Christmas Donations (Yes, it's almost that time of year already!)

Fever Response

Fevers are a very tightly controlled immune response to a pathogen and serve to make the body less hospitable for unwelcome microbes.  This response is natural, effective and generally short-lived. 

When we suppress a fever we are not treating the illness, rather we are suppressing a critical immune response.  A higher temperature is not necessarily indicative of a more serious illness.  Focus not on what the thermometer reads but how you or your family may be presenting.  A low grade fever in a person who is in great pain and cannot take in fluids is much more concerning than a higher fever in a person who is resting comfortably.

It is a common fear that allowing the fever to continue unchecked, will result in an unregulated spike in temperature that will cause brain damage, hearing loss, and seizures.  The body has carefully regulated mechanisms that prevent infection-induced fever from reaching dangerous levels.  Only in cases of external causes like heatstroke or poisoning are the body’s control mechanisms likely to be overwhelmed or inoperative.

Tips for Helping Kids Eat Healthier– Even the Toughest Cases!

by Kelly Hayford, C.N.C. provided by the ICPA

Children’s bodies respond quickly to their diet one way or the other.  Feed them well and they’ll thrive.  Feed them poorly and they’ll nose dive.  The younger children are when they begin to eat harmful foods and miss out on the nourishing foods their body needs, the more likely they are to develop chronic disease in the future and at a younger age, whether they currently have symptoms or not.

Consequently, the best advice for helping children establish well-balanced eating habits is to start from the beginning by feeding them primarily, whole, fresh, natural foods (80-100%), minimal amounts of naturally processed foods (0-20%), and absolutely no junk foods or fake-food brands.  Keeping kids away from extreme tasting fake food is the only sure way to prevent them for developing a taste for it.  If it’s too late for that, as it is for most people today, systematically transition them off the undesirable foods and re-educate their wayward palates.

This is not as difficult as people sometimes think.  I have seen scores of parents transform their children’s dietary habits with little to no trouble.  And yes, all of them thought “not my kids!” at first, just as many of you may be thinking now.  Although some will fight and kick and scream initially, children learn, make changes, and adapt more easily than adults.  Once made aware of, and taken off the foods that are overriding their natural sensibilities, kids are often surprisingly more attuned to their innate desire for initiating and maintaining a nutritious diet. 

Make Eating for Health a Priority!

You must place the same importance on good nutrition in your household as you do on wearing seat belts in your car.  Seventy percent of deaths in America are due to chronic degenerative disease and the average American loses 15 years of their life to these largely preventable diseases.  So, statistically speaking allowing children to indulge in poor eating habits is even more dangerous than driving without their seat belts on.  As you do with seatbelts, make your words and actions convey the danger of poor nutrition and the value of good nutrition to your children.

Don’t rob your children of the opportunity to establish good eating habits that will serve them for a lifetime.  Developing self-care skills is a critical and sorely neglected part of their education.  You must rise to the occasion and make your responsibility bigger than your excuses.  Make use of the following practical tips to help:

Top Ten Tips for Helping Children Eat Better:

1. Have a heart-to-heart talk and let them participate in decision making before you begin.

2. Make small, incremental changes over time and establish them as  lifestyle habits.

3. Appeal to their interests when talking about the benefits of healthy eating—i.e. every child wants to be strong, healthy, fast, smart, nice looking etc.

4. Educate them about wise food choices.

5. Involve them in food preparation as much as possible, at as early an age as possible.

6. Be an example by Eating for Health as much as possible yourself!

7. Don’t keep temping junk food in the house.  Do keep plenty of healthy foods on hand!

8. Encourage other parents, teachers and family members to make healthy foods available at school and social functions.

9. Pack a bag with nutritious foods when going out to avoid resorting to convenient, albeit poor-quality food choices.

10. Implement the Five Bites, Five Times method described below.

Five Bites, Five Times!

A tried and true method of helping to train children’s and adult’s taste buds to like new, healthier foods, is to serve a food item on five different occasions and have them take five bites each time they have it.  Why?  Because the brain automatically repels unfamiliar tastes in the mouth as an innate defense mechanism  that helps prevent us from eating poison berries, for example.  Having at least five bites, five times, helps override this mechanism and develop tastes for healthier foods as they become  more familiar.  Explain this to your children and make a fun game out of seeing who likes what food the fastest. 

Children & Eating For Health by Kelly Hayford, C.N.C. provided by the ICPA

Factoid:  Researchers say that for the first time in a century, today’s children will have a shorter life expectancy that their parents.  - Texas Children’s Hospital Study

The food industry aims their heaviest marketing artillery at children, the most impressionable segment of our society, with the intention of creating lifelong consumers of their fake-food products.  And they’ve been very successful.  Diet-related health statistics that have emerged in recent decades for children are the scariest of all.

For the first time in history, conditions that were previously associated with aging are now showing up in children at younger and younger ages.  Major diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and even heart attacks have now reached unprecedented numbers among our youth.

As the stewards of this next generation we must do everything possible to turn this trend around and give our children every opportunity to live healthy lives.  We’re not only robbing them of their childhoods, but the quality of their adulthoods, and sometimes their very lives as well.

Despite the troubling predictions and burgeoning health crisis that is emerging, an abundant supply of soda and junk food continues to flow into the mouths of our youngsters.  One of the most alarming dispensaries of these anti-nutrients is in the very place children should be safest from manipulative marketing maneuvers– our public schools.

The good news is, you have complete control over what comes into your house and makes its way into your cupboards.  This is also where you have the most influence.  The more you clean up your own diet and restore your own health and energy, the more you’ll be an energetic dynamo and role model for helping your children.  You can also join with other concerned parents in speaking out at your children’s school and community activities.

Factoid:  At Texas Children’s Hospital, the percentage of children and adolescents diagnosed with type 2 diabetes increased from less than 1% twenty years ago to 27% in 2002.

Same Guidelines Apply

When considering what to feed your children, the same universal Eating-for-Health Guildeines apply (see our March newsletter).  Because their bodies are smaller and still developing you’ll want to be even more vigilant, as children are extra sensitive to low-quality anti-nutrient foods and the many noxious substances they contain, such as MSG, food colourings, and preservatives.  They’re also hypersensitive to stimulants such as sugar and caffeine.  Unfortunately the fake foods made especially for kids are loaded with all of the above.

So many children’s delicate systems aren’t able to function properly because they’re not getting the nutrients they need.  At the same time they’re consuming anti-nutrients and stimulants that further interfere with their ability to function normally.  There are millions of children today though to have a host of conditions who are in fact, merely lacking proper nutrition.

Take any child off processed, packaged fake foods, sugar, caffeine and any common food allergens to which they may be sensitive and you will see significant improvement in their behaviour and physical well-being no matter what conditions they may have.  Feed them lots of whole, fresh, natural foods and be sure they’re getting an adequate amount of essential fatty acids and green foods (the two things missing from the Standard American Diet) and the changes you’ll see will astound you.

Factoid:  A study at the ADHD Research Center in the Netherlands, found that 64% of the children diagnosed with ADHD are actually experiencing a hypersensitivity to food.

Make Nutrition a Priority

Unless your child is having an acute situation that demands urgent intervention, please explore safe, natural approaches that emphasize nutritional factors before you subject your little ones to dangerous, traumatic surgeries, procedures, and toxic drugs.

There are thousands of surgeries performed every year on children who have had recurrent ear infections, for example; surgeries that frequently could have been prevented by identifying and eliminating offending foods from the child’s diet.  Either do some research and experimenting on your own or work with a chiropractor or other holistic practitioner who is knowledgeable about food sensitivities.  Also be sure to have your child’s spine checked by a chiropractor, as nerve interference is often at the root of childhood conditions including ear infections and bed wetting.

By now  I hope you are convinced that helping your children to eat well is essential, and have a pretty good idea of what to feed them.  But I know many of you are probably thinking at this point—actually getting them to eat better is another story.  We’ll address that topic in an upcoming article, Tips for Helping Kids Eat Healthier.  So stay tuned!

Bug Bite Relief (for all those itchy bites we got last month!)

It seems pretty much impossible to enjoy the summer without sustaining at least a few bug bites.  Relief is around the corner with these suggestions:

· Apply cooled tea bags to the bite, the tannins act as an astringent to reduce swelling.

· For a body covered in bites soak in a warm bath with 2-3 cups of apple cider vinegar to relieve itching.

· Make a paste with witch hazel and baking soda to relieve swelling and itching.  Apply to site of bite.

· Swelling is relieved by ice.  If itching is the trouble try heating a metal spoon under hot water and applying to bite—make sure the spoon isn't hot enough to burn.

· Apply peppermint oil to the bite.  The tingling, cooling sensation provides relief. Ask us about Tei Fu oil.

Barefootin'

How keeping little feet in the buff helps babies’ brains and nervous systems develop.

     In her Pathways article, Barefootin’, Dr. Kacie Flegal teaches us the importance of allowing our babies to explore the world naturally without wearing shoes and socks. She explains the function of our two sensory systems, the proprioceptive and vestibular system, and how they directly contribute to the development of our neuromuscular strength, spatial orientation, balance and coordination.
 
     When our little ones wear shoes, she says, it inhibits their sensory development by restricting
the movement of their feet while creating a barrier that prevents the proprioceptors in the feet
from feeling the terrain. Dr. Flegal points out that the sole of the foot is an extremely sensitive
part of the body with as many proprioceptors as the entire spinal column! She encourages us
to take off our baby’s shoes and our own shoes as much as possible to explore and enjoy the
stimulating sensation of the grass, leaves, and earth beneath our feet.