Motherhood: From Toddlers To Teens: How To Nourish Your Kids From Pre-conception Through Picky Stages, Peer Pressure, And Everything In-Between

How important is it to feed your family organic food? Is baby-led weaning a good idea? Should you give in to your picky eaters’ preferences? And how do you equip your teens to make better nutritional choices when they’re away from home?

Recorded LIVE at the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando, a team of experts address all the above. They share insights on fertility, conception, and the power of nutrient-dense traditional diets in promoting health across generations.

They share stories about the importance of organic food for avoiding glyphosate, including organ meats for overcoming infertility, and how to nourish your family deeply, even on a budget. Whether you have a family, or hope to have one someday, this panel provides insights for nourishing deeply.

Connect with our guests:

Zen Honeycutt – Moms Across America
Pam Schoenfeld – Women and Family Nutrition
Sandrine Perez – Nourishing Our Children and Nourishing Our Children Facebook Groups
Christine Muldoon – Nourish the Littles
Sally Fallon Morell – Nourishing Traditions
Subscribe to Wise Traditions on Apple Podcasts
Check out our sponsors Optimal Carnivore and Lumiran

Key Takeaways:

Family Food Values
Importance of Feeding Families Organic Food
Managing Picky Eaters and Benefits of Baby-Led Weaning
Nourishing Children, Enhancing Fertility, Preparing for Conception
Nutrient-Dense Foods for Preconception

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 – Introduction

00:28 – Baby-Led Weaning Benefits Explored by Experts

06:31 – Importance of Nutrient-Dense Foods for Fertility and Pregnancy

13:20 – Debunking Misconceptions: The Nutritional Value of Eggs

17:34 – Organic Foods: Reducing Harmful Chemical Exposure

24:59 – Strategies for Nourishing Picky Eaters

29:13 – Nutritional Testing and Role Modeling Healthy Eating

36:41 – Optimal Carnivore and Chromalux: Nature-Inspired Solutions

40:01 – Supporting Development Through Early Introduction of Solids

48:33 – Dietary Adjustments Enhancing Baby Growth

53:00 – Sensory Food Experiences for Healthy Baby Development

57:38 – Dissecting Baby-Led Weaning Strategies and Caregiver Bonding

59:57 – Vital Nutrients: Vitamin A from Liver, Eggs, and Cod Oil

01:06:05 – Choosing Empowerment, Courage, and Creativity

01:14:04 – Outro

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Listen to the episode here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text are Zen Honeycutt, Pam Schoenfeld, Sandrine Perez, Christine Muldoon and Sally Fallon Morell.

Introduction To The Wise Traditions Podcast

How important is it to feed your family organic food? What if you can’t afford it? What do you do about picky eaters in your family? Is there anything you can do about it? What do you think of Baby-Led Weaning? Are there benefits to it? This is Episode 501, and we talk about everything in this episode from how to manage toddlers to teens.

This is a special episode that was in front of a live audience at the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando, Florida. Our team of experts addresses everything from top to bottom, how to nurture our children from preconception onward. The guests include Zen Honeycutt, the Founder of Moms Across America, Sally Fallon Morell, the President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Christine Muldoon of Nourish the Littles Sandrine Perez, the head of Nourishing Our Children, and Pam Schoenfeld a registered dietician with a practice in North Carolina.

Together they answer all of the questions that we discussed at the top of this episode and more. This episode is a little longer than usual, but it is worth it because it is jam-packed with wisdom on how to nourish your family deeply, how to enhance fertility, and how to feed your children in a way that they will love. Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to join the Weston A. Price Foundation’s email list. We send out important action alerts pertinent to where you live in the world, along with letting you know about upcoming events and so forth.

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Connect with our guests:

Zen Honeycutt – Moms Across America

Pam Schoenfeld – Women and Family Nutrition

Sandrine Perez – Nourishing Our Children and Nourishing Our Children Facebook Groups

Christine Muldoon – Nourish the Littles

Sally Fallon Morell – Nourishing Traditions

Subscribe to Wise Traditions on Apple Podcasts

Check out our sponsors Optimal Carnivore and Lumiran

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This is a very special show because we are doing it at The Wise Traditions Conference 2024 in Orlando, Florida. Did you know that the Weston A. Price Foundation was established in 1999? We are so thankful to the President and Founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Sally Fallon Morell. She is the author of Nourishing Traditions, Nourishing Fats, Nourishing Broth, and Nourishing Diets. She is a nourishing woman. We are so thankful.

She is on our panel, along with Zen Honeycutt from Moms Across America, advocating for children’s food and all of our health. Sandrine Perez, a dear supporter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. She’s also the head of Nourishing Our Children. Christine Muldoon is on the Board of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and she’s also from Nourish the Littles, and Pam Schoenfeld a registered dietician who has previously been on the board and is from Women and Family Nutrition.

This is one of the most critical topics that the Weston A. Price Foundation focuses on for the next generation because traditional people did the same. They weren’t shoring up their health. They wanted to guarantee the health of their children and their grandchildren and so on. This is why we are doing this panel on nourishing our children from preconception onward, and I’m going to pose some questions to a couple of panelists and some to all of them. My first question goes to Sally and Sandrine, how can you nourish from preconception onward? What does that mean, Sally?

Preparing For Pregnancy And Preconception Nutrition

It means preparing for pregnancy. You eat very nutrient-dense foods for at least six months before conception. If you’ve been a vegetarian or eating a lot of processed food, you want to make that 1 or 2 years to prepare your body for conception. You need all of these nutrients ready and available because as soon as you conceive, that embryo and that fetus start growing and need those nutrients.

The nutrient-dense foods are foods very rich in minerals and fat-soluble vitamins. A, D, and K. Liver is one of those foods so you need to find a way to like liver. Butter from grass-fed animals. That’s not hard. Raw whole milk. Fermented foods, broth, cod liver oil, and eggs. Eggs are a very important nutrient-dense food.

I was going to add, how can you prepare yourself, in advance of pregnancy? It’s to space your pregnancies. Traditionally, they were spaced three years, meaning if you had your firstborn, it would be age 0, then 3, then 6, then 9. I wanted to add that because in between pregnancies a woman needs to recover her nutritional stores and also during that time, we recommend that a woman stop breastfeeding so that she’s not breastfeeding while she’s pregnant. That’s also another way to prepare for pregnancy preconception.

Pam, I know that you also work a lot with people who are trying to conceive. What are tips for preparing for conception as we are discussing? I still don’t quite get it. Why do we have to prepare? I see young seventeen-year-olds getting pregnant when they are not exactly prepared for it, and not trying to get pregnant.

That is a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? There are genetic differences in the way we need to consume nutrients. I don’t think that would be something that we should even pay any attention to because most of us don’t know our genes, and this would be especially in vitamin A, but we know that traditional peoples use organ meats, especially prior to conception and during pregnancy, and they are the most nutrient-dense foods. The other thing I’d like to say in regards to what Sandrine was saying. I have a lot of women that come to me with what’s called secondary infertility. They had no problem getting pregnant the first time around, but by the second time, whatever number of times they are now trying, and sometimes they have had a couple of miscarriages.

They are like, “What’s going on?” I said, “Tell me a little bit about your pregnancy and what diet you had and things like that.” They tell me, and then, “How long did you breastfeed?” A lot of women are trying to do the best for their families, so they breastfeed for a while or a year or more. I said, “That’s why you can’t get pregnant because now you are nutrient-depleted.

What worked the first time doesn’t necessarily work the second time or the third time, to your point. This is what I see in practice. It’s not that uncommon to see women who are quite successful early on, and I can’t explain why someone with a less nourishing diet does, except for there are genetic differences, but the body does get very depleted through that process of pregnancy and lactation. It has to be supported.

I also wonder if age has something to do with it.

Sometimes I think it does, but in most cases, unless a woman’s in her late 30s, I don’t see it as an issue generally.

Sandrine, do you have anything to add?

Yes, I was going to say, to your question, “Why prepare?” I am not a mother. I lead Nourishing Our Children. The reason I’m motivated is because my mom abandoned her traditional Moroccan diet, and she didn’t focus on a preconception diet or nourishing herself during pregnancy. While all of her 11 siblings had 32 teeth and perfect eyesight, I have only 24 teeth in my mouth because adult teeth were pulled to make enough room for the rest of the teeth.

If we don’t prepare for pregnancy, if we are not well-nourished, we can create another life that is handicapped in some way, who doesn’t have the palate that they need for all the 32 teeth that we are designed to have, who has a narrow pelvis, who might have difficulty giving birth. Why prepare so that we can give the next generation of our children the most optimal health and physical structure? It does make a difference. I have lots of testimonials and mental health. If you haphazardly get pregnant, they could be missing vital nutrients and they have a very narrow palate and a very narrow pelvis that will impact them for the rest of their lives.

Zen, I know that you know that a lot of people these days are struggling with infertility. What do you recommend or what do you see as an impediment to conception?

The short answer is chemicals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals. I read the book Count Down by Dr. Shanna Swan. Hopefully, so you don’t have to, it’s horrible that the projection of fertility in the future. The number of endocrine-disrupting chemicals allowed in the United States is around 1,200. In Europe, they allowed three. We need to drastically reduce our exposure to these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are primarily pesticides in the food supply, so we will talk more about the importance of eating organic, but I want to go above that even more. A bigger reason is convenience.

I call it the disease of ease. We want things fast, cheap, easy, and tasty. In America, we are so obsessed with information, TV, and social media that tells us we need to have stuff. When we need to have stuff, when we need to have designer clothes and the newest pho, one and all of these things, we end up curbing the time that we allow for cooking and food and home. I love what Weston A. Price Foundation does because the word nourishing makes us think about what we need for our body, and that usually is to get connected with nature. I truly believe if we cut out a lot of the media and a lot of the exposure to material things, and we get reconnect with nature, we will naturally cook more food at home. We will naturally eat organic, and we will naturally be more fertile.

Pam, I know that you see a lot of women hoping to have kids. What other ideas do you have to help enhance conception or enhance fertility?

There are so many things, but one of the main things that I see is women aren’t getting enough sleep. It’s a pervasive problem, and there are a lot of reasons for that, especially if they already have one child or more. I’m always saying we get the nutrition but they do not. They are too stressed. They are not sleeping. I said, “That’s one of your most important problems, and when that can be addressed, oftentimes with a nourishing diet, the fertility can be reversed.”

I wanted to mention something about the endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and it’s what you mentioned was very smart and we should avoid them, but a well-nourished person is more able to detoxify those. I know that vitamin A is very important in that process. Most of you might know that I’m all about vitamin A, but it’s not the only vitamin, but that’s the one I have looked into. That’s part of the whole picture that we don’t think about what we can avoid, but we think about how we can protect ourselves because it’s everywhere and there’s no way you can 100% protect yourself from chemicals. Getting well-nourished is key.

A well-nourished body is more capable of detoxifying harmful chemicals, making nutrition a powerful tool for protecting health.

Sacred Foods For Fertility And Growth

That leads to our next question. There are sacred foods that traditional cultures revered ever since their existence began because they knew that they were good, not only for people wanting to conceive, mothers wanting to conceive, but for those who were already expecting and even for the children. I want to ask each of you to highlight a particular sacred food, and let’s start with you, Pam.

I’m going to skip the obvious one, and I’m going to mention eggs. I say this because I have a lot of patients that are unlike you all. They are just average people who haven’t looked into things to the depth that you’ve all investigated. I’m always saying, “Eat a lot of eggs.” If you think about what an egg is, it’s unfertilized, it could be fertilized, a living thing, and it contains so many nutrients that our eggs, our reproductive system need someone’s unwilling to eat the best food, which I’m going to let somebody else say. I recommend that they eat as many eggs and pastured organic if they can get them from a farmer as possible. Unfortunately, this is not being done because the government has scared people from eating too many eggs, but it’s interesting how well that often works in conjunction with other changes.

Christine.

I’m going to say bone marrow and seafood. That’s my answer. Let’s see what hasn’t been mentioned. Liver. I was going to leave that one for Sally. She mentioned you need to find a way to like liver and it can be hidden in meatloaf where you don’t taste it at all or meatballs. It can also be taken as capsules or desiccated liver capsules. We have numerous providers that provide a grass-fed and grass-finished liver capsule. Also, women in our community will freeze the liver and create a capsule of their own, which is less expensive than having it encapsulated. It doesn’t have to be something you don’t enjoy. Janine Farzin, is very expert in preparing organ meats, and I encourage people to look her up, Offaly Good Cooking. That is the most nutrient-dense food to consume.

Zen.

I’m going to go from the Asian perspective and say seaweed and the minerals that are in that. I don’t know if that’s a Weston A. Price Foundation recommendation but in Japan, they eat seaweed for almost every meal, and that would include fermented food.

Sally.

Pam and I share a very similar personal history in that we recovered our health or boosted our health when we discovered liver as adults. I had never eaten liver in my life, and then I discovered pate and couldn’t eat enough of it. I’m sure that’s why my daughter was so beautiful and healthy, even though I wasn’t doing Weston Price at the time.

The liver is our most nutrient-dense food. It was a sacred food in all cultures. People ate liver to prepare for pregnancy. It’s not only our best source of vitamin A, but B12, B6, phosphorus, and even vitamin C. Choline, biotin, and all of these critical B vitamins and it’s a complete package. I do recommend if you are going to have healthy children to learn to like liver in some way. This is much easier in Europe because they have liver sausage and pate. You can get chicken liver pate in any pub in England. Learn to make pate and if you can’t do it, then do the desiccated liver capsules.

Liver is our most nutrient-dense food. It is the sacred food in all cultures.

I want to pivot and ask about the importance of organic. You mentioned that, Zen. Why is it important to get organic food as opposed to the regular conventional stuff?

Why Organic Foods Matter

I have reviewed thousands of food tests from Canada, and the United States from multiple organizations, and across the board organic food has dramatically fewer chemicals, specifically glyphosate, which is, has been proven and shown to destroy the beneficial gut bacteria and allow for the proliferation of pathogenic gut bacteria affect the hormone system, the nervous system, and cause cancer. All kinds of fertility issues can be connected to it as well. Miscarriages and the androgenization of baby girls, meaning lengthening their anogenital distance. When the mother was exposed to glyphosate, the baby girls were masculinized,d and also damaging the sperm.

Organic has far less. It’s not allowed, first of all, glyphosate is not allowed in organs,c and toxic chemicals are not allowed. There could be some contamination, but from what I have seen, for instance, maybe the conventional wine had 54 parts per billion of glyphosate in it. If there was any contamination, the organic wine or biodynamic wine might’ve had 0.3 so far lower across the board. I do want to point out, it doesn’t have to be USDA organic. If you know your farmer and you trust your farmer, for me, that trust and that level of connection are much more important, so organic is across the board, going to have fewer pesticides and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Christine, what do you think about that?

I’m going to offer an anecdotal personal story about that. When I was a young child, my mother started buying organic before it was even a thing. I am from Texas and Whole Foods started in Texas and I will never forget this. She had a garden. She had parsley and one year there were caterpillars that ate it up. In an effort to save the caterpillars, she went to the grocery store. She bought some conventional regular parsley, put the caterpillars in a box, and fed the caterpillars. They all died and she couldn’t figure out why.

My mother is a microbiologist, so she was a little bit curious. The following year, the same thing happened. The caterpillars came to her plants, wanting to eat it up. The second year she bought organic parsley, and this was before organic was even a thing. There weren’t a lot of people buying organic back then, and they all survived. Ever since then, she was convinced it was the chemicals they were spraying on the parsley and she started buying organic from then on.

Can I add one more thing to that too? Another story. I love the story thing, not just the data. I interviewed a woman in Australia, who was from Africa, and she said that her father called her and said that the GMO crops that they were planting in Africa were killing their village and that the people were getting diabetes because of chemicals.

They were starving because the soil wasn’t able to grow the cowpeas and the other foods that they normally would grow to feed their village. Their GMOs were making them starve. I asked if she had a personal experience with it because she wasn’t in Africa, she was in Australia at the time, and she said she had nine miscarriages until she switched to organic, which included organic raw milk. She switched that and ate organic food, and then after that, she had 3 healthy babies in her late 30s.

These are dramatic stories. Thank you for sharing. Sally, you and I often talk about the struggling single mom trying to make ends meet. What if she’s like, “Organic is out of reach. I can’t afford it.” What would you say to her?

Making Organic Affordable For Families

It’s neat to be a homesteader or have a little farm, but live a simple life, but very few people can afford that. I don’t want the Weston A. Price Foundation to be associated with simply that lifestyle because we need to get to the single mom living in an apartment in Brooklyn. How can we help her? If you can’t always afford organic, I certainly would make sure that your grains are organic because they are sprayed with glyphosate two days before harvest, and you are getting the full brunt of them. I believe this is why so many people have so-called gluten intolerance. It’s the glyphosate sprayed on the grains.

Glyphosate does break down a little over time, but there’s no time for it to break down. You are getting the full brunt of this. The other thing I would urge the mom to do is eat liver. I can point to many people who grew up in a background that we would say are poor and they ate liver because it was cheap.

You can get calf liver in any supermarket. In America, calves are out in the open range. I wouldn’t get the beef liver because that’s from the confinement, but calves in America are still outside, grass-fed. I’d get calf liver. It’s not expensive. The two other things I would say is to eat butter, no matter what it costs, it’s worth it. Get raw milk. Through our chapters, we are trying to make raw milk available everywhere.

Wise Traditions | Motherhood — Motherhood: Eat butter no matter what it costs. It’s worth it.

Christine, you also work with families, what do you say about affordability and people trying to stay within budget eating this way?

I know that’s a challenging topic right now, especially with how expensive groceries are. One of my recommendations would be the EWG and they put out the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. If it’s not possible to buy organic for all of your produce and all of your foods, then stick to the Dirty Dozen, buy an organic for that and conventional for Clean Fifteen.

EWG, the Environmental Working Group. They also have an app where you can see exactly what is in the food that you are thinking about buying. If I’m not mistaken, you can plug it into their app and they will tell you, “There are these ingredients or these chemicals. That one’s particularly one to avoid.” Do you have anything to add, Pam?

Yes. About the liver. I am at Whole Foods, and I don’t know if this is everywhere across the United States, but they do have organic chicken livers for $6 a pound, and that could be 2 or 3 servings. That’s quite affordable and a great way to make a very palatable, tasty, mild liver dish, and it’s quite nutrient-dense.

As a lot of moms know, you can chop the liver up and make dirty rice as they say. Mix it into things. Not that you are trying to hide it, but you are trying to make it so your kid will eat it and then they will still be craving it. I have seen my friends with little kids and their kids gulping down the pate because like when Sally first found it, they can’t get enough of it because their little bodies know exactly what they need.

This next question is going to go to the whole panel. What do you do? I talked about a kid who’s eager to eat it all, but some people have very picky children. Sometimes it has to do with the fact that the texture is funny to them. Zen, you even told me that there was this mom whose kid was autistic and all this kid would eat was like nuggets, ice cream, and pizza. The mom is like, “I know it’s not good, but what can I do?” This is a question for each of the panelists. We will start with you, Zen. What would you tell her?

What To Do About Picky Eaters

First of all, it’s mindset. You are the gatekeeper to your child’s health and they will not die if they do not have those foods. We need to understand that it’s not them that want those foods, it’s their gut bacteria that has been imbalanced by the exposure to all these different chemicals. Having this mindset that you are the one that’s going to open up the gateway and give them this pathway to new health is very important indeed. I had another thought about that, but I might have to come back to it.

Picky eating is normal, but parents are the gatekeepers to their child’s health. Serve nourishing foods consistently, and kids will come around.

It’s having the food in your house that you want to give them and then giving them a choice. Don’t have the food in the house that you don’t want them to have. Don’t buy it. You are in charge. You can have organic chicken nuggets if you want to. You can make organic chicken nuggets with them, and give them a choice. Make sure everything that you are giving them as a choice are things that you are happy with them having.

Let’s go back to Sally.

I see this a lot. It’s moms who perhaps don’t have a lot of self-confidence and they want to be popular with their kids. Being a mom is not a popularity contest and they will still love you if you say no and if you control things. Probably in the end, they will love you more because you cared for them in this way. Yes, I see a lot of moms who give in and buy the cookies and the sweets when all they have to do is say, “No, I’m not going to do this.”

Zen.

The one sentence is being a good parent means giving your children what they need, not what they want.

Giving them what they need, not what they want. Good words. Sandrine.

Nourishing Our Children has a private Facebook group and lots of parents ask this question. We continually tell the parents to, as Zen and Sally have encouraged, offer only the foods you want them to eat. If there’s something they enjoy, such as a chicken nugget, you can make it in a nutrient-dense way. You don’t have to buy convenience food.

I want to highlight a resource in our audience. Corey Dunn is very specialized in these kinds of swaps. She’s on Instagram and she has a blog. She creates all sorts of macaroni and cheese and the typical processed foods that children are drawn to in nutrient-dense ways. That’s an option. I do think that it’s helpful to be with other parents who are facing this and have the communal support of other moms and dads who are saying no. Coach each other to that finish line. We have seen time and again that kids do come around. They are hungry and they will eat what you are serving in time. There might be a painful period of tears and upset. They will not starve to death.

Encouraging words. Christine.

This is one of my favorite subjects to talk about, so I will try and keep it brief. If we are talking about severe picky eating, for those parents, I want to say that it’s very likely that nutritional testing, specifically HTMA. Looking at heavy metals. Looking at nutrient deficiencies like zinc. Zinc is known as a sensory mineral.

Oftentimes, kids who struggle with texture issues reject meat and things like that, they are deficient in zinc. That’s if we are talking about severe picky eating. If we are talking about regular picky eating, it’s developmentally appropriate and it is a stage that all kids go through. Eventually, as Sandrine said, they move past it.

Words of encouragement would be to keep serving nutrient-dense foods, day in, day out, and keep your food family values and boundaries firm. Model for your kids. When they see you eating nutrient-dense foods, they are going to want to eat nutrient-dense foods, and then also the division of responsibility, which was created by a woman named Ellyn Satter. This espouses that the parents are in charge of what their kids eat when they eat and what and when and the children are in charge of if they eat and how much. As we do the grocery shopping and meal planning, we serve the food, and then we release control and it’s up to the kids after that.

Didn’t you tell me one time that one of your kids was like, “I don’t like that. I have never liked it,” and then one time he served it and he was like, “I love it. I want more of it.”

It’s all about exposure because there’s this disconnect between parents and kids where a parent will serve food maybe 2 or 3 times and they are like, “My kid doesn’t like it. They are never going to eat this.” When in reality they need to be exposed to it anywhere between 15 and 20 times before they accept it. An exposure could look like seeing it at the grocery store, seeing it at the farmer’s market, seeing it on a plate of food cooked one way, or seeing it on a plate of food cooked a different way. It’s constant exposure and sometimes it takes years. She’s talking about my son who didn’t eat mushrooms and that took seven years.

Pam, you go.

There are so many good tips. One of the things that I have done with my granddaughter to help her increase interest in foods is to get her preparing foods together and they love that, especially when they are young. Once they have made something themselves, they are most likely to try it. It’s something I did with my son because he rejected eggs when I don’t know what age he began doing that. I kept encouraging them, kept serving them, and kept making him eat them before I gave him anything else.

When it was difficult, when he was more insistent, I started putting egg yolks into everything I made. It’s pretty easy to sneak egg yolks into a taco meat or a spaghetti sauce. You’ve probably heard of Jessica Seinfeld putting vegetables in. Mine was hiding egg yolks in everything. Don’t put the whites in necessarily. They have a little bit too much rubbery texture, but you can get egg yolks in a lot of different foods.

I even made it, I can’t even think of what the dessert is called. Zabaglione. It does have sugar in it, but it’s made with six egg yolks, and I gave that to him to dip his fruit in. Try to find creative ways. Nowadays my son loves eggs and he’s very much into all these types of foods, but it takes persistence and knowing that it’s not easy. The other thing I would say is don’t even let your kids. If you go to a restaurant, forget the kids’ menu. Don’t even think it is an occasional treat. Once they start tasting these foods, you don’t need to give them to them. My granddaughter goes out with my husband and me, and we only order off the adult menu, and people always notice and they go, “She’s such a good eater.” The kids’ menus are the worst. It’s a terrible thing in this country that we think kids should eat these foods as their sustenance.

I want to say one thing about pickiness. I didn’t allow pickiness. You ate what I served you, and you need to make that food taste good. I did allow pickiness on eggs because I’m picking on eggs. I can’t eat a runny white, and I don’t like to see the whites. I have to cook those and whip those scrambled eggs. I understand this. I’m still picky about eggs. I allowed my kids. I always ask them, “How do you want your eggs?” I tried to make them so that they would eat them.

Sometimes it’s not about the food, it’s about control or other issues or associations. Let’s have grace with our kids.

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Coming up. Our panelists discuss what a baby’s first foods should be. Hint not rice cereal, and they talk about the timing of introducing solid foods to the baby and what signals you can look for that your baby will give you to indicate to you that it is time.

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Let’s go back to infancy. I want to ask Sandrine and Christine about the baby’s first food. What should it be and what should the timing be on that?

Introduction of solids should be between 4 and 6 months of age, depending on the baby and their maturity, and there are several indicators that a baby is ready for solids. Starting solids is incredibly important for developmental and brain growth. One of the reasons why babies need to start solid foods is because beginning at around six months, their iron needs increase and they need more iron than their mother’s breast milk alone can provide.

Babies’ First Foods And Timing For Solids

Reduction of solids should be between four and six months of age depending on the baby and their maturity.

Also when you are starting solids, there is a special window, called the texture window and the flavor window. This is when the baby’s brain is primed to receive texture information and flavor information. Within that first year, we want to introduce our baby to as many different textures of food, as many different flavors of food as possible because their brain is receptive to that.

There have been studies out there that show that the earlier the more solid foods that are introduced in that window, they will help prevent picky eating in the future. When it comes to solid foods, there’s the oral motor development aspect of it, which is incredibly important for babies to develop their strength to practice having food in their mouth, practice lateralizing their tongue, and seeing what it feels like if I have too much food in my mouth, what does it feel like if there’s not enough? Eating is a full sensorial experience, so we want them to touch it, we want them to smear it all over their face, we want them to smell it. All of these things are necessary for starting solids, for babies.

Sandrine, you take this part of the question, what should those foods be? What would you suggest introducing the baby to?

I want to say quickly before I answer that. Within the Nourishing Our Children community, this has been a controversial topic. There’s this notion that food before one is for fun, and I want to dispel that it is not for fun. It’s critical and some babies are ready as early as four months, and that’s been very controversial so I want to highlight, don’t buy into that trendy slogan. The first food we recommend is not rice cereal. It’s not the perfect food. We recommend a slightly cooked egg yolk, not the white egg yolk with a little grated liver. It can be raw liver and a pinch of salt. There’s another myth that babies should not have salt, and we disagree with that. Sally is very expert on the topic of salt. Let me suffice it to say that it doesn’t have to be the egg yolk, liver, and salt, but that is one of the first foods we recommend.

If you are interested in all the different foods we would recommend, Nourishing Our Children has a whole resource list for babies’ first solid foods with lots of guides around that. Anything that will nourish your child, some children don’t do well with the egg yolk. They vomit it. We encourage them to try something else. Bone marrow is a popular first food. Avocado. Sally is big into pure purees and not doing the Baby-Led Weaning trend.

What I was going to say is that this canned baby food on the grocery store shelf, it’s a little bit like the kids’ menu. It’s like something we came up with, but traditional cultures didn’t have baby food in little jars with a cute baby picture on it. They had the food that they were eating that they shared with the child at the right time. Part of this may be intuitive and returning to nutrient-dense foods as Sandrine is alluding. What I did want to ask you, Sally, about now is raw milk. This is another controversy. We are not afraid of controversy here at the Weston A. Price Foundation. It’s a controversial topic. Is raw milk safe? Is it safe for pregnant women and even babies and children?

If you are against raw milk, you are against breastfeeding. Breast milk is raw milk. Raw milk is very safe. We like raw milk to come from very clean dairies, but even raw milk from dairies that aren’t as clean as we’d like has nourished populations all over the world. The two foods that we consider dangerous are soft cheeses, whether raw or pasteurized, and luncheon meats are the most common source of listeria. Listeria is the bad actor among these microorganisms and can cause miscarriage.

Raw milk is a wonderful food for pregnant women and growing children. After you wean the child, they should go on to raw milk. I do want to say something about our weaning food boots. What do traditional people do? Some of them wean as early as 1 month, but none of them go past 6 months. You are going to end up with a baby who’s anemic if you think you should be exclusively breastfeeding for a year.

Why do we recommend egg yolks and liver as babies’ first foods? While these are extremely nutrient-dense foods and also are the best sources of cholesterol, babies cannot make cholesterol. Adults make their cholesterol, but babies can’t make this. They need cholesterol for everything. They make hormones out of cholesterol and babies make hormones that you need for their brains, for their gut formation, and everything. Mother’s milk is very high in cholesterol and contains special enzymes to ensure 100% assimilation of that cholesterol.

One of our big concerns about baby formula is that it contains no cholesterol. If you buy milk replacer for calves, the third ingredient is animal fat, number three. They know that these animals will not grow properly, and they will die if they don’t have animal fat, which is our source of cholesterol. What’s in the human formula? It’s skim milk and vegetable oils. There’s no animal fat in the formula.

If I were president or king, I would make that a requirement like you have a requirement for ice cream. If it says ice cream on the label, it has to contain 10% butter fat. If it says baby formula for human babies, it should be made with whole milk, and that should be an absolute requirement of formula makers, and we have a precedent to do it. Do you know why they don’t do it? It’s because they have figured out that if they put that butterfat in ice cream, they can make 5 to 10 times more for it than if they leave it in the milk for growing children.

Have you noticed this as a theme that profit is chosen over people’s health time and time again?

Our nutrition policy for our children is not based on science. It’s determined by accountants, and we should be on our knees in sackcloth and ashes that we have allowed this to happen to our culture.

Pam, do you want to add something?

A little anecdotal story from one of my patients. I was working with an Asian Indian woman, and she had a six-month-old baby. She had come to me because she had intrauterine growth restriction with him. We had worked it out and he wasn’t growing well initially with the breast milk she was providing. Then we changed some of the things in her diet, notably, adding eggs and more full-fat dairy, which is Indian, she was a vegetarian, so she wasn’t going to eat any of those other foods, but I did have her get cod liver oil. She was able to do that. Her baby started growing much better. It changed the trajectory of his growth curve.

Now he’s six months old and she’s telling me she wants to get pregnant again, but anyway, she’s telling me what they are starting to feed him. She goes, “I have been doing fruits and vegetables.” I said, “It’s important that you make sure you get him some egg yolks. Those fruits and vegetables, I want you to put some ghee in that.” She’s going, “That’s interesting. In India, there’s one thing they tell you about feeding a baby.” I said, “What’s that?” She goes, “Plenty of ghee.” Ghee is high in cholesterol, and many other fat-soluble vitamins too. Zen can address the baby food that’s out there. It is so bad.

Fruits, which is naked sugar and it’s in either aluminum or plastic. It doesn’t provide enough calories for the babies. They give them fruits and vegetables and I say, “What were you told to eat if you wanted to lose weight?” Fruits and vegetables. That’s not what we want for babies in the amounts that they are being recommended. Certainly, you want to introduce them, but you want those fats and the healthy protein foods that we were talking about that include all the organ meats and the eggs.

Zen, do you want to speak to this too?

I’d like to address the baby food. A very good point about them being pretty on the shelf. Again, convenience. For moms, we want convenience. We like to look at the shelf. “That’s great for babies.” We are not thinking about feeding babies what we are eating, which makes more sense. In India, they give the babies ghee or curry. Most Americans wouldn’t think of giving our babies curry because we don’t eat curry as much, but in other places or other countries, they do. They feed the babies what they eat.

The baby food has been tested by Healthy Babies Bright Futures, and they found levels of heavy metals in those packaged baby food containers, especially the ones in aluminum to be high in heavy metals. Unfortunately, organic baby foods had some of the highest levels of heavy metals. This is packaged baby food. This is because organic farmers cannot use chemical fertilizers. They have to use manure, and it often comes from confined animal feeding operations where the animals are eating GMO grains, sprayed with glyphosates, and pesticides, which have heavy metals in them.

Oftentimes the organic, especially the sweet potatoes, which are in the ground absorbing heavy metals, had the highest levels of heavy metals. Also the baby rice foods. Where do we get this idea that we have to give babies rice food? That’s high in arsenic. Any of the canned baby foods that had cinnamon in them, any apple sauce, any type of other Turkey dinner that would contain a little bit of cinnamon in it. The cinnamon had very high levels of heavy metals. I would avoid anything with rice, root vegetables, or cinnamon. If you were purchasing baby food. Much prefer you make your own and boil, mash it, or whatever it is, and put it in ice cube trays. I know that’s plastic, but you are doing it for a very short period of time and then you carry around those little cubes.

I want to add that when we are feeding babies food out of pouches or jars, that’s a sterile experience for them. Going back to the importance of the sensorial experience of them being able to see the food, smell the food, our digestion begins in our brain, and it’s the same for babies. They need to be able to see the food, they need to be able to touch it, and when we are feeding it from a pouch, they have no idea what it is that they are eating. We are feeding them pouches and baby food, and then all of a sudden we introduce solids-like food in bigger pieces. How does that make any sense? We should be feeding them regular food from the beginning, not baby food from jars and pouches.

Sally, do you want to add something?

I want to say something about this book, Baby-Led Weaning. It’s a book that should be burned. It is about the most horrible book I have ever read. It’s giving moms the excuse to be lazy and saying, “You don’t have to make purees,” and babies don’t have teeth. They can’t chew, and yet you are giving them pieces of lettuce or grapey hunks of meat. I can’t eat a big hunk of meat. This is a horrible book, and that’s where they came up with the phrase, “Foods before one are just for fun.” Foods before one are the most important foods that you are going to give your baby for life.

I did write some scathing blogs on this all bringing up baby. We put those blogs in the journal. On my website, I have a cute video of a baby being fed pureed liver. One of the things you do, when you are feeding this baby and the baby, ‘s laughing and he’s clowning around. He loves this liver, but when you put the food on the tray for him, not only can he not chew it, but he’s alone with that food. When you are feeding the puree you’ve made for your baby, you are engaging with him. You are smiling and laughing. Isn’t this funny? It’s a wonderful happy time for the baby.

We are going to go down the line. Let’s have Zen go next. This is going to replace one of the other questions I had planned, and then we are going to do a lightning round. Please, Zen. Add your two cents.

One more thing about baby formula. A lot of women supplement with baby formula because they think they are not giving their babies enough, and if you look at the size of a baby’s stomach, it’s very small. We are being brainwashed to think that we need to give our babies baby formula and we don’t. It’s like the size of a cherry when they are a newborn and an egg when they are a month old. Please don’t think that your baby’s not getting enough food, and you need to give formula because if you do give formula and you look at the formula testing that’s on Moms Across America or GMOScience, you will see that 100% of the 40 babies formulas that we tested had contained aluminum and lead.

Eighty percent of them contained lead which was higher than what the FDA allows in drinking water. There were some that contained all five of the heavy metals that we tested for, and a goat’s milk baby formula contained 41,000 parts per billion of aluminum. There are some very concerning levels of heavy metals in baby formula, and if you can all avoid baby formula, I would highly recommend that.

I wanted to say that we put an emphasis on animal foods rather than plant foods. It’s okay if your children don’t enjoy vegetables. I want to make that point because plant foods are not as nutrient-dense as animal foods. It’s a matter of fact, and you want to focus on nutrient density as they are developing. If they don’t want the broccoli, don’t serve it to them. It’s no problem.

Dr. Cowan will say, “Let the cow eat the plants and then give the products from the cow,” the meat, the milk, the yogurt, and the butter. Don’t have any fights with your children over vegetables. Skip
It.

Some people say, “Let the cow eat the plants so we don’t have to.” Christine, you go.

I agree with Sally on the Baby-Led Weaning book being a pretty bad book for advice as far as feeding babies. One of the things that Sally talks about is liver, and liver is one of those foods that is pretty difficult to eat unless it’s for a young baby unless it’s in pate form, or sprinkled on top of the egg yolk, those kinds of things.

There are other very nutrient-dense foods that are difficult to feed to a baby. For example, bone marrow, broth, and ferments. The part of the Baby-Led Weaning that could be beneficial is the connection piece between the caregiver and the child. Babies, we want to establish that relationship and that feeding relationship with them from infancy, from the time that they come out.

There’s this belief that babies don’t need to be at the table when we are eating, that the family eats and then you feed the baby by themselves. That’s not ideal at all because babies are watching us eat every single time we sit down and eat. Even if your baby is a month old or two months old, include them in family meals because they are observing. They are watching you bring the fork to your mouth. If you’ve ever seen a baby between 4 and 6 months old, it’s the cutest thing. They are starting to open their mouths. They want to see how you are eating. They want to bite that. They are so curious.

Even if your baby is a month old or two months old, include them in family meals because they’re observing. They’re watching you bring the fork to your mouth.

That relationship aspect is important. I’m also a big fan of the oral motor development aspect and that’s why I think that as babies get older, it’s okay to give them a little bit of food from your plate so that they can practice picking things up. Fish eggs are wonderful around the 9 to 10-month age range where they can practice fine motor skills, the dexterity. They can practice picking up the fish eggs and popping them into their mouth.

Pam.

I would like to add that we should not rely on the use of orange vegetables to supply our children with vitamin A. Despite what the United States government believes they want 2-year-olds and up to consume 5.5 cups of orange vegetables a week to meet their vitamin A requirements. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a child that young meet that much, and that wouldn’t even matter because they are very poor converters of two vitamin A from Betacarotene at that young age.

Sweet potatoes are a very common food that young mothers or parents will feed their children because it’s mashed up. There was an advisory against root vegetables because of the contaminants in the soil. We have already heard that. I want people to understand that they need the liver, egg yolks, and cod liver oil for the real vitamin A.

Before we hit the lightning round, there are going to be two questions in the lightning round. I want to emphasize that I have interviewed Pam on an episode called Vitamin A and Fertility, so you might want to check that out and share that with a friend. Each of these panelists has been on the show, so you can find more resources from each of them.

Sally and I did a whole episode on homemade baby formula. If you do feel like, “I don’t have enough milk. This is an issue for me.” There are alternatives to the commercial formula sold in supermarkets. My first question that’s going to be lightning round for you guys is many people here have older kids too. What do you do? How do you manage it as they grow up and get outside of your control? They are on the soccer team. They are exposed to Takis or they are going to a birthday party and there’s cake. We don’t always have control over the choices that the kids have. How do you influence them as they get influenced by their peers? Let’s start with you, Pam, and then we’ll take it down the road.

Managing Children’s Diets As They Grow

I had that problem with my children and we were always looked at as a weird family. When people were eating the candy between the breaks and the games and things like that. I would bring them some milk smoothies and things like that. It was interesting though, and I don’t know if this is going to help people, but while the parents were looking at me making comments, some of my children’s friends were, “Mrs. Schoenfeld, this is good.” I think the kids want this. It’s the parents that don’t necessarily want to make an effort and it’s too much work to do it. Do the work and whether the children eat it all the time, you can’t control that but know that you are doing the best for them.

If most of the time they are eating the nourishing food you are providing even their friends will see it. They might even say things like, “I like this.” Stick with it. It might be the wrong thing to say, but I never felt like I was going to control every meal of my children’s diet because I knew that would be something that they would probably reject. I let them make some of their own choices, and generally, everything turned out okay but that’s my way of doing it.

Christine.

I think that there’s something as a family unit that we all need to establish, which is something called your family food values. That’s where you decide as your own family, what are your food values, and you set those boundaries and you stick with them. Sometimes in this modern society, parents don’t have the guts to say no and to be firm in the boundaries. That’s the first thing that I want to say about that, and then the other is to invite them over.

Invite all the friends over and you be the one that feeds them. I can’t tell you how many times I have invited kids over whose parents have told me they don’t eat anything. They are super picky, and then I feed them and they eat two plates of food that I have offered and they love what I’m serving. I think it’s because they are hungry and they are not served nourishing foods at home and it tastes good. Feed your kids and friends. Be that house that everyone wants to go over to and be firm in your boundaries and don’t be afraid to set them.

Sandrine.

I didn’t have children of my own, but I partnered with a man who I’m with now who had a fifteen-year-old son when we started dating he was eating Top Ramen from containers and we did a swap. We made the Top Ramen with real bone broth and good ingredients, real noodles, and sourdough noodles. He loved it. We simply took all the foods that he was attached to and swapped them, and then that’s what we served when his friends did come over.

We invited friends. We made our pizza. He had homemade ice cream. It was very seamless. Now this is a nineteen-year-old boy who works at a co-op. He didn’t want to work anywhere where they served seed oils. He started as a dishwasher but didn’t want to be in any place where seed oils were served. On his first paycheck, a nineteen-year-old boy bought organic cotton underwear and organic cotton sheets for his bed.

That sounds like a win. Beautiful. Zen.

My eldest son was about nine years old, he was getting rashes. You guys have probably seen these on kids’ mouths. Around their mouth red and swollen and lips cracking and breaking. On and off for seven months. They would last for two weeks at a time. You’d have to go to school like that. He looked at me one day, after about seven months of this and he said, “I wish all my allergies would go away.” It was sad, and I said, “Me too.”

I realized though in my head that my voice was saying, “That’s never going to happen,” because the doctors had told me that would only get worse. I realized, “That’s a very disempowering voice. That’s not what I’m committed to. I’m committed to being courageous, creative, and a contribution.” I realized that my cousin Sarah had gone gluten-free for a year and she was able to restore her gut microbiome enough to be able to eat a slice of pizza now and then, or a piece of wedding cake.

I reminded my son of this and I said, “Would you like to one day be able to eat a slice of pizza at a birthday party?” His eyes got big and he said yes because that was not the case at the time. We were celebrating Johnny. Not his cake. We were bringing all our food to birthday parties. I said, “Would you be my partner in your health? Would you drink green drinks, try acupuncture, eat whatever it takes, do whatever it takes.” He thought about it seriously and he said yes. I put out my hand and I said, “I promise you, you are going to get better.”

I didn’t know how that was going to happen, but I knew if I made a promise and I had his agreement and partnership, there would be progress. He would get better, and he did. We also watched movies and GMO OMG. We watched Genetic Roulette. He educated himself.

I supported him in getting educated, and within four months, the rashes and all that, going non-GMO got dramatically better after we went completely organic a year later because his brother had autism symptoms and we went completely 100%. His allergies went from 19 down to 0.2. He no longer has life-threatening allergies.

My kids had the twenty different food allergies they had before they could eat eggs and even nuts. He tries to avoid it because he feels a little uncomfortable, but he won’t die from nuts anymore. He will not die from food, and he made those choices himself because we created a partnership and I stepped up. I had in my brain, that would eat birdseed with this kid if I had to. It was like, “Enough is enough.”

It’s the mindset. “Have you had enough with the way it’s been before? Are you willing to educate your children, and create a partnership with them?” Sometimes let them go make their own choice. Sometimes they have to eat that food and learn that they don’t feel good. My second son had to do that with school lunches. He had to learn that he had consequences on Friday, and when he had the school lunches a treat. He got in fights with his brother and he lost Saturday morning cartoon privileges. That had to happen about four times before he realized that, and then he chose not to eat school lunches anymore. Allowing your children to be aware of the ramifications themselves is also very important.

Healing is possible. I love that idea of partnering. Thank you so, Zen. Sally.

I had a family of 4 very boisterous children, 3 boys. I was highly criticized by the parents at the school because they thought my children were wild. As an example, my son and one of his friends liked to go out at 3:00 in the morning and shoot rats behind McDonald’s with BB guns. Great experiences in life, but they had to have dinner at home. They always had breakfast that I made and there were no excuses. You had to have dinner at home if you wanted to go out and shoot rats, that was fine, but you had to have dinner at home.

I agree that their friends love to come to our house and they eat everything. You can’t say no to everything. You have to decide what you are going to require and then what you are going to allow. We required that they had to do their homework, they had to do their chores and they had to eat the meals and then they could do whatever they wanted.

That family food values. We are going to go down the line and I want one-sentence answers. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health or their family’s health, what would you recommend that they do? We’ll start with you, Sally.

Key Takeaways For Family Health

I’d start with a good breakfast and that’s no cereal, no garbage. Eggs, bacon, or soaked oatmeal, and it can be good. You can have sourdough pancakes, but I would always make sure they eat a good breakfast.

Zen.

I need to follow up. My son chose not to eat the pizza at the birthday party a year later. He doesn’t eat that stuff. He only eats organic. I would first switch your grains, particularly your chickpeas. If you are ever going to eat hummus, it has to be organic. I would make it yourself at home if we canned chickpeas. That’s the only way that we found no glyphosate. It was canned chickpeas. Everything else, even the organic and store-bought hummus had very high levels of glyphosate. Also oatmeal has to be organic. Very high levels of glyphosate because they spray it on grains as a drying agent. It’s not used on GMOs. I would switch out all your grains to organic to avoid the highest levels of glyphosate.

Sandrine.

I would say avoid seed oils, canola, soy, corn, sunflower. Avoid seed oils. That is the number one thing you can do to improve your health.

Christine.

Eat butter instead. I completely agree with all of them that food matters, and I also think relationships matter. Your relationship with your children is so incredibly important so cultivate that.

Pam.

Find a way to include liver at least once a week in your diet or daily if you are going to do it in the capsules. Try to eat eggs every day if you can tolerate them unless you have an allergy.

On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thank you so much for your time. We are thankful for you.

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Our guests were the panelists at the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando, Florida. Zen Honeycutt, Sally Fallon Morell, Christine Muldoon, Sandrine Perez, and Pam Schoenfeld, and their websites are, respectively, Zen Honeycutt at Moms Across America, Sally Fallon Morell at Nourishing Traditions, Christine Muldoon at Nourish the Littles, Sandrine Perez at Nourishing Our Children, and Pam Schoenfeld at Women and Family Nutrition. I am Hilda Labrada Gore of the Westin A Price Foundation. You can find me at Holistic Hilda.

For a review from Apple Podcast. Aunt May said, “I love this show. I have read for years and it gets better every year.” Aunt May thank you for your review. There are also reviews that are not so positive, but whether you love the show or hate it, tell the world what you think. Go to Apple Podcasts, and click on ratings and reviews. Give us as many stars as you like, or as few as you’d like, and let the world know exactly what’s on your mind related to the show. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.