Food

                Along with sleep, food plays a critical role in how effectively they perform at school, and how easy it is for them to learn.  If they don’t get enough sleep, they will be sleepy in class and perform poorly, but the wrong breakfast (or none at all) will make it harder for them.  Students who are poorly fed have trouble focusing because their hunger and stomach pains distract them, their lack of energy slows their thought processes down, and the lack of proper nourishment causes their muscles and brain to perform below average, not to mention they will be sleepy.  They will seem to have learning disabilities when they are actually just undernourished.

Avoid junk and fast food, food with lots of sugar, salt, or oil, heavily processed foods and late-night snacks and sweets.  This sort of food can also cause them to appear to have disorders (such as ADHD), when they actually just have too much energy from high-calorie foods, or they may even be having an allergic reaction to something.  In addition, this sort of food will cause all sorts of health problems for them.  The reason they are so cheap is because they are made using crops that are heavily subsidized (wheat, corn, soy) and people who are trying to be careful with their money fall into the trap of thinking that a $1 bag of potato chips is a better deal than one apple (it isn’t).  All you have to do is look at the nutrient information for that bag of chips and compare it to the nutrients of an apple and you start to see the quality difference.  Then, you add in that apples have long been recommended to help promote good health and, in fact, an apple can help to mitigate an asthma attack – I’ve tried it myself.  Then compare the ingredients.  The chips: artificial flavors, flavor enhancers (MSG), artificial coloring, salt, sugar, oil, stabilizer and words that you don’t know the meaning of.  Apples are all natural but, at worst, have a layer of some kind of waxy substance on the skin to keep them looking fresh longer and there may be pesticide on or in them – but you get those pesticides in the chips, too, they just don’t list them in the ingredients!  Chips make you thirsty and may upset your stomach.  Apples quench your thirst. So, choose a fruit and peel the skin after washing it carefully.

White rice has a high glycemic index (which means it has a lot of sugar in it), so it is an inappropriate grain to eat for someone who is not active, especially if they’re already getting sugar from other sources.  Processed sugars should only be added to sustenance on a limited basis and the purer the sugar is, the less you should use.  Impure sugars, such as honey, brown sugar, coconut sugar, palm sugar, etc., have other things in them that can provide enzymes, vitamins and/or minerals and are thus, at least modestly, healthier to consume; white crystal and rock sugars should be minimized.  Sugar provides us with energy, but most societies these days consume dangerous amounts of it.

Salt is a crucial mineral for our health – not consuming enough or eating too much can cause health problems, but some people are also sensitive to sodium and must be careful about high blood pressure.  This doesn’t just mean sodium chloride but also other kinds of consumed salts, like baking soda.

Stop eating fried food – it may taste good, but it is bad for you.  Some oils, when consumed without heating them, have a beneficial effect on our bodies, such as olive, canola and fish oil.  Even virgin coconut oil is good for us.  However, using it for frying food destroys most of the benefits and leaves the detrimental parts of it – the fats that can hurt us, like saturated fats and trans fat.  Cold-extracted oils are, in general, the best choice as long as you don’t subsequently heat them.

There are two main scenarios for eating, the first of which is to serve 6 small meals a day, each meal containing different varieties of food.  Although this is the ideal way to eat, this may be impractical for many people, so follow the adage: “Eat the breakfast of a king, the lunch of a prince and the dinner of a pauper.”  Breakfast should be the largest meal of the day since it has to get your child through the long, arduous hours until lunchtime, and dinner the smallest since you’ll be sleeping and don’t need energy for that. Grains should be the largest food group, followed by vegetables, then fruits, then protein sources (e.g.:  soy and certain other plants, fish, poultry and waterfowl, eggs, pork, beef, mutton and goat), and finally dairy products, with anything else being the least important and most destructive for your bodies and brains.

Grains (red/brown/black rice, oatmeal, whole wheat bread, rye, etc.) and complex carbohydrates, combined with a good source of protein make a great breakfast.  Please note that if you’re a regular white rice eater and want to switch to dark rice because of the lower sugar content, and high fiber and nutritional value, do not switch all at once unless your diet is already fairly high in fiber; a 100% switch immediately can result in too much fiber, which can create lots of gas and diarrhea.  Change the ratio of white to dark rice daily, slowly increasing the latter and decreasing the former over at least a couple of weeks’ time.  One definite benefit of more fiber in your diet is that your bowel movements will become easier; your feces will stop looking like hard balls and will become long and exit smoothly.  This is good for your bowel muscles and helps to reduce the risk of hemmorhoids as well as long-term damage to your bowels that increase the risk of intestinal diseases like diverticulitis and cancer.

If your child is into athletic activities, his/her diet will need to be adjusted to support it with extra protein and carbs, but s/he will need to be taught that if s/he changes the level of their activity, s/he has to modify what and how much s/he eat.  This is also true of different life stages when our body’s nutritional needs change as we age.  For example, the older a male is, the less meat he should eat, unless he is a body-builder (they need lots of protein for their sport).  During the growth phase (which should be done by age 30), men can eat more meat but, after that age and unless he regularly donates blood, he should decrease his meat intake to no more than 1-2 portions per week, or even consider becoming a vegetarian if a nutritionist agrees that would a good idea.  Females, on the other hand, will need to consume meat more often to compensate for blood and iron loss during menstruation, at least until menopause, at which point their bodily need for meat will become low.  I have seen many athletes ruin their bodies when they stopped being athletes but didn’t adapt their diets.

Don’t give anyone food any later than 2 hours before bedtime because this can lead to obesity (and someday to diabetes, gastro-esophageal reflux disease [GERD], and other diseases) as the body converts the food into fat since the energy isn’t used.  In addition, late meals and snacks may cause them to lack an appetite or even feel nauseous in the morning, meaning that they won’t want or be able to eat a proper breakfast.  I used to suffer from GERD (indigestion that comes up your esophagus) and morning nausea due to not knowing about this.

I cannot stress this enough – the more natural, unprocessed food your child is given, the healthier, stronger, more energetic and smarter your child will be because your child gets the maximum nutritional value instead of just a portion of it.  Organic food provides even more because manmade fertilizers and pesticides damage nutritional value, and the taste is usually so much better.

There are a lot of diets out there that stress the body a great deal, or make claims that are patently false.  I’m not going to discuss them, but I want to point out that the blood-type diet is a fraud.  Humans are far too complex for something as simple as blood type to dictate what to eat.

How food is cooked plays a significant role in how much value the food has and how dangerous it is.  Frying, pressure-cooking and grilling are some of the worst ways to cook, while par-boiling, baking and steaming are among the best.

Finally, always keep in mind that different people have different nutritional needs and that a professional nutritionist should be consulted in order to determine what the best diet is for your child.  The information above is fairly standard for most people, but a small number of people need a different diet.