You might think I’m crazy for what I’m about to post, but bear in mind that healthy eating is what has saved me from a life of illness, so I am very, very passionate about this subject (so passionate, in fact, that I switched careers in order to help others learn how to eat right!).

Brace yourself because this is a rant of mine. (I promise once it’s out of my system, I’ll get back to positive tips as usual.) :)

With that in mind, a couple recent happenings have given me more than the usual amount of concern, and I want to get them off my chest:

1) As a semi-professional Internet surfer *lol* I find myself active on several online message boards and e-mail lists for parents in my local area. As sad as this sounds, I’ve gotten very jaded lately about parents posting what they feed their kids. I am a FIRM believer in feeding your kids the very healthiest foods because what we eat as children impacts our health more than anything else that we eat in life, and we can build great eating habits so much more easily in our kids if we start when they’re young.

But even I was shocked the other day when a well-meaning mother of an 18-month-old posted that her child is small for her age, and in order to fatten her up, they had taken to feeding the baby fast food at least 3 times a week (the greasy, burger-and-fries kind, that is).

Ouch.

Now, you’re never going to hear me advocate eating junk food for a second here on this blog, and I don’t do it myself literally ever, but it would be naive at best for me to assume that most parents aren’t going to resort to fast food now and then. (I would recommend sticking to the healthier options like Chinese steamed veggies and the burrito chains where you can get simple plates of food full of beans, veggies, avocado/guacamole and occasionally a little brown rice whenever possible! I rely on the above options occasionally myself.) And once in a very long while, having just about anything won’t hurt. Once. Now and then. Not often.

But purposefully feeding a child fried chicken nuggets or a burger, french fries and a milkshake in order to help the child grow? It’s like asking the universe to make your child sickly and setting her up for a life full of completely preventable diseases.

If you want to help your child grow up as healthy as can be, try whenever possible to stick to whole foods, mainly veggies, beans and whole grains, as well as nuts/seeds/avocado. The healthy high-fat foods I mentioned just now — nuts, seeds and avocado — will help every child with brain development, increase weight when needed, and seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame) and avocado in particular are highly nutritious and only very, very rarely associated with food allergies.

And oddly enough (well, you might think it’s odd), other than needing to eat less of the same healthy fats I mentioned above, adults do best on the same diet because little humans and big humans thrive on whole foods. So you can feed yourself the same way as your child, and you both reap the rewards. (As the mother of a little one just now getting into eating solids, I can say that the less you expose your child to junk food early on, the easier it is for the child to develop a taste for the healthier foods as well.)

2) Someone I care very much about is very, very ill. And while part of the illness is due to being pretty much poisoned by medicine over a long period of time, much of it is due to the person’s being pretty much entirely malnourished. (Yes, even if you are overweight or consider yourself a healthy eater, you can be malnourished.) I have offered help with diet, of course, and if I was closer, I’d even help with meal preparation if that’s what it took.

Everything seemed to be going well with the dietary changes that this person undertook for a while, but then yet another health emergency came about. (I’m not going to reveal what or how to keep this private, but it was not in any way due to the diet.) And that’s when things got tough. As in, the healthful eating flew out the window.

Why?

Because hospitals don’t serve healthy food. Or at least this one doesn’t, nor do any I’ve ever been to as a patient or visitor. And this person lives far too far away from the hospital to even attempt to bring in food, not that there would be a place to store it.

What kind of world do we live in when the place people go to get well actually feeds them so poorly? But what to do? I’m all ears.

Personally, the only thing I know to do is try to set things up so that you can bring food in if nothing healthy is available (and you can count on it not being healthful) or make sure there are decent options close by that someone can bring you. When I was in the hospital after delivering my son, my husband brought in food for me that was actually — gasp! — good for me and not the mystery meat with sauce and jello that seem par for the course. (Sadly, in my case, it wasn’t actually mystery meat — it was a ham sandwich. And not only have I been vegetarian for well over a decade, but I’m also intolerant to gluten, which is in flour, i.e., sandwich bread. One bite and I’m sick for the better part of a week. And yes, I’d noted these issues early on when I got to the hospital, but had my husband not brought in food, I’d have not had anything to eat. I make it a practice not to eat anything that will make me sick, and being hungry once is annoying but won’t lead to illness.)

I also think that we each need to do our part to ask hospitals in our local areas to prepare foods that are actually restorative, that actually help our bodies heal.

OK, end of rant. And now perhaps I’ll get that sleep I’ve been missing out on. :)