Quotes About Nutrition

If you can cancel a child's hunger during those first three years - from conception to toddlerdom -you create possibilities that stretch decades into the future. If not, the consequences can last for generations.

Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.

Hara hachi bu is a Confucian principle, popular in Japan since medieval times, that you should eat until you are only eight-tenths full. This principle has since been given backing by nutrition scientists who note that when we eat there is a time delay between the body receiving the food and the brain registering that we are full. When the urge comes to have a second helping, it's worth waiting twenty minutes, and the feeling may pass.

One of the commonest ways our eating goes wrong is that we consistently choose foods that offer immediate satiation in the belly rather than longer lasting satiety.

It is possible for children to learn and improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.

We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

Very little about the way we eat is, in fact, logical.

Our difficulty is not just that we haven't learned to cook and grow food, however important that is; it's that we haven't learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness

Once we accept that eating is a learned behavior, we see that the challenge is not to grasp information but to learn new habits.

It's easy to confuse hunger with other emotional states.

We eat so often and so much because we have more or less lost touch with the signals our body is sending us about hunger.

Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full.

In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our wellbeing - including dieting - it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better.

We need new eating methods to take account of the new ways we are being supplied with food.

If it's not a mealtime and you are wondering which of two 'healthy snacks' you should buy, the answer is probably neither.

If you want your children to eat better, don't tell them what to do; eat better yourself.

Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food.

With good cooking and a patient but persistent approach at mealtimes, it could be food that was both good for the children and enjoyable.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

In most places, for most of history, children's food has not existed as a separate category after the age of weaning.

The main reason to be suspicious of fruit as a food for children was that it was just so delicious.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don't want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

While the form of 'kid food' is more varied than ever, however, the content is far less so. Foods marketed specifically at children tend to be higher than average in salt, sugar and fat.

How can wholesome nursery food compete with hundreds of new and heavily advertised concoctions, calculated to appeal to a child's sense of novelty?