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Healthy Kids
By Marilu Henner
Review by Sally Fallon
Marilu Henner is an actress who also describes herself as a health
pioneer. In this colorful, "kid-friendly" book she says it's time to
say good-bye to sugarcoated cereals, artificially colored cheese puffs,
oceans of sugary soft drinks, nutritionally deficient school lunches
and fast food supermeals. Sounds great.
But then come all the mistakes:
- Young girls are starting to menstruate years earlier because of
bovine growth hormones in meat and dairy.
- School lunches are bad because they contain over 40 percent of
calories as fat. s Meat and butter clog arteries.
- Saturated fats are just as bad as trans fats.
- Grains and legumes will protect against cancer, heart disease and
overweight.
- Plant foods are better sources of calcium than dairy foods.
- There are more pesticides in meat than in grains, fruits and vegetables.
- Children should eat lots of rough whole grains, including the bran
and hull.
- Cows milk does not contain essential fatty acids.
- Safflower oil is good for frying and corn, canola and soy oil are
fine for "general use."
Henner's dietary advice for nursing mothers is to avoid spicy foods
and drink plenty of water. Recommended foods for weaning include soy-based,
vitamin-enriched formula, tofu and hard-to-digest items such as breads,
cereals and nut butters.
Then come the recipes, just loaded with unbleached flour, soy margarine
(even though she says trans fats are bad), canola oil, lots of whole
unsoaked grains and an overabundance of sweeteners. Just about every
soy food imaginable finds its way into Henner's recipes for kids—soy
milk, soy yoghurt, soy mayonnaise, soy cheese, soy sausage, soy meat
substitutes, soy cream, soy bacon and soy pastrami. These bland foods
then get flavored with Spike and Bragg's Liquid Aminos, both sources
of MSG. The only meat allowed is skinless chicken breasts or lean turkey,
and the only other animal food in the recipes is cage-free eggs.
Henner promises that this diet will protect children against asthma,
allergies, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, yeast infections and
overweight. But it is almost completely devoid of those dietary factors
that children need to avoid these conditions, beginning with the fat-soluble
activators found in organ meats, oily fish, shellfish, butter and other
animal fats. The granola and other whole grain products she recommends
are the fast-track to candida problems.
The irony is that Henner condemns processed foods on one page but on
the next endorses the most processed foods of all—imitation milk, butter,
yoghurt, cheese and meat made from soy. And she doesn't seem to realize
that these soy foods contain huge amounts of additives—the very additives
she condemns in her appendix.
To top off her highly restrictive diet, Henner throws in food-combining
rules that prohibit eating protein foods with starches. Sweet fruits
should not be combined with other foods, she says, but they abound in
her baked goods.
This book is billed as a guidebook to healthy kids, but the guidelines
it contains are more likely to produce a variety of pathologies, including
the kinds of eating disorders that manifest when we prohibit those wholesome
traditional foods for which the body has deep instinctual desires.
About the Reviewer
 Sally
Fallon is the author of
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct
Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (with Mary G. Enig, PhD), a well-researched,
thought-provoking guide to traditional foods with a startling message: Animal
fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary
for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection
from disease and optimum energy levels. She joined forces with Enig again to
write Eat Fat, Lose Fat, and has authored numerous articles on the
subject of diet and health. The President of the Weston A. Price Foundation
and founder of A Campaign for Real Milk,
Sally is also a journalist, chef, nutrition researcher, homemaker, and community
activist. Her four healthy children were raised on whole foods including butter,
cream, eggs and meat.
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