It’s hard to know what to feed your kid. Well, I shouldn’t say that. When they’re really young, you can just stick a boob in their face, and they’re good to go. But once they get to be about 4 months old, every parent is faced with the question about what to feed their kid.
For us, nutrition is on par with proper sleep as two major priorities for Matthew’s health. It’s safe to say that we don’t want Matthew’s favorite vegetables to be French fries and high fructose corn syrup.
At the same time, we don’t want to be too over the top. Once Matthew gets older, we want him to be able to go to birthday parties and eat cake and ice cream without us worrying about whether the chocolate in the frosting is made from single-origin Ecuadorean cacao beans, or whether the cream used for the ice cream came from cows that were milked with velvet gloves and sung sweet lullabies. We don’t want Matthew to be the one kid in the corner wearing hemp clothing, smelling like B.O. and patchouli, drinking wheatgrass and playing hacky sack by himself.
But we want him to eat right which, in this day and age, means reading the ingredient list like it was the fine print on your subprime mortgage. Even food marketed for the sub-1-year-old demographic oftentimes has a lot of junk in it. Our basic rule is that if one of the ingredients is something we can’t pronounce (such as ioplolycarbonite bisulfuphate, and no, that’s not a real ingredient, I don’t think) then we go ahead and pass on feeding it to him.
On the plus side, this has led us to eat healthier ourselves. When Bea or I cook up a batch of zucchini or pasta for Matthew, we make extra for us. It beats having spoonfuls of peanut butter and jelly straight from the jar for dinner. Kind of. Though I must admit, this healthy food habit hasn’t eliminated my occasional need for PB&J straight from the jar. And by “occasional need,” I mean once or twice a day. And when Matthew gets a little older, every once in a while I’ll tell him to dump the wheatgrass in the sink, put away the hacky sack, and join me at the kitchen table for some PB&J, straight from the jar.
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High fructose corn syrup may have a complicated-sounding name, but it's actually a simple sweetener, made from corn, that is nutritionally the same as sugar.
The American Medical Association in June 2008 helped put to rest misunderstandings about this sweetener and obesity, stating that “high fructose syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners.”
High fructose corn syrup is not sweeter than sugar; and high fructose corn syrup, sugar and honey all contain the same number of calories (four calories per gram).
Like table sugar and honey, high fructose corn syrup contains no artificial or synthetic ingredients or color additives.
Consumers can see the latest research and learn more about high fructose corn syrup at www.SweetSurprise.com.
Audrae Erickson
President
Corn Refiners Association
Hi Audrae,
Thanks for writing in. We plan on limiting all forms of sweets for Matthew, but do believe that sugar in its natural form is better than any kind of processed sweetener. In other words, we'll stick to corn-on-the-cob and fresh fruit, thanks.
Mark
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