Quotes About Health

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.

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

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.

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

Overeaters often say they are swallowing their feelings.

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.

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

Girls eat better when food stops being something forbidden.

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?

Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or - better still - get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.

Large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of 'kid food' over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow and heavily processed.

It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.

Healthy eating should not preclude the odd cake. But it's good to be able to wait: if not for a while year, at least for an hour or two.

Feeding children is an immense responsibility.

Avoid 'distracting' meals such as TV dinners and computer lunches. replace the biscuit jar with a fruit bowl. Repackage food into smaller containers. Order half-size portions in restaurants. Replace short wide glasses with tall narrow ones. And get smaller plates.

Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends' lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

Indulgence makes a child fat. Restriction makes a child fat and unhappy.

Learning how to eat better - which is quite different from going on a diet - is within anyone's grasp.