Authors: Dara-Lynn Weiss
Look, diet fads come and go, but there is no debate that someone who burns more calories than he takes in will lose weight. You can achieve that energy balance in any number of ways, through
excluding certain food groups or increasing activity. But the bottom line is, if you want to lose weight, you’re going to have to eat less. Calories matter.
But you shouldn’t think I was completely cavalier regarding nutrients. My confidence in my choices was occasionally shaken. For example, one day I was looking up recipes I could make for Bea using my dependable Cool Whip Free, and I found a blog posting written by a seemingly un-crazy, un-sanctimonious person about how unhealthy this product was.
She criticized its use of both corn syrup
and
high-fructose corn syrup as two of the top four ingredients, and then explained that what really made her throw out the tub forever was the presence of a small amount of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which contains trans fats.
She complained that Kraft indicates on the nutrition label via an asterisk that the amount is “negligible,” and indeed, as the blogger explained via a link, if a product has less than 0.5 gram of trans fat, it can consider itself trans fat free even if it’s technically not.
Now, I can’t tell you what exactly trans fats are or what they do, but I know that everyone hates them, they’re being banned by cities all over the place, and they have some negative impact on cholesterol. So, sure, I’m on board with avoiding them. They were, in fact, one of the few things our nutrition doctor told us we should never, ever eat. Whoa, okay then—out with the Cool Whip Free!
But wait … let’s take another look at that food label.
As it turns out, Cool Whip Free’s fourth ingredient is “hydrogenated vegetable oil,” not the partially hydrogenated kind the blogger cited. Awesome! Let’s put that tub back into the freezer!
Not so fast.
According to the Mayo Clinic, fully hydrogenated oil doesn’t contain trans fat, but if a label says “hydrogenated vegetable
oil,” as my Cool Whip Free does, it “could mean” it contains trans fat. Um, so what exactly does that mean for my light frozen whipped topping?
I still don’t know. My research did nothing but confuse me, and though I made no formal policy decision in response, I found that while I continued buying fat-free Reddi-wip whipped cream, my practice of buying Cool Whip Free ended, and with it, the era of the mini fruit tart and make-your-own fruit parfaits in Bea’s lunch bag. The incident served to remind me of how utterly perplexing and misleading nutrition information can be for the average consumer trying to make informed and nutritious choices for her family.
Let me be clear: I am not going to stand up for processed foods and advocate that they must be a part of a well-balanced diet. However, there’s no getting around the fact that they proved extremely useful in motivating Bea to stick with her program. Sugar substitutes help cut the calorie content of things my child likes to eat, so I sometimes bought foods that contained them. Bea’s health issue is not one specifically proscribing the consumption of sodium or cholesterol or lactose. Her issue requires the avoidance of excess calories. So sometimes I chose a low-calorie Snackwells cookie, with all its additives and imitation sugars, over a more wholesome but higher-calorie oatmeal-raisin alternative because, ironically, it was a better health choice for Bea.
In case you weren’t aware, that’s a wildly controversial position. Having been on both sides of the opinion spectrum regarding healthful foods versus processed foods, I completely understand the repugnance some people feel about feeding junky food to kids. There’s a reflexive judgment made about a parent with an overweight child when that child is seen eating junk food—even if that
food, unbeknownst to the casual observer, has been carefully chosen for its lower calorie content and motivational properties.
On a playdate during one of those early weeks, I handed Bea her 100-calorie pack of yogurt-covered pretzels while her friend ate a Whole Foods apple cereal bar that, no question about it, was more nutritious than Bea’s snack, but also was 40 percent more caloric.
“Does Bea want a cereal bar?” her friend’s dad asked. “I have an extra one.”
“No, thanks,” I answered, in unison with Bea’s resounding “Yes!”
“Bea, you have your snack,” I reminded her.
A snapshot of the scene creates a discomfiting picture: the heavy kid eating the processed, packaged snack, and the thin kid eating the wholesome, Whole Foods–brand snack. The mother of the overweight kid stubbornly refuses the more healthful snack, insisting on the nutritionally inferior one. What does this portrait imply to the average person witnessing it? That each parent’s chosen snack has contributed to his or her child’s weight status. That if the fat kid’s mom listened to the thin kid’s dad, the fat kid might look more like the thin kid. But only a parent of a child who struggles with the scale knows how oversimplified that is.
This sort of moment occurs constantly for us. I can’t defend nutritionally deficient low-calorie processed snacks against higher-calorie nutritious ones to anyone. I have a different gut reaction to seeing a parent give a child a packet of organic baked brown rice chips than I do to seeing one hand her kid a bag of Funyuns. I also have a different emotional response when I see an overweight kid eating a king-size Kit Kat, and when I see a thin kid eating a king-size Kit Kat. I just do. I knew there were societal judgments that went along with giving an overweight child processed snacks,
because I was guilty of those judgments as well. But I had to ignore them.
Usually the parents who knew Bea and me well were the least judgmental. It was the moms I met at the playground or chatted with only occasionally at school who would pepper our discussions with sanctimony. If they overheard me refusing Bea a second serving of lunch, they’d mildly note that kids are still growing and suggest that I should let Bea eat if she was still hungry. They’d criticize the size or quality of Bea’s snack, unaware that it was the result of a great deal of thought and planning.
“Do you know how bad that stuff is for her?” a fellow parent asked me upon seeing Bea bust open a package of miniature Oreo Cakesters I’d been delighted to come across in the supermarket. The comment was made in a friendly way, as though maybe I really didn’t know and she could be helpful and clue me in.
“Well, it fits in her diet, and I want her to get to have some junk food like other kids,” I answered.
“You should at least give her snacks that aren’t processed,” the woman suggested.
“Her health priority is eating less, not eating healthier,” I said. And it sounded idiotic even to me.
I’m obviously no expert on natural eating, and I admit I don’t know whether certain ingredients are to be sought out or avoided. (To wit: is soy lecithin a good thing or a bad thing? How about citric acid? I know omega-3 fatty acids are really healthy, but don’t they
sound
like they wouldn’t be?) However, it seemed impossible to me that all these organic foods peddled to kids (and their parents) were entirely free of anything bad.
It turns out that the USDA permits dozens of non-organic ingredients in processed products labeled “organic.” Carrageenan—which has been linked to ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer—is
in many popular brands of organic cottage cheese and soy milk. Brown rice syrup—which can contain high levels of arsenic—is used as a sweetener in some organic cereal bars.
I’m the last person to be holier-than-thou about food ingredients. I’m not deriding these chemicals or the products that contain them. I would happily eat an organic cereal bar (and now that I write about it, I sort of wish I were eating one right this minute), and I would feed one to my child. I’m just saying that making kids eat only organic food doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not also ingesting some questionable ingredients. And the messages we parents get about how to best nourish our kids are often perplexing and contradictory.
Ironically, I felt like a really good mom when I met Bea after school one day and gave her a 100-calorie three-pack of Hostess mini cream-filled cupcakes. As she ate them, another kid—one with no weight problem or dietary issues—saw her chomping on those little cupcakes and let out a jealous wail. A normal-weight kid who could eat whatever he wanted was jealous of Bea’s snack! Yay, me!
What struck me as hypocritical was that even parents whose day-to-day food choices for their children are very healthful do generally relent sometimes, allowing indulgent birthday treats or occasional fast-food excesses. I don’t know many parents who really refuse their children processed foods 100 percent of the time. So let us people with weight problems have our kicks where we can get them! Bea wanted so much to be “normal” that processed foods were a small price to pay to help her feel that way.
I’d get flak from the other side, too—parents who felt (as I do) that summer ice cream cones and cookie chasers to birthday party cake slices are an inalienable right of childhood, and that by putting any limitation on Bea’s consumption of those items, I was
being callous. No matter how much effort I expended tailoring Bea’s weekly food plans to allow participation in classroom treats and social celebrations, there always seemed to be a parent who felt I was cutting Bea off one Twinkie short and, in doing so, curtailing her childhood joy.
There it is, plain and simple: I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Some might have looked down on me for “letting” Bea become overweight. But then they offered their scorn when I decided to do the only thing that science and medicine agree is the best treatment, the thing that will decisively reverse her problem: that is, put her on a diet. Of course, it’s not just me and it’s not always about food. A working mom is judged negatively for letting someone else raise her kids, but a stay-at-home mom is accused of sacrificing her self-worth and providing an outdated role model for her children. Let your kids watch TV or play video games, and you’re rotting their brains. Refuse to let them do so, and you’re an oversheltering tyrant. You can’t win.
There are healthy children who eat junk food all day and are still healthy. There are also unhealthy children who eat only natural, organic fare and are, sad to say, still unhealthy. As I said earlier, some things are just genetic. Not everyone who gets lung cancer smokes, and not every smoker gets lung cancer. Since letting a child eat some processed food is not definitely going to doom him to ill health, I see no reason to systematically deprive my healthy kids of it.
But I wondered: Was defending my decisions about what she should eat worth suffering this social unease? Worth making friends feel uncomfortable? Worth making Bea the subject of a public debate? Should I have just kept my mouth shut and let Bea eat the socially appropriate food of the moment, be it the Niçoise salad, the M&Ms, the cookie, the ramen soup, the calorie-packed
organic snack? If so, what effect would that have had on her willingness to accept the limits I set in the future? And what cumulative effect would those little allowances have had on her weight over time?
I wasn’t going to allow us to find out.
“I hate this doctor, and I want to punch her in the face,” Bea declared.
We were sitting in the nutrition doctor’s waiting room. We’d been on the program for a couple of months, and I felt things were generally going well. Bea and I had been sticking closely to the regimen and had both lost about five pounds. For me, that rate of loss was unprecedentedly slow, but for Bea, it seemed right and I was proud of her progress. And for a child with no concern for his weight, David had an impressive level of dedication to the program. He would often ask if something was “healthy” before he ate it, or ask me to guide him in a choice between two foods (“Which is more healthy, penne or spaghetti?”). He sometimes took the stairs to our fourth-floor apartment instead of the elevator, and once he even climbed a small ski slope in lieu of riding the “magic carpet” conveyor, for the express purpose of pleasing our nutrition doctor.
Yet they both passionately hated these appointments. I figured it was normal, and analogous to a patient/therapist relationship. The work is difficult, so sometimes it can be hard to like the person overseeing it. We take out our frustration with the process on the doctor.
“I like her,” I replied.
“Well, I didn’t hate her at first,” Bea admitted. “But the appointments are starting to grow drearier and drearier and drearier.”
She was putting it mildly, I think. Bea’s and David’s attitudes toward our weekly appointments had disintegrated from mild intolerance to downright contempt. If Bea didn’t much like the doctor or the associate we’d met on our second visit, she—and I—were even less excited about the third member of the doctor’s team, who met with us on occasional weeks. This third woman, while friendly and enthusiastic, made the appointments she led feel like a day at school with an inept substitute teacher. The nutrition lecture we were supposed to receive never came when she was in charge. She didn’t provide concrete answers to the questions I asked about food choices or feeding strategies, instead tossing the query back into my court with a less-than-helpful, “Well, what do
you
think?”
When we met this third woman about a month into our visits, I could sense that Bea felt uneasy that yet another person was hearing our food-related problems, writing notes about the previous week’s triumphs and stumbling blocks, discussing her weight, seeing what the scale said when she stepped on. It was weird to try to pick up the thread of our journey with three different people on alternating weeks. To not have one person who would follow our progress, know our history, and understand the family dynamic was decidedly awkward.
Check-ins with the nutrition doctor herself were always more productive. But even with her, there was an incident one afternoon that bothered me. On the way to the appointment—as always, at four o’clock on a Friday—the kids had eaten their snacks. David had a slice of pizza. Bea had a green-light-size bag of Cheetos and a banana. Afterward, she complained that she was starving.