Saving Your Kids From Diabetes and Obesity: A Moderate Strategy, contributed by DuctapeFatwa

A recent piece in the New York Times mentioned statistics that indicate that an alarming percentage of children will develop diabetes as adults. On CNN, we see regular articles on the obesity epidemic in children.

The culprits are easy to identify: Increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and increasingly horrific dietary practices. Children are now sent to some form of “education” activity from the age of three or four, the “pre-school.” By the age of six, they begin “regular” school, and for the next twelve impressionable and developmental years, they will spend at least six or seven hours seated in a classroom, with maybe a few minutes’ break once or twice for “recess” or walking down to the lunchroom, where they will be served – but we will get to that. First let’s talk about how they get to school and back. They ride. In a car or in a bus, they get another couple of hours of sitting. Rare is the child in the US who walks to school. If there are no logistical impediments, such as distance, 8 lane expressways, etc., there are safety concerns.

Once home from school, the most popular and probable activities are more sitting – to watch TV, to play computer games, to do homework. Gone are those days when kids walked ten miles to school each day through the snow, and had one shirt and washed it every day and made it shine. There are a thousand reasons why walking ten miles to school in today’s world would not be either practical or advisable. Kids also no longer get up at 3:30 AM to milk the cows before that snowy walk, nor do they come home from school and pick a hundred pounds of cotton in the broiling sun before supper. (Weather tended to be extremely changeable back then).

Gone even are the days when, home from school, kids went outside and played “Red Rover” and “Hide and Go Seek” until the sun set, the fireflies began to blink, and mothers, who had stayed home all day caring for the smaller kids and cooking, began to call out names through screen doors, and reluctantly, one by one heeded the call, reluctance soon vanishing on reaching the spotless home from which wafted the scent of home-cooked, made from scratch everything, much of it grown by mother herself, out in the spacious backyard.

Your kids have to live in the real world, in the modern world, where few mothers can afford to stay home and prune broccoli, wax floors, or roast chickens, and any physical activity the kids engage in is more likely to be some after school sport or tae kwan do class, to and from which they will ride in vehicles and after which they will resume sedentary life.

And the sedentary diet. Cheap, quick, and filling are the operative words of today’s diet, for kids and everybody else. This will be the basis of the lunch they are served at school, the snacks they will eat when they come home, and the supper that is seldom eaten with the entire family seated around the lace-covered table, each telling positive, upbeat newsy tidbits about their day.

Beginning with the typical breakfast of cold cereal that contains sugar as the primary ingredient, with processed grain and artificial flavors as accents, washed down with a “fruit drink” which also contains mostly sugar, with a bit of fruit flavoring, or even juice, and ending with the bedtime snack of cookies or candy, add up the amount of sugar your child consumes a day, and the figure is hair raising!

Just eating a lot of sugar does not “cause” diabetes, although if your child has a genetic predisposition for it, it sure isn’t going to help. But consuming large amounts of sugar, especially in combination with other cheap “fillers” like white bread, potatoes (typically fried) and the like definitely causes obesity, and throw in that sedentary lifestyle, and you have essentially guaranteed that your child will be obese, and again, while obesity does not cause diabetes in the direct sense, it does put a strain on the mechanism whereby the body processes all that sugar – remember the potatoes and bread also turn to sugar once swallowed – and that strain on the processing takes its toll and sort of invites diabetes to come on in and set a spell, a spell in this case being the rest of your child’s life.

Simply removing all junk food and sugary products from your home and forbidding your child to eat them elsewhere, sending him off to school with a container of low fat yogurt and celery sticks, is not an option for most ordinary or even extraordinary parents, and it is not effective. Everybody has seen the child whose “parents won’t let him have sugar” wolf down an entire box of Mallo-Mars like a starving man once he gets out of the sight of those stern and nutrition-conscious guardians of his pancreas.

Nor will ordering your child outside into the fresh air to get exercise for some stated period be much use. To begin with, if you live in a city, it’s a stretch to call it “fresh air,” and unless you are ordering him out into the street, or have an extra couple of hours to drive to the local park and put him through calesthenics, “outside” is likely to consist, at best, of a few square yards of combined grass driveway. Even if you have anything that can in good conscience be dignified by the word “yard,” once he has had a couple of runs around it, he will in all probability settle down to some edifying but unathletic activity like watching ants or discovering what is inside the hole in the tree that you should probably have either cured or removed. Or, if you live in a “safe” suburb, he will exercise his muscles to hie himself to the home of a neighbor child, and play video games there, while consuming an entire box of Mallo-Mars.

The best most parents can hope to do is ameliorate, as best they can, the deleterious effects of the inescapable realities of modern life, which in practical terms, means gently weaning them away from the Admiral HoneyKrunch to a non-sugar cereal to which you add, once it is in the bowl, a small amount, maybe a teaspoon or so, of sugar. If the child is young enough, you can even put the unsweetened oat circles or wheat puffs or whatever into the Admiral’s box, or something that decorated with a brightly colored cartoon character. Older children can be told a different lie, for example that you are sweetening this new cereal with special extra sweet sugar that contains steroid buds, which will make them better at Tae Kwon Do, or enhance the part of their brain that controls joystick response time, and the Admiral contains enzymes that neutralize this effect. You probably do stuff like this all the time at work, and while your child is unquestionably more intelligent than your boss, your skills are honed enough to meet the added challenge.

There are sugar free cookies that do not suck, and while they will also contain little nutrition and cheap filler, they are still a step up from those whose ingredient label begins with “pure cane sugar, corn syrup…” and they can also be repackaged and assigned impressive sounding attributes just like the cereal.

Sugar-free bread can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (light on the jelly) “safe” for even a diabetic to eat. Go look at your white sponge bread and read the sugar content. And while you’re at it, look at your peanut butter. Feed it to the dog and fill the jar with peanut butter from the “make your own” machine at the health food store, or purchase an already made “natural” one that does not have added sugar. Once it is enhanced with a teaspoon or so of jelly, he won’t notice the difference, and while the sugar free bread is brown, by now you have become an expert at things like explaining that several studies have shown that kids who eat brown bread instead of white are able to text message on their cell phones up to 80% faster.

Although labor-intensive, especially since you will not be able to enlist the help of your child, for obvious reasons, homemade pizza is a nutrition-savvy parent’s best friend. Now that the child knows the text-messaging benefits to be gained from brown bread, he will not object to whole grain crust, and if you spread the ingredients all the way out to the edge, he may not even realize it is whole grain crust until his junior year in college. Once the tomato sauce is added, the real stealth of the operation begins. You can load the pizza with vegetables and the child will actually eat them. If you chop it up fine enough, he can even be deceived into unknowingly consuming broccoli. Top it all off with skim or 1% mozzarella and decorate it with a few slices of pepperoni to lure him in and he will put away as much as you put in front of him.

If you season pre-toasted bread crumbs with the right amount of garlic, “poultry seasoning” and salt (yes, I know, but we are making compromises here, just wait) dip chunks or strips of chicken breast in egg white, then shake them well in a bag of the seasoned bread crumbs, and bake them on a Pam-sprayed pan for about ten minutes, turning them over halfway through, your child will not notice that they are not fried.

Hamburgers can also be baked, served on whole grain buns, and lettuce, tomato and onion are better than no vegetables at all. Let’s face it, he’s not going to come in and demand a spinach salad with just a bit of lemon juice. And he shouldn’t.

Kids are growing, and they do need calories, and they do need dairy products, and protein, and yes, even carbs and fat. You might not need any of these things, and may be struggling mightily to eliminate at least some of them from your diet completely, but you are not ten.

The goal here is to do the doable, not to achieve the holy grail of the model child who sulks when he can’t get any raw carrots. Speaking of raw carrots, the tried and true method of getting these into your child is by adding them to lemon jello. You may be able to get him to eat sugar free jello, but it appears likely that aspartame may do him as much if not more damage in the long run, so just get regular jello and add less sugar than the package says, use ginger ale for half the liquid, and of course, shredded raw carrots.

Once you embrace the diabolical, Machiavellian evil of this method of altering your child’s diet to be at least somewhat less deadly, you will be able to easily apply these principles to just about anything that he likes to eat.

And ready to tackle that other big bugaboo: Exercise.

Even though they are preceded and followed by sitting, and mean chauffeur duty for you, those after school sports teams, and classes in martial arts, ballet, etc. do get your kid off his butt for a while.

And there are other things you can do, mini-workouts, like parking the car at the far end of the parking lot on trips to the big box store or supermarket. This has the added advantage of a mini-workout for you.

Send your kids on errands. No, we are not slipping into time travel fantasy world, where children as young as five or six used to be sent down to the corner store for bread or or a couple of onions. The corner store is now, like the school, likely involves navigating expressways and six miles without sidewalks, not to mention the danger of sending kids of any age anywhere unaccompanied these days. But they can do errands around the house. Need something from upstairs? Send a kid. No, that’s not what I wanted, go back and try again. Get the mail. Take this upstairs. Go look in the car and find your sweater. Take this bottle of harmful chemicals and go scrub your shower. Go put the clothes in the dryer. Bring the dry clothes up here. Fold them, put them away. You, of course, will be sacrificing many exercise opportunities that you might need for yourself, but that’s parenthood. You can always make it up by turning on MTV and entertaining your family by dancing to the dulcet strains of Fi’ty Cent. Hearty laughter, Science has recently decreed, provides the same cardiovascular benefit as exercise.

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