962, Adelle Davis, in Let’s Cook It Right, cautioned us that some foods needed to be cooked to a solid form. Eggs contain all the lecithin that we need to break down the cholesterol in eggs, she maintained, so long as they stay in our stomachs long enough to absorb the lecithin. The conclusion we draw is: no sloppy eggs or raw eggs. Even if this is is no longer accepted as true today, raw and uncooked eggs now pose a serious risk of salmonella poisoning so they’re still not a great way to eat eggs.
For those of us who are cookie dough nibblers, beware. A little bit of salmonella can grow to a lot in just a few days and we have had friends who’ve become very sick from nibbling cookie dough before baking the cookies (how sad is that!).
Bacon
Bacon does not appear to be a good food for anyone. We banned bacon from our home 20 years ago. My son gets to eat it on the rare occasion that we eat breakfast in a restaurant. It’s so rare that we feel it’s safe for him. One family member was fed eggs and bacon 2-3 times a week growing up. So far he has had a triple bypass, four stents to prop up collapsing veins and arteries, and 3 heart attacks. He’s not even 70 yet.
Pastries and Donuts
Love them as we may, we feel that pastries and donuts are junk food.
Pastries are loaded with fat and sugar. They are really tough on the waistline and heart, but they probably stick with you for a long time because of all the fat. Make your own pastries, if you like them, but try to limit the fat content, particularly from “bad fat” sources.
Donuts are fried food with no nutritional value that prepare your body for strokes in later life. Strokes often end your ability to walk, talk, think clearly, and communicate with others. There must be something better to eat!
Sugar on Cereal
In our home, this is a running argument. One of us feels that processed white sugar is not good food. It’s more like a drug in the way it affects our bodies, and kids do not need a sugary sweet breakfast from processed sugar.
The other maintains that, if it gets kids to eat the cereal, it’s acceptable.
However, there are many ways to sweeten up cereals that do less damage, including chopped, fresh fruit in season (the best), vanilla or fruit yogurt (which appears to have plenty of milk sugars, just not processed white sugar), and dried fruit (also concentrated sugar). Why bother with the white stuff? It just teaches kids to use it every morning.
I could read a book about this without finding such real-world approaches!