Aversions and Gerber- and how they’re related
I really got thinking over the last few days what I was going to talk about in this week’s post and decided on a subject near and dear to my heart, the nourishment and health of our young ones- which ties into how I eat. And then as I was drinking sauerkraut juice straight from the jar, it occurred to me- children don’t eat for health. They will eat it if they LIKE it.
Let me back up, and I’ll explain the sauerkraut jar, I promise. I had a massive A-Ha moment this week which led me to don the ‘ol conspiracy foil hat once more, but don it I will, and proudly at that.
I spent time in my 20’s working at a pediatric behavioral therapy clinic, and part of what we saw children for was food aversions. This is not an uncommon thing in this day and age. Children will always go through phases where they don’t like something, sure, but it’s far more common these days to see children as a whole just flat-out refuse to eat food that isn’t what is within the wheelhouse of what they like. In fact, I don’t think I’ve encountered a single child in the last decade who will just eat whatever you put in front of them- other than my own. So while I was putting a round of pot roast and veggie jars into the pressure canner this morning, I started wondering to myself why my child is different (beyond the obvious, she’s the best child because she’s mine, I am clearly not biased and I will take no questions at this time.) After turning it around in my noggin, I finally came up with a few potential, plausible reasons as to why my kiddo never seemed to be a picky eater.
We were very poor when she was a young toddler. If she wanted something else, there wasn’t anything else. She had to eat what we gave her.
Along the lines of #1, there was no “kid” food at our house. She ate what the grown-ups ate. It wasn’t like I was making myself Julia Child’s Beef Bourgnignon and nuking my kiddo some chicken nuggets in the microwave in the same evening. Occasionally she’d get mac and cheese with peas in it. That was about as much “kid” food as she got, and those nights were rare.
I made all of her baby food from scratch. Why? See #1 again, we were extremely poor. Two carrots and a sweet potato cost about three dollars back then. Two carrots and a sweet potato makes about 10 meals I could stash in the freezer, rather than spending $2 per Gerber jar. It was simply more cost efficient for me to use the steamer/puree machine I had been given as a gift, rather than cough up $200 per month on Gerber jars.
As I was thinking about this, the A-Ha moment popped into my brain. If you were the FDA and in bed with Big Pharma (which I believe I have already proven is true), and you wanted to make people as unhealthy as possible, how would you do it? Simple- you’d go after the children. You’d process a vegetable until there was almost no nutrients left in it, boil it to death, strain it, make it bland, tasteless, or even worse- disgusting, and then sell it for $2 per jar to parents who don’t know any better (and I am certainly not blaming you, folks, I didn’t know better either back then). Those parents turn around and forcefeed their baby this nutrient-less concoction, and as they grow into toddlerhood, they are told they must eat this food because it is healthy for them. Now take the average four year old who has just learned the word “No” and loves to use it at every opportunity. As soon as they figure out they have free will, there is NO WAY they are voluntarily shoveling that processed, puree’d nasty business into their faces. They have now made the connection that healthy = gross and they refuse it. Now you have a five year old who refuses to eat any vegetable at all, ever.
I babysat the children of a former boss of mine while he and his wife took a trip to Italy- which was really fun, honestly. They’re great kids. It was a week-long trip, and it was sometimes a little hard to feed them because they didn’t like hardly anything healthy. They got breakfast egg sandwiches (minus the one who wouldn’t eat eggs), they got fresh fruit, they happily slurped up yogurt. For dinner, chili was a hit, and so was spaghetti, but if I put a salad in front of them they would have looked at me like I had a whale tapdancing on my nose. I’ll just let you sit with that visual for a moment, and on we go.
The point is, feeding our children is so much harder these days because we have placed our trust in the hands of corporations who are paid bribes to make sure your children end up with six different prescribed medications by age 18. This is the real problem- that we have trusted these corporations, who have sneakily over the past 50 years slowly changed the ingredients in the food we eat. Which is why I contort myself into knots to home cook or home bake literally everything. This is how I taught myself how to make my husband imitation Cheez-Its from scratch. And before anyone gets indignant, I am very well aware that having the time to make everything from scratch is a luxury I have that many do not have. My husband and I live very simply so that I am afforded the ability to pressure can/make fruit leather/meal prep all day. If you do work, there’s still a lot you can do on weekends to make your weekday life easier- it’s all about choices. There is no judgment being passed- I’m simply making people aware that if they outsource their cooking, chances are they’re consuming things that are designed to make them sicker in the long run- important information that many people simply don’t know unless they’ve dived into as many rabbit holes as I have.
Wonder Bread is a great example of this horror. I’m sure most of us ate Wonder Bread as a child, back when it wasn’t, y’know, pure poison.
It’s the slowly boiling frog phenomenon. If you just toss a bunch of frogs into a boiling water pot, they jump out. But put them in nice, cool water, then turn it up a single degree every hour, and they’re boiling before they know to jump out, because they acclimate. This is what’s been done to us. We have been engineered to believe that obesity is now normal. That gut issues are just a thing that happen to most people. That allergies are just genetic, and that food aversions are just kids acting up, or a symptom of the spectrum. We have been led to believe in the modern age that sickness is health and health is sickness, and there is no greater example of this than how I was told to my face that I looked anorexic a couple of weeks ago, which was completely wild to me, because 5’9 and 145 lbs is nowhere near anorexic. Anorexic was when I was about 120 lbs in late January of 2021, around the time of The Souffle Incident (which I’ll circle back around to) but needless to say, I didn’t eat for almost two solid months and size 4 clothes were hanging off of me back then. I was positively skeletal. THAT was anorexic. Not the way I am now- a muscular woman at age 40 who has hacked her brain to burn fat for fuel. And for the record, anyone can do this. It doesn’t make sense to most people that I mainline full-fat cheeses, fatty steaks, heavy cream, and tons of butter, and look the way I do, but I think this is the way our bodies were intended to work, and I stand by that statement, because I’m in better health at age 40 than I was at age 25. (and for the record, I am not bulemic, either, just in case someone thinks they are calling a bluff)
Now- we get back to the trusty sauerkraut jar I was drinking out of a couple of days ago. As I was sipping the fermented, salty, briny liquid, I realized that I eat for nourishment and not for dopamine hits anymore. When you eat for dopamine hits, you are eating what makes your mouth happy, but not what makes your body happy. A chocolate malt milkshake probably tastes amazing, but enough of those and now you’re injecting insulin 3x per day. We can’t eat for what makes our mouths happy, our mouths are, quite frankly, idiots. *To be fair, the fatty steaks and butter -do- taste good, I’d be a liar if I said otherwise, but I’m also the person doing ginger, tumeric, lemon and cayenne pepper shots at 4:30am some mornings (which is exceptionally good for you, by the way. Capsaicin is incredibly good for circulation, ginger is great for the tummy, tumeric boosts your immune system, and the lemon helps you detox). At some point along my journey to health, I discovered that sometimes you have to eat stuff that definitely doesn’t taste good in order to nourish your body, because our food is currently stripped of those nutrients you need. I eat all sorts of strange food combinations that most people would think is bizarrely weird- zucchini and kale in my scrambled eggs, wheatgrass shots, dandelion greens in my tea, etc. There’s in fact a lot of very healthy things for me that I straight choke down because I know it’s good for me- like those lemon, ginger, cayenne shots.
Aversions aren’t just food related, by the way. Did you know that temperature therapy is a thing? As in, both heat and cold are things you can use to build mental resilience and boost your health. I give you two amazing examples- extreme cold and extreme heat.
First- cold plunges. Sitting yourself into an ice bath builds neuroplasticity (IE mental flexibility), trains your cells to adapt better to stress, improves autophagic function (the way your cells release waste) as well as extends cellular longevity and even prevents disease! A study from the University of Ottowa states the following:
Second- heat therapy. This one blew my mind, because I am well-acquainted with several people who can’t stand the heat- at all. It’s very uncomfortable for them. But a study out of Finland just proved that frequent usage of a very hot sauna reduced all-cause mortality by 40%. FORTY. PERCENT. You are literally 40% less likely to get a medical condition that can kill you just by forcing yourself to sweat in a sauna regularly! My husband is half Norwegian, and his genetic lineage says the following: Frolic in the snow all day, then sweat nearly to death right after. My husband is a huge sauna enjoyer.
Ice baths and sauna sessions are now something I have incorporated into my semi-regular routines. Okay, I have done them… a few times. Full disclosure, ice baths are not fun. Trust me, the first time you slide your body into your bathtub full of cold water with a bag of ice emptied into it, all you can think of is Jack hanging off the door and freezing to death at the end of Titanic, and every molecule in your body rebels, particularly when you plunge your head under. I swear, my life flashed before my eyes the first time I did that. It is freaking awful to do ice baths.
But you know what happens afterwards? You get out after 3-5 minutes, you warm up, and something in your brain changes. You literally feel invincible, like you could lift a car over your head.
Little wonder that ice baths have been connected with improvement of severe mental illness. There are tons of studies on this.
We have been unfortunately exposed to the idea that if something is uncomfortable for us, it equals bad, when just the opposite is true. If you do the things you do not like to do but choose to do because you know they are healthy for you, then you will live a longer, happier, mentally-stable life. For me personally, it’s running- I don’t like it but I do it regularly because I know it’s good for me, which is part of the reason I am so slim- because I exercise at least an hour per week, usually two or three 20-25 min sessions. It’s the very act of mentally pushing ourselves through those uncomfortable feelings that makes us grow and builds mental resilience- which is part of the reason why people in my life say I’m so strong. This didn’t happen by accident, this happened over a lifetime of pushing myself mentally through difficult or uncomfortable circumstances and not sitting down and giving up, or refusing to see it through. Those who never encounter any hardships will stagnate- which is why I have learned to be grateful for the things in my life that I dislike, because they make me better in the end. The people who grow are those who look at their discomforts and dislikes and dive into them anyway, cheerfully. In other words: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Which is an impossible concept to explain to an 8 year old who is crying into his broccoli.
I, however, have found some clever ways around this for children. I say it’s not lying if you simply don’t give them the whole truth, which might be sometimes needed if you’re dealing with a particularly food-adverse child. God would forgive you.
For example- Does your kiddo like chocolate milkshakes? Great!
…You don’t have to tell them that a scoop of this is in said milkshake, and they’ll never taste it over the ice cream. (This is found on vitacost.com and is well worth the money)
I mean, check out the health benefits of this stuff. I can’t count how many containers of this choco greens mix I’ve gone through. You put a scoop or two of that goodness in a blender with some full-fat yogurt and coconut milk, and it’s Heaven on Earth.
Does your kiddo enjoy hash browns? WHO DOESN’T, am I right? Allow me to give you the recipe I snuck into the kids I babysat, and they never knew they were eating veggies.
ZUCCHINI HASH BROWN CAKES
1 package of Simply Potatoes (or appx 4 peeled and grated russet potatoes, soaking in water)
2 small or 1 large zucchini, peeled
2 eggs
2 tbsp flour
Seasonings to taste- I like salt, pepper, garlic salt, and a little parsley
Drain your potatoes or empty your package of Simply Potato shreds into a bowl- wring potatoes out in a cheesecloth or paper towels if they were freshly grated and soaking. Take your zucchini that’s been peeled, and grate it on your cheese grater into the potatoes. (without the peel, they’re almost the same color as the potatoes, hahaha) Add your eggs and mix, then add the flour and stir in until the mix looks a little gummy and sticky. Too much flour and it gets stiff, not enough and it’s too slimy to hold shape into a round ball. Add your seasonings- not too much salt, but keep in mind they can hold a lot of salt. I can’t say how much salt to add because that’s taste preference.
Heat a pan with your preferred grease on the stove (I prefer beef tallow these days because it has a high smoke point and isn’t a seed oil, coconut oil will also work great) with the grease about 1/4 in deep across the flat pan. Take a big spoonful scoop of your mix in a large spoon, place it down into the hot oil, and then press on the back of the ball with the rounded edge of your spoon until it’s flattened out. You’ll have about a 3 inch diameter pancake. Let it fry for a few minutes until you just see the edges start to turn brown, then flip, carefully (I’ve burned myself with hot grease on these puppies a number of times). When the second side is golden brown, remove onto a plate with paper towels to drain, and sprinkle a little salt on top to finish if you wish. Add a little more oil if you need between batches, they soak up a lot.
This recipe makes a LOT of hash brown cakes- you can halve the recipe easily. Fair warning, the mix doesn’t keep well. I’ve tried.
A couple of these bad boys with a squirt of ketchup will get some veggies into your unsuspecting child and they’ll never know. They were a hit with children who “didn’t like veggies.”
To end this post- The Souffle Incident.
Between Nov 2020 and Mar 2021 was the worst of my traumatic brain injury. I spent about two months not really eating much at all, and in late Jan of 2021, I was actually anorexic-looking, my family can attest. I was a skeleton. Well, considering that food is probably my most accomplished gift (after music, I mean, do something since you’re 2 years old and you’ll always be a pro) I decided one evening after being suicidal for a week that if I couldn’t make a dessert souffle that held on the first try (something notoriously hard for an accomplished, well-fed and well-rested chef to do on a GOOD DAY) that I’d just fling myself off a roof and end it all. Yeah, irrational. True, regardless.
So I watched Gordon Ramsay’s Raspberry Souffle tutorial, and I whipped my egg whites by hand (yes, while skeletal). I put those souffle’s into ramekins, they baked, and when I pulled them out of the oven, they held without collapsing.
And I ate one. And it was delicious.
And then I started eating again.
I probably will never meet you, Mr. Ramsay, but you should know, your raspberry souffle tutorial saved a life. And God sometimes works in tiny miracles like that- reinforcing the structural integrity of a souffle made by a crazed, exhausted, terrified, unwell woman with shaky hands. Praise Him for that.
And now, at 8am, after having choked down my cayenne, lemon, ginger and tumeric shot three hours ago, I will voluntarily go for a run- something I very much dislike but choose to do anyway, because our bodies are the temple where God dwells, per 1 Corinthians 3:16. If we assume that is true, why would we allow it to fall into disrepair? I believe we have an obligation to be in as good of health as possible- to glorify the One who created the temple I get to drive around in this life. And I have to say, I got a pretty good one. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
Next week’s post- The Carnivore Diet and why it’s curing incurable illnesses, with Harvard research to back it up.