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New Book - Feeding Baby Green
Emily Lynne Ion
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Over the weekend, a pregnant friend of mine was telling me about her nephews’ beige diet. No, this is not a new form of The Atkins Diet for children, she assured me. She was referring to the fact that both boys are such finicky eaters that their diet consists of mostly beige foods – primarily French fries and chicken fingers and peanut butter. “They won’t touch anything that’s green,” she lamented. And her sister is so exhausted by this daily meal-time battle that she gives in, just to get them to eat something.
What if there was a way, during pregnancy and early childhood, to program your baby’s taste buds to love and crave healthy whole foods? What if a parent could create a foundation for healthy eating that will last their child’s entire lifetime?
In a new book called Feeding Baby Green, one of the country’s pre-eminent pediatricians, Dr. Alan Greene, answers these questions with an emphatic, “YES, YOU CAN!” His book posits a unique, forward-thinking 34-month guide to train your baby’s palate to appreciate the more complex flavors of healthy, unprocessed foods.
Every parent is keen to find a way to engender healthy eating habits in their child. “Parents today have an unprecedented awareness and eagerness about the necessity of providing safe, wholesome, nutritious foods for their children”, says Dr. Greene. And yet today’s parents are burdened by economic constraints and severely limited time. The book reports that 80% of parents are unable to feed their children healthy foods because they are inconvenient, unavailable in their communities, or their children don’t like the taste.
What is the connection between what a pregnant woman eats and what her baby experiences? Dr. Greene explains that babies actually have a food life in utero, and the habits they establish in the first years after birth can have a lasting influence on their attitudes to food.
He refutes the claim by some (like my friend’s sister) that it is impossible to get kids to eat healthy foods because they simply don’t like the taste. Dr. Greene believes that babies’ taste-buds can become easily programmed for the extra-sugar, extra-salt, extra starch that is every present in processed and take-out food. But if they are exposed to the “rainbow of flavors”, as he calls it, they can establish a preference for fruits and vegetables early on. This is his core thesis – something he calls “nutritional intelligence”.
“Baby food”, Dr. Greene reminds us, is a myth. Commercial baby food was an invention of 20th century food corporations, enforcing the theory that babies need meals separate from the fruits, vegetables and seasonings the rest of the family consume. Pointed and pervasive advertising convinced mothers that good baby food was scientific, uniform, twice boiled, and sold in jars.
Dr. Greene lays out a clear yet flexible how-to program, incorporating many techniques and angles, all of which is tailored to the baby’s current development stage. The time frames are general enough to work for most families, and allow enough wiggle room for customization.
Many of Feeding Baby Green's suggestions are both revolutionary and fundamental – breaking new molds yet also revisiting older traditions. He writes about engaging all of the baby’s senses when learning about food and eating. Flavor, aroma, touch, sights, sounds and language, these are all tools that help you make food a joyous experience. He also counsels on proper amounts, the right variety, and varying repetition with novelty.
Throughout the book, Dr. Greene offers a host of tempting recipes to make for baby at home. And reading through the titles of these recipes, my stomach began to rumble: Bombay Vegetable Stew, Chickpeas and Tomatoes Provence, Baba Ganoush – oh my! There’s very little puree of this or cream of that. These recipes are meant for the culinary delight of the whole family.
As with everything he touches, Dr. Greene infuses Feeding Baby Green with a connection to the earth, to our food source, and to the truism that we are what we eat. He believes firmly that what is good for the planet is good for your family. As a Board Member of Healthy Child Healthy World, his outlook and practice are always consistent with the advice we offer parents. Much of his book is devoted to educating parents on the dangers of GMO crops, pesticides in agriculture, chemical additives in our food, and prevention of allergies and asthma. Dr. Greene is also a renowned advocate for organic foods, believing they not only keep us healthier but ensure our environment receives protection and nourishment as well.
And throughout, he draws on his wisdom as a practicing pediatrician, his first hand experience as a father of four children, and his family’s journey through his beloved wife’s battle with cancer. (She won!!!) Taking on this endeavor seems less daunting because Dr. Greene’s meticulous guide reassures the reader that they’ve got a friend in the kitchen with them.
Does the Feeding Baby Green approach make perfect sense? Absolutely. Is it the new paradigm for an enlightened generation of parents? Absolutely.
