Dr. Alan Greene, the famous pediatrician, whose family eats nothing but natural food, has a great new blog post showing why we’re hooked on junk food. He calls for a delicious revolution back to natural food.
All living things, says Dr. Greene, get imprinted with their survival habits in their early stage of life: during gestation, at birth, and in their first set of life experiences after being born. And human babies today are getting imprinted with all the wrong messages.
In particular human babies imprint on food. This is a highly adaptive mechanism — but in the second half of the twentieth century we have unwittingly imprinted our children on the wrong tastes and textures. They will chase after junk food and kids meals, and ignore a delicious, ripe peach or tomato packed with nutrients their bodies crave.
This is only comes rather recently, from a wrong turn we’ve taken as a society, as Dr. Greene shows.
The idea of baby food (and later, of kids’ meals) is a recently created myth. It didn’t exist when my father was born. But by the time I was born, almost every baby in the U.S. ate mostly jarred baby food, and we are reaping the consequences of this today.Baby food can have a place in a healthy childhood, but not as the knee-jerk centerpiece of infant nutrition.
We can turn this around – food is an acquired taste. But it’s important to know that imprinting as a child holds deep value for us as a support factor, more so than simple habit. So go easy on your kids, and yourself, as you re-learn the traditional ways of food.
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