As my kids get all excited to dress up and pretend to be someone or something that they are not for Halloween, I can’t help but cringe at the thought of all that candy coming into my house.  You would think that my first concern would be for my two boys, age 4 and 10 but it is not. I am afraid for me! You see I am a sugar addict.

In fact I just wrote a book on sugar addiction and kids so I know all the statistics and scary facts that would make Halloween seem like a tea party.  Our children are eating their weight in sugar each year and adults are doing no better with an average intake of 140 to 150 pounds of added sugar each year. How is that for frightening?

As I looked into methods of getting rid of my kids’ loot before I can get into it, I came across an initiative to send our troops oversee leftover Halloween candy: it is part of Operation Gratitude. At first I was appalled. How could we be sending our soldiers this unhealthy food, full of sugar that will wreck havoc on their health? When I put on my nutrition scientist hat, it is clear that this is indeed a very bad idea.

But when I settled down and thought of my own struggles with sugar, I came up with an entirely different answer.  As I thought about the real reason I wrote the book on sugar, my response changed.  My goal for my boys and other children is to bring them up in an environment where candy is an OK thing in moderation but needing it, well that is unacceptable to me.

As a girl I grew up with a father who was both an alcoholic and an ex-marine. I do not think I could have survived such a stressful childhood without sugar by my side.  It was my best friend and companion.  I turned to sugar for comfort and for an escape of my everyday reality at home.

Candy immediately made me feel better and connected.  It only lasted a brief moment before the crash came, but those few precious moments each day were what carried me through my childhood. I turned to candy for an escape and I ended up reaching for sugar anytime my life got stressful.  Today I see it for what it really is: my drug of choice.

So if our troops need a little escape and a rush of pleasure who am I to deny them that?  They are putting their life on the line for me; the least I can do is send them some lovin’ in a sweet form.  When they get back home, I’ll be to there help them in any way I can especially if that means helping them to get off of sugar.

The rates of autism have reached an all time high.  One in eighty eight children have some form of autism says a recent government report.  That is insane! Sure some of the increase is due to the fact that we are getting better at diagnosing autism but that is not the whole story.  Parents and researchers have been scrambling to find the reason so many kids are afflicted with this disorder.  The most recent finding is that a child is at higher risk of developing autism if their dad is over the age of 35 when they were conceived.
What concerns me the most over this recent finding is that I see and hear people taking a collective sigh of relief.  “Oh, OK ,its because of older dads.” I don’t think we can rest easy here.  I believe that this generation of kids have reached the tipping point.  Their little bodies are saying ENOUGH!  You can not load me up with dozens of vaccines when my immune system is not even fully developed, eat a diet full of processed junk food or produce with pesticides, breath polluted air and drink water with contaminants without thinking and believing that it is all collectively doing something to my DNA. OK so they maybe wouldn’t be that articulate but I am speaking for them.
As a ‘future parent’,what you eat, breath and surround yourself with does effect the DNA that you pass on to make your baby and I don’t mean just the time around conception but the months and years leading up to that magic moment.  Until recently, scientists and doctors used to think that you could not influence your genetic makeup.  If you had a gene that said you are at a higher risk of developing a certain cancer, the thinking was there was nothing you could do to stop it.  We know a lot more now. What you eat can turn off and on some genes. Really!  How cool is that.  So perhaps the reason babies are at risk when their dads are older is that the collection of chemicals, pesticides, and toxins have built up in their system so much that it effected the DNA in their sperm.
Babies are the most vulnerable of all humans.  As such, they will be the first to show signs of distress, illness and symptoms of a society that has become so toxic that it changes our genetic expression.  As parents, or “wanna be” parents the food we choose to eat can have a profound impact on our offspring. Let’s make healthy choices not only for ourselves but for future generations.

Let’s take a moment to talk about poop. I know it may be uncomfortable but poop can tell you so much about your child’s body (and yours). As a nutritionist there are several areas of the body that I focus on to determine if a person is digesting their food properly as well as to determine if there is a potential food allergy or sensitivity. These areas are the skin and bowel. Rashes, blisters and unhealthy skin say to me that I need to look into a possible food allergy or sensitivity and asking questions about a persons poop tells me so much about how their diet is affecting their body.

This may seem like an obvious statement but a person’s poop tells a lot about their digestion. Here are some questions that you may want to look into. Does your child poop every day? Is it painful? Does it take more than several minutes to poop? Is the poop in one long piece or does it look like rabbit pellets (this means they are dehydrated and constipated). It may seem gross but it is important to take a moment to determine if your child’s bowel movements are healthy (you may want to take a peek at yours too).

Once children are eating table food they should be having a bowel movement every day. If they are not, you should look into it. My 3 year old went from pooping several times a day during breastfeeding to very infrequently at the age of one. His pediatrician said not to worry but I knew better having worked as a nutritionist for over two decades. I paid attention to what my son ate and figured out that if he had any dairy in his diet he pooped every 5 days and when I removed all dairy he pooped every day. He may not have a “diagnosable food allergy” but he certainly has an issue (sensitivity) to dairy.

You may think that pooping every several days is no big deal but it is. Our bodies are designed to eliminate every day. The following are just some important reasons:

• Toxins have more time to hurt the wall of the intestine and potentially cause harm the longer they are in the bowel
• We do not re-circulate hormones and fat effectively when we don’t poop daily
• Constipation can cause low grade inflammation around the bowel that leads to a host of ill effects

For little children it is important to get them into the habit of sitting on the toilet to try and poop daily. For many, they dislike to do this because 1) it is boring and 2) it may be uncomfortable. You can tell your child that their poop is a train and their toots are a way of letting them know the train is ready to leave the station. This analogy has turned around my son’s bathroom habits. He now understands that when he gets that feeling and hears the toots, that means he has to go. Toot toot!