Guest authors for this post are nationally recognized experts on children’s health, Laura A. Jana, MD, FAAP and Jennifer Shu, MD, FAAP. Both are pediatricians, parents, and award-winning authors whose most recent book is Food Fights: Winning the Nutritional Challenges of Parenthood Armed with Insight, Humor and a Bottle of Ketchup (American Academy of Pediatrics, Oct. 2007). Menu recipes are my own.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, many families celebrate by having green food. While it may be tempting to artificially color your way to a green St. Paddy’s day dinner, health-conscious parents can achieve a better result by choosing locally grown green herbs and produce and throwing them into the mix.

(Tips and recipes in the rest of the post).

Cross posted at The Expatriate's Kitchen

I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food. About fifty pages in, I got a jolt to the memory. Have you ever stumbled onto an old to-do list and found a couple important things you still hadn't done? Just like that.

The first section of the book describes nutritionism, the blend of science and food industry efforts that have gotten us lost as eaters. The primary example he was using to explain this theory was the rise and fall of trans-fats and the resulting "low fat" diet era.

Here's your Happy Meal, you want lies with that? Of all the fast food marketing tactics, in-school advertising to grade school and younger is probably the lowest of the low.

So, when McDonald's puts a "free happy meal reward" on the cover of REPORT CARDS specifically mentioning cheeseburgers and McNuggets, AFTER they have promised publicly (and gotten good PR out of it) to stop advertising these foods to this age group and in schools ... how can they justify it?

Easy, they say, it's NOT marketing. Yet the copy on the report card cover reads "Reward yourself with a Happy Meal from McDonald's!" Sure sounds like an ad to me.

Read more about this here, here and here.
Or, just write McDonald's with your thoughts.

Here's a bit of irony. I found this great site when I was reading the Web Blog awards for best parenting sites. And this is, really, you all have been incredible. Specially Rachel, rock star and cheerleader.

Now, I am up for a Web Blog Award as a finalist for Best Food Site. I found out by accident when I went to vote for another finalist. I am giddy, 'cause I had no idea. Thanks to all of you who voted for me early on to get me this far. Voting is once a day through November 9, but I am happy to be in the top ten with some fine company. Thanks!

Most of us have complaints about our kid's school menus. Let's see how ugly it is and how good the exceptions are. For the bad, tell us what needs to change and post an image of the menu. For the good, how did the change come about? What did the school do to make this possible and what can we other parents learn from the experience to send to OUR schools. I want to gather a list of the stories, create one huge post and then send a link to what works to my kid's school. You can send a link to your kid's school. Just let them know you want better options and you know it is possible.

Send it to parents in your school district. Use it as a talking point. Whatever.

Here's how:

1. Post an image or text of the current menu along with why/how it is good or bad.

2. Go to this post.

3. Leave me a comment with the link and I will gather all the links into one big post in a month from now. We can all see what shows up. Hopefully some good lessons.

Maybe you don't know. Maybe you just don't want to know. But when you pull up to the drive-thru to get your breakfast in a hurry, that is not just an egg on your biscuit. It's actually eggs and:

"food starch-modified, soybean oil, natural flavors (botanical source), sodium acid pyrophosphate, carrageenan gum, flavor enhancer [salt, maltodextrin, natural flavor (plant source), spices, herb, turmeric (color)], monosodium phosphate, citric acid, soy lecithin. Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color)."

Mmmm. Yummy. What is all that stuff? Other than the recognizable egg and some very unhealthy hydrogenated oils, much of the other ingredients are food additives. Additives are chemical compounds that are used to enhance or preserve (enhance being a relative term) color, texture, flavor and shelf life of a manufactured food. Some additives are safe, at least as far as the FDA is concerned, in small quantities. However, there are many that I just don't think belong in food despite what the FDA says.

From the USDA and FDA sites, there has been a large recall of canned meat and dog food products due to contamination from botulism. Most of these are house brands like Piggly Wiggly and Kroger, so those of you in southern states will want to watch for this. The manufacturer is Castlebury, a division of Bumble Bee.

The unique thing about this recall is that it required both the FDA and USDA since some products contain meat and some do not. This exposes a rather strange gap in food safety where different agencies manage different foods, even when they are produced in the same facility.

A list of all the foods and dog foods follows.

Building a commitment to phsyical activity in your children.

In light of the current childhood obesity epidemic, it’s good to know that your active lifestyle provides a positive influence on your kids’ attitudes toward fitness. In fact, until recently, this kind of role modeling was thought to be the greatest influence on kids’ activity levels. Research published by R.J. Brustad in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport showed that your role modeling may not be as important as your beliefs, encouragement and support of your child’s activity.

A while back (while I was posting on nutrition topics) some of the comments veered into creative ways to use vegetables, including things like sweet potato pancakes and pumpkin waffles. I worked on a new vegetable "pancake" over the weekend and thought I would post it. It's a summer squash fritter that has red pepper, mild green chile, corn, onion and cilantro in it. The batter is a lightly sweet cornmeal that makes the veggies taste even better. Here it is ...

Here's a shock! I am a bit of a liberal. To say I am less than pleased with the Bush administration would be an understatement to say the least. I am also of the literary/writer mindset, so when I stumble across some writing that makes me say, "Hey, that's good" it makes my day.

I caught this guy's articles on a link sent by a friend who knows that I am most concerned about bees right now. But the other posts I have read from this writer have been fantastic as well. I want to share a thought-provoking, no-punches-pulled paragraph:

If you have seen the front page of most newspapers, then you know that the FDA was aware of the problems that led to the spinach and peanut butter for some time before the outbreaks.

In the case of the Salmonella in the peanut butter, the FDA knew of the issues as early as 2005. When FDA inspectors requested documents from the ConAgra plant, they were refused. The FDA inspector left and the issue was not followed up on.

So, what can we do about all this?

As I finished the book, Food Marketing to Children and Youth, the recommendations section largely dealt with the need for government regulations and national social marketing campaigns to help educate our children on nutrition and physical activity.

This is great, but I don't think we can wait for private industry to stop wanting to make more money from selling crap to all of us. I don’t think we can even afford to wait on the government to tell private industry not to make so much money off selling crap to our kids and us. Definitely not under the current administration.

So, since hell is not going to freeze over anytime soon, we have to worry about our kids in the meantime. These are my recommendations after spending a solid month plowing through all this research. Call it my Manifesto. Take it with a grain or two, or a shaker, of salt. Apply liberally, or create your own recipe for change.