Are Children Instinctually More Inclined To Eat Peat Friendly Foods?

skittles

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Jan 12, 2013
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I've been reflecting on this lately. I think kids generally dislike vegetables, and gravitate toward processed food, sugar and fat. But I don't think they have an aversion to PUFA or fake sugar.

My parents always made me clean my plate. I wonder if I would have ate less chips, drank less soda, and ate less margarine, if they were all made with real ingredients. In general, my parents restricted my sugar and saturated fat, and I probably overcompensated with fatty meat and chips. I wasn't ever too fat as a kid, but always had a few extra pounds. As I got older, I fought with acne.

I loved chocolate, but my parents rarely let me have it. Even going so far as to telling my school that I was 'allergic to chocolate'.
I never cared much for plain milk, but I loved chocolate milk. I loved cereal too.
I liked regular old block cheese and parmesan, but not fancy cheese. Also didn't like processed cheese.
I loved all kinds of fruit, loved orange juice and apple juice.
I only ate egg yolks, never egg whites.
I loved fatty meat, but didn't like lean meat. Except shellfish, I always loved every type of shellfish. Even sea snails.
I liked burgers but I didn't eat much beef.
At McDonalds, I'd always get McNuggets with Sweet & Sour sauce or Honey.
I hated lots of veggies like onions, lettuce, tomato, cabbage, cauliflower, etc.
I would only eat pasta with margarine and salt (maybe cheese). I wouldn't eat pizza if it had too much tomato sauce.
I loved some veggies like carrots, mushrooms, green beans, broccoli, if they were cooked and smothered with fat (margarine - parents didn't get butter)
I liked corn and mashed potatoes.
I loved peanut butter, but not the natural stuff. Favourite candy was Reese's and Wunderbar.
I loved crackers and bagels with margarine or peanut butter.
I loved Pepsi, but my parents only ever bought Diet Pepsi.
I loved vinegar way more than any normal kid.
I ate way too many chips. Favourite flavour was Salt and Vinegar.

The eldest of my sisters was raised with similar restrictions, and grew up eating very similar to me. Meat-centric, loved chips and fatty foods, told to clean her plate, overate. She always had a few extra pounds too, and although she never had much acne, she always had other health problems. Infections, headaches, sicknesses, etc.

My youngest sister was raised without any sort of food restriction. She grew up with butter in the house. She ate whatever she wanted and was never told to clean her plate. Lots of people consider her a picky eater. She never had any difficulty maintaining a lean physique or perfect skin, and she's always had seemingly infinite energy. She instinctively doesn't eat much food in one sitting - often eating only half her plate before offering her leftovers to someone else at the table - but she typically snacks on things throughout the day. She eats some veggies, but not a lot of them. She puts sugar on her oranges, drinks lots of soda, loves candy. Very starch-centric diet - pasta, potatoes. She generally doesn't gravitate toward animal fat (cuts the fat off her bacon/steak), but she likes butter on some foods. She'll have some PUFA-rich foods now and then (chicken strips, potato chips, etc), but she doesn't ever seem to need much of it before she's satisfied.
 

somuch4food

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My parents always made me clean my plate.

I think that's one of the worst habit you can leave a child with. I struggle with overeating since I always feel the urge to finish my plate and the food on the table even if I'm full.
 

kyle

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Adults broaden their palate as they age due to more stress and slower metabolism. A kid doesn't need a lot of nutrient dense foods like meat and greens but it isn't a bad idea to encourage them to eat it, or to cook and make the nutrient dense foods more palatable.

For example, greens can be healthy, but most people eat it in the most spartan way possible with no flavorings. But using salt, gelatin and cream will make it delicious while also calorie and metabolically and nutritionally digestible.

My creamed spinach/greens recipe, even a kid would love because it's full of salt and cream. :lol:

But a lot of people being told greens are goods will serve them raw and without any flavor or drenched in soybean dressing. They intelligently don't want to eat much of it.

I think unlike adults, kids are not brainwashed into what is "healthy" vs "unhealthy" - and won't be so willing to force themselves to eat something that doesn't taste good. But on the other hand, the thing about kids wanting to eat junk food is probably because that's all they're exposed to and the so-called healthy foods are worse.

I think a kid that has access to nutrient dense foods that is prepared right will want to eat it. It's just most people growing up in America don't have that.

Liver, oysters, greens, balancing meat with gelatin, cheeses...those are quite nutrient dense.

People go overboard trying to get their metabolisms revved up with sugar they forget the context. And it can certainly backfire if you start relying on less nutrient dense foods over time.

I think if you look closer at Peat's ideas, he talks about raw sugar as a more therapeutic context, not a dietary mainstay.

I think people that are frustrated with modern diets might go overboard and want to eat ice cream for every meal when they start using Peat's ideas, then they forget about balanced diet.
 
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lvysaur

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I don't think so, I loved fried foods and never cared about sugar when I was a kid
 
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It's interesting that we gravitate towards these foods when we are young, and it isn't until we approach adulthood that we begin to neurotically restrict the types of foods we eat and force ourselves to eat more salads and strictly avoid sugars and saturated fats.

It also seems a bit misguided that parents maybe are going out of their way to restrict their children's natural inclination to eat lots of sugar, or sneak lots of leafy greens into meatballs, or give them multi-vitamins with fish oils added (admittedly my wife and I have been guilty of all of this at various points).
“We are brainwashed into eating above ground vegetables,,salads and such. It is butter, salad dressing croutons that enable children to get it down. I saw a video recently about how people on the street looked in the sixties verses now and all those vegetable and salads, and our Round-Up, glysophate ridden wheat for that matter is destroying human health. People are eating what was intended for animals, and some needing two stomached to break it down and wonder what the problem is…

Not long ago, breast feeding was socially unacceptable in the United States, and several manufacturers were teaching the world’s poorest women to use their baby-food formulas even when there was no clean water for its preparation. Industrialists have campaigned to convince the public that their by-products, from cotton-seed oil to shrimp shells, are “health foods.” In several parts of the world, desperately poor people sometimes eat clay, and even clay has been promoted as a health food. Almost anything becomes “food,” when people are under economic and social pressure. If these things aren’t acutely toxic, they can become part of our “normal” diet.

Our instincts give us a few clues about our nutritional needs, such as thirst, the hunger for salt, the pleasantness of sweet things, and the unpleasantness of certain odors or very acrid or bitter tastes. People who are constitutionally unable to taste certain bitter chemicals find certain vegetables less objectionable; their instinctive guidance has become less clear. But within the boundaries of cravings and disgust, habits and customs become the dominant forces in diet. "Professional dietitians" and other "experts" primarily function as enforcers of cultural prejudice.

The manufacturers of pureed vegetables for babies used to put large amounts of salt, sugar, and monosodium glutamate into their products, because the added chemicals served as instinctual signals that made the material somewhat acceptable to the babies. There was no scientific basis for providing these vegetables to babies in a form that they would accept, but it was a profitable practice that was compatible with the social pressure against prolonged breast feeding.

Poor people, especially in the spring when other foods were scarce, have sometimes subsisted on foliage such as collard and poke greens, usually made more palatable by cooking them with flavorings, such as a little bacon grease and lots of salt. Eventually, "famine foods" can be accepted as dietary staples. The fact that cows, sheep, goats and deer can thrive on a diet of foliage shows that leaves contain essential nutrients. Their minerals, vitamins, and amino acids are suitable for sustaining most animal life, if a sufficient quantity is eaten. But when people try to live primarily on foliage, as in famines, they soon suffer from a great variety of diseases. Various leaves contain antimetabolic substances that prevent the assimilation of the nutrients, and only very specifically adapted digestive systems (or technologies) can overcome those toxic effects.“ -Ray Peat

“How did the celebration of food come to a screeching halt, seemingly overnight for the likes of broccoli, wheat germ and protein powders? No wonder children aren't minding their parents, there is now a great divide! The young can't wait to excuse themselves from the dinner table and get back to living life. The business, or laziness is now killing us, with ovens traded for microwaves and dinner tables for couches. The celebration of food is now a chore or not a focus, with everybody having answers as to what we are suppose to be eating. They were all happier back then, and nobody was as fat and sick as we are today. How was sugar ever the the problem? I'll tell you what, broccoli could have never gotten this far if it weren't for butter!”

 

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