Had sent an email to both kids a few days ago after someone forwarded me this article on healthy food vs. unhealthy food.
My mail to the kids with the subject "Why I don't want you to eat outside" :
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Dear (Jr. and LO),
please read this report.
outside food is not nutricious. lunchables, school lunches, packaged foods etc. are all bad.
http://cspinet.org/new/201303281.html
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Jr.'s reply :
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Not true! You can eat out once in a while but never always!
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Little One's reply :
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appa it is kind of good to eat bad food then your body will get energy.
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Obviously, they know everything and they also have an answer for everything.
We made the mistake of letting the kids pick what they want for snack time in school and that has slowly gone from granola bars and brownies to things called skinny cow, ding dongs (!?), Pirates booty !?
I am pretty much tired of fighting the system. My personal advertisement budget for health foods is not as good as these companies and I also don't have the equivalent time of a few hundred people marketing department.
No amount of effort in me packaging a banana or idly will appeal to these kids like the "ding dongs".
Jr. wanted popcorn. We have a popcorn maker at home. So I picked the bottle of popping corn the other day thinking "this is probably some genetically modfied stuff that will slowly turn into poison if left in her intestines.. but this is the best option in this aisle". She quickly insisted on putting that back and picking up the Orville Redenbacker Movie Theater butter flavored popcorn saying "Daddy, this one tastes good. I have had it in my friends place. We NEED this!"
That one had fat and sugar ratings (even if that was a conservative estimate to con consumers.. for who is to know if they are the real values given the type of money they spend to rig the system) were over the top. I had to fight to get plain corn to pop!
The only good thing that was done? Told her that if she takes the box of things called "skinny cow" which was clever advertising but creates a fat kid in all probability, she has to buy some fruit. So she picked not fresh fruit, but Dole's pre packaged fruit bits in guess what ? Sugar syrup!
As a dad I feel frustrated trying to mandate these things in the house. Pretty soon we will have to start showing them what happens to folks who eat too much sugar with gory pictures and videos.
We don't need North Korean nut jobs to threaten our country. We have our own guys who put these sugary processed foods on the shelves, threatening our very future. Our kids!