I almost didn’t do this video.
I honestly thought it would be too wacky and out of the box for some readers to handle.
My change of heart occurred when one of my children said, “Mom, you HAVE to do that video”.
Out of the mouths of babes.
So here I am posting a video about the best trick I know for teaching your kids about the dangers of fast food and hopefully keeping them far far away from it forever – even once they are out of the house and making their own decisions.
While this trick won’t work for older children, if your kids are still quite young, it should work well. My three kids want absolutely nothing to do with fast food and that includes my teenager who has more freedom away from his parents and has the opportunity to indulge if he chose to.
So here it is. What do you think? Too wacky or totally on target?
Mom Versus Fast Food (Mom Wins)
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Wow! I like this video because I agree that the garbage is where junk food belongs. I also like this video because it shows the power that parents have over the beliefs of their developing children.
I think this is a lesson to us all to be careful what you purposely or inadvertently teach your child because those lessons, taught at an early age, will stick. We need to be discerning in what we are teaching them and at the same time teach them to think critically so that they can figure things out for themselves when we are not there to make decisions for them.
Awesome! LOVE THIS IDEA!!! Not wacky at all! I’m totally doing this with my 2 year old and all the next ones 🙂
Sarah, I loved the video! You point out that it really only works with young children, so let me tell you about how I did something similar with my older children. We only started to eat healthier about six months ago (thanks in great part to your website), and since we homeschool, my four kids, who are all teens, are usually with me when we grocery shop. I have to admit I did not do what I’m going to tell you about consciously, with any sort of deliberate “lesson-teaching” in mind. It just sort of “happened” and “evolved” on its own.
The first thing I did after reading how bad HFCS was, was start checking food labels, on my own, for it. When my kids asked what I was doing, I gave them a quicky, two-sentence version of the negative effects of HFCS on the human body, and explained that I’d really like to try to avoid buying things with it in them if at all possible. I called it “garbage”.
After a while, the kids started helping me read the labels, just to make things go faster, knowing that I wouldn’t buy it if I saw HFCS on the label. I was excited to hear them, after just a few weeks of doing this, start to get a little frustrated as they began realizing that, gosh, this darned stuff is in EVERYTHING! Anyway, they’d reluctantly put the item back on the shelf, often with a sigh and a remark like, “Nope. Garbage”.
The exciting thing, though, was that very, very quickly, they actually started to associate the word “garbage”, not so much with the HFCS in that item, but with the whole actual item itself. Call it guilt by association or what you will, but after repeatedly putting item after item back on the shelf with the words, “Nope. Garbage.” “Garbage.” “Garbage”, eventually they weren’t thinking of, say, boxed macaroni and cheese as having garbage IN it, but of boxed macaroni and cheese as BEING garbage! YAY!
As my learning grew, I started adding other ingredients to our forbidden list, and now, about six months after starting this, my kids read the labels of anything processed we think we might want to buy, and will remark “Garbage” and put it back immediately. if they see HFCS, L-cysteine, artificial anything, MSG, etc. on the label.
To prove the point that my kids now consider the entire food item garbage, rather than just the junk ingredients in it, if we’re in a new grocery store, or one we’re not that familiar with, we’ll walk past aisle after aisle, and my kids will look down the aisle, and go, “Nope. Garbage aisle.” “Garbage.” “Still garbage.” “Okay, here’s a good aisle.”
Oh my I love that so much. I guess the same thing “accidentally” happened at our house too. It is a beautiful thing when your children embrace these principles on their own. I recently bought a non organic pineappble from Costco and my 11 year old would not eat it until I showed him that it was on the “ok” non organic fruit list because of its thick skin. Yes, I would still prefer it to organic but it is not always possible and I was making WAPF approved coconut pineapple macaroons for a WAPF gathering we were attending. But I loved my son’s commitment to being healthy especially since pineapple is one of his favs!
Good way to waste food. And some are posting that deliberately wasting food is a blessing and a freedom? Does anyone in this “nourishing traditions movement” care about anyone or anything beyond their own little circle of family and friends? I follow the principles and practices of traditional peoples AND it is not a religion I practice charity by buying a “toxic” meal for homeless people I encounter AND work to change the quality and accessibility of federal meals in schools – which for many children is the only meal that they may receive. You people obsess over whether the milk is raw or not and then act as if you are not connected in any way to those hungry children who sit next to your children in school. You really are proud of this!? Does anyone out there connect the blessing of your ability to care for your family as you want with any compassion for those children whose parents cannot or will not? How did a way of eating
for health become a cover for right wing Me-and-mine-only? It’s all over the different blogs I follow. Am I the only one who thinks social justice and caring well for one’s loved ones are mutually exclusive? Sorry for the rant but come on! Its time for some accountabilty on the part of those who want to make changes for all – especially the most vulnerable. I guess the animal that gave its life for that meal was never thought of either. At least give thanks for it as you are deliberately wasting it as a trick. Can’t think of a single traditional society or person whose community has known hunger that would use deliberate waste of an animals life as teaching tool…
I understand what you are saying, but that animal was desecrated long before it was thrown in the trash.
Amen to that, Our Small Hours! Beyond our own health, I feel we have a moral responsibility not to eat at fast food chains that sell factory meat. Clearly Job does not know how the vast majority of American meat is made if she or he is worried about desecrating animals.
For the record, I personally do not feed to a homeless person what I wouldn’t feed my own family. It’s not fit for human consumption in my opinion.
Every time you buy this junk you are voting “yes!” with your dollars. I won’t be part of that.
I totally agree! I think that it’s important to teach our children charity and caring for others, and part of that is that we provide REAL FOOD to those in need- who are those who NEED it most. Every bite they take needs to count big time, and not cause health problems that they can not afford to address. What does it say to your child when toxic trash food is “ok” for someone else, but not for them? We’re not any more deserving of healthful meals and I think it’s important that the point is made that FAST FOOD IS NOT FOOD AND ITS NOT FIT FOR ANYONE.
If people would see how the food for fast food companies and MOST supermarkets is being produced, how the animals are treated, they would never eat anything from these places anymore. If you see the CAFO’s (Google for images) where that hamburger beef is coming from, your stomach will ache. I watched Food Inc. together with my 8 year old daughter and this also helped to avoid places like McD, she’s even reading food labels now. We buy our meat from Polyface farm because we know Joel Salatin treats his animals with respect and feeds them what they would eat in nature. Our food industry is so bad and corrupt it’s not funny anymore!
I could not agree more! Well Said indeed. Even before learing about real nutrition and real food I was a health nut that just didn’t see the whole picture yet. I basically did the exact thing as Sarah when it came to the crappy little toys marketed to our precious children on the TV (thought vacuum/trance venue) we would get the toy but not the meal or throw it out. I would say not having TV or at the very least deleating commercials would go a long way towards our kids not wanting this junk both the food and the toys. However, getting a Pokemon toy and not eating the “food” is a great lesson. Now that we eat the WAPF way none of us including the kids have any taste left for the non food these establishments offer. We are fully detoxed from that stuff. We ate at a former favorite restaurant after the entire family walking in the 5K for NAMI (National Aliance on Mental Illness) last Saturday in San Diego and each of us had stomach aches all day and did not enjoy it nearly as much as we used to or remembered.
Next can you do a lesson on how to train my husband? 😉
Wacky… but I love it!
That seems like a less wacky version of what I’ve heard other parents do. When I was an undergrad my behaviorist psychology professor told us all about how he conditioned his kids to hate fast food. Whenever he, and/or his wife drove by a fast food place they would make gagging noises and say how disgusting that place was. Kids never touched the stuff.
Although I am not anti-fast food myself, and in fact feel there are many times and places for it, I had to post this as you made me remember the good ol’ days of undergraduate school.
:O
I love you.
This is a good and important lesson with regard to teaching children that fast food is bad, and not healthy and harmful to consume.
But what kind of lesson is this teaching your child about caring for the environment or animals or not wasting? It seems incredibly wasteful to go through a drive-thru and purchase a meal filled with GMO’s and meat from animals raised on factory farms (thus supporting McDonalds) and then to throw it straight into the trash. What about people who are going hungry? What about the environment? The box could be recycled and the bottle of milk as well.
Seems silly- I think simply raising children eating healthy and well and explaining to them how their body works- how animals are treated- how the planet is effected- how their health is effected by fast food is a much more productive and less wasteful way to get a message across.
That is fantastic!