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Pack your kid’s lunchbox with wholesome foods to help her gain health, not weight.

Across the Western world, parents and schools have woken up to the crucial link between the foods a child eats during school hours and his/her health. To control obesity, children are being encouraged to acquire a taste for real foods and to form healthy eating habits. Hopefully, the days of soda and snack machines in school corridors and cafeteria trays loaded with greasy, starchy messes are on their way out.

In the U.S., efforts such as the Farm to School movement integrate food and nutrition education in the  classroom. Through their efforts, more American children eat fresh local foods in school cafeterias, and local farmers benefit too.  Turning to Europe, we see that, according to the WorldWatch Institute, “Seventy percent of all school cafeteria food in Rome is now organic, with ingredients coming from 400 Italian organic farms.” France, where at lunch children are routinely served 4-5 courses freshly cooked in the school kitchen, has the lowest rate of childhood obesity in Europe.

And what of those of us who live in the Middle East, where the majority of school children take their lunches to school from home? As a mother living in Israel, I’m sad to report that many kids fill up on soy-based or meat-glued chicken “shnitzels” nuked in the microwave a few minutes before running off to school. (See our post on the perils of soy and meat glue here.) The horrible white bread sandwich with a layer of cocoa-flavored margarine known as “chocolate spread” is still the favorite 10:00 am snack.

The solution? Dedicate time to preparing real food for your precious children

It means deciding what “quality time” really means to you. Is an hour spent in front of the TV emptying your mind as valuable as an hour cooking ? If you encourage your child or teenager to help out, you might find you’re having fun together. And your child will like being the one to determine what his lunch foods will be. Even cooking alone, the manual labor (and good smells coming from the pot) soothe and relax.

Helpful equipment:

• A standard thermos for hot cocoa or soup.
• A food thermos to contain hot foods like stews or drier hot foods like rice and beans, or majadra.
• 2 frozen packs to keep sliced fresh fruit or vegetables, or salads, fresh. Frozen packs also keep sandwiches with fish or chicken cool.
• 3 light but sturdy containers with tight lids. They should be microwaveable.
• TV-dinner style boxes with separated areas inside for different foods.

Nice but not essential:

• A small insulated carrying bag.
• An insulated bottle container with a shoulder strap, for home-made iced tea or other cold drink.

Just having those thermoses and packs gives you lunch ideas.

The plan

During the school year, I sit down with my teenage daughter once a month or so and we draw up the food plan in two columns. Column A: something satisfying but portable for breakfast, since that’s food she might snatch up as she’s flying out the door to make her bus. The snack foods for the 10:00 o’clock break are interchangeable with the foods in Column A. Lunch foods go to Column B.

I undertake to cook and pack the the food either the night before or in the mornng. She has to put up with my choices, since she dictated the list.

Rather than suggest menus item by item, here are lists of kinds of foods that you can turn out in your kitchen with just a little effort.

Column A: Breakfast and Mid-Morning Snack

Muffins and quick breads of all kinds. As long as they’re whole-wheat and have chunks of fresh fruit or grated vegetables (zucchini, carrots). For a savory muffin, try cheese, with or without oven-dried tomatoes.

Low-sugar cookies or cupcakes. Add dates or other dried fruit. This allows you to reduce the sugar in the recipe.

A variety of favorite whole-grain breads, sliced or ready to fill as sandwiches (like a half-pita or tortilla).

Breakfast sandwich fillings:  whatever he/she likes to put on bread in the morning.

A slice of leftover pizza (we’re talking about a teenager here). With slices of whatever raw vegetable is in favor at the time.

Sliced fresh fruit. Sliced is key here. A child might ignore an entire apple or bell pepper, but one sliced, arranged, and kept cool in a box always gets eaten up.

Dried fruit and nuts. Mix a few varieties or pack them individually.

Dairy. Natural yogurt with a dollop of maple syrup or your jam, or chopped nuts and raisins. Natural cheese slices wrapped around cucumber sticks.

Let’s not forget healthy drinks. One glass of natural juice . Cold herbal tea, sweetened or not, as you will. How about plain cool water?

Column B: Lunch

Protein foods give energy; starchy foods put kids to sleep.Pack a minimal amount of carb-heavy foods – enough to satisfy but not act as a soporific.

Eggs, hard-boiled and kept cool in a bag with a frozen pack. Or an omelet. Omelets are handy protein vehicles for chopped vegetables, or to use as wraps. Or chopped up and added to pasta salads or brown rice.

Dairy: a container of low-fat cottage cheese (add a spoon). Put some olives or pickles on the side or in a small bag to go with it.

Whole grains, hot in food thermos or cold with dressing, as a salad. Rice and beans, hot. Quinoa tabbuleh, cold. Lentils.

Pasta and other carb-heavy foods: mix with cold or hot vegetables, leftover meat or fish and pack into the appropriate container.

Vegetables.  A mixture of  raw vegetable sticks for dipping into choumous or to eat as is. Your child will decide which vegetables. A whole baked potato. A whole small baked sweet potato (add his favorite topping in a small separate container).  Leftover stir-fry. Vegetable fritters. Mixed salad with 4 colors of vegetables in it.

Soup or stew left over from dinner, re-heated in the morning and stored in a thermos. (In my kosher kitchen there is a dairy thermos and another for chicken soups.)

Leftover meat or poultry, sliced or chopped and packed into a hot/cold container. Again, sliced or pre-chopped is important. Provide a fork, and your kid will eat. Expect him to pick up an entire drumstick and eat it in front of his friends, and he won’t. Meatballs are good.

Tips:

• Choose menus for the next week and cook accordingly. At the end of the month, review the lists with your child and let him/her choose to repeat, or omit, or add whatever healthy foods he wants for the next month.
• Cook ahead. Freeze individual portions at least twice a week.
• When cooking dinner, keep the next day’s lunch in mind. My daughter doesn’t mind repeating last night’s dinner at lunch, but if she did, I would separate a portion to freeze, thawing it out another day.
• Every once in a while, dedicate time to making two condiments. Pesto, labneh, jam, chutney, salsa, pickles, salad dressing. Anything your child likes that adds relish to his food. Pesto, by the way, freezes well.
• Cook and pack  foods your child likes, being mindful of quality ingredients. Is he/she going through a phase of only peanut butter sandwiches? My daughter did, at age 6 – three weeks of only PB sandwiches, with an occasional apple or yogurt to make me happy. I made sure the bread was whole wheat and the PB natural and sugar free. She grew out of it.

Still looking for specific recipes? Try some of these on Green Prophet:

• Muhamarra Red Pepper Spread
• Crunchy Chickpeas for Healthy Snacking
• 5 Fast and Delicious Sandwich Ideas
• Eating Well With Leftovers

The post Best back to school lunches, inspired by the Mediterranean Diet appeared first on Green Prophet.

Water beads are superabsorbent polymer chemicals, water beads are also known as jelly beads, hydro orbs, crystal soil and gel beads. They are also called sensory beads, used as play tools for children with autism and other developmental conditions. They can be found in the dollar store and may be a marvel to touch and play with but have become a serious health hazard for young children. Parents may buy them by the hundreds or thousands and misplaced beads which are ingested can lead to death. Orbeez is a common name brand.

Researchers in the United States reported 8000 hospital visits related to water beads in a one-year period from from 2007 through 2022 and found the number of these visits increased rapidly by more than 130% from 2021 to 2022. Many cases were probably not reported.

According to Greenmatch, a consumer environmental watchdog, Orbeez beads are damaging to nature and they are a risk to wildlife who might swallow them. Due to growing concerns about their impact, retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have stopped selling water beads marketed towards children. But they are easily found elsewhere and marketed for different purposes such as floral arrangements.

Researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Policy and Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital published a study on the polluting water beads in the in American Journal of Emergency Medicine where they have asked for regulations to prevent water bead-associated injuries.

Water beads are made from super-absorbent material that can swell to hundreds of times their original size when exposed to fluids. They are commonly sold as child sensory products, gel projectiles for toy “gel blaster” guns, and decorations. If swallowed, they can expand in the gastrointestinal tract and cause intestinal blockage and even death. They can also cause injury if placed in the ear canal or nose.

According to Consumer Reports the beads are also toxic and dangerous to the environment. The watchdog said that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)  warned parents and caregivers about water beads this past fall, it cited a panoply of potential risks to children. The tiny, superabsorbent and super-expanding Dollar Store item toys can cause intestinal obstruction if swallowed, lung damage if inhaled, or hearing loss if put in the ear, the agency said.

But there is another potential harm to consider, aside from what the beads’ growth inside the body can do. The beads themselves may be toxic. A mechanical engineer at the CPSC has tested a number of brands of water beads for acrylamide. Acrylamide is a known carcinogen that is also toxic to the nervous system, reproductive system, and brain.

The letter comes following a Consumer Reports investigation into water beads, which featured the stories of several children who were severely injured after they swallowed or inhaled water beads—and, in one case, died.

CR safety experts urged the CPSC to move as quickly as possible to ban them and called on retailers and online platforms to stop selling them. Lawmakers in Congress are also now pushing for a national ban. Consider that about half of all Dollar Store items have tested for toxic materials.

According to the recent study on the dangers of water beads, there were an estimated 8,159 visits to U.S. emergency departments from 2007 through 2022 involving water beads among people younger than 20 years.

More than half (55%) of cases involved children younger than 5 years. Most emergency department visits in this study involved children swallowing water beads (46%), followed by putting water beads in the ear (33%) or nose (12%). Eye injuries made up 9% of cases in this study.

Most patients were treated and released (92%). The proportion of cases admitted was highest among children younger than 5 years (10%), and this age group accounted for most (90%) of admissions in this study. All admissions among children younger than 5 years involved swallowing water beads.

“The number of pediatric water bead-related emergency department visits is increasing rapidly,” said Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “Although swallowing objects and putting them into an ear or the nose are common among children, water beads pose a unique increased risk of harm because of their expanding properties, and they’re hard to detect with X-rays,” he says.

Water beads in dehydrated form are often sold in sets of tens of thousands, which makes it more likely that misplaced water beads in the home will not be noticed until found by a young child, a group known for exploring their environment by placing objects in their mouth – especially objects like water beads that look like candy.

Water bead toy safety is covered in the ASTM toy safety standard, ASTM F963. The standard addresses bowel obstruction by limiting the size of water beads to the narrowest part of the gastrointestinal tract of a small 18-month-old child. “The current safety standard is inadequate,” said Dr. Smith. “Serious outcomes have occurred to children younger than 18 months, and one-fifth of the water beads swallowed in this study were among children younger than 18 months with the youngest child being 7 months old. Therefore, using intestinal measurements for 18-month-olds is not adequate.”

The ASTM F963 toy safety standard also does not address water beads marketed to individuals 14 years or older as gel blasters or used for home decoration or other purposes.

Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate (S.4298, Esther’s Law) in May 2024 would ban water beads that expand by 50% or more with hydration or expand to a size of 3 millimeters or larger. This legislation followed a similar bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R.6468) in November 2023, titled the “Ban Water Beads Act,” and applies to water beads marketed not only as toys, but as educational materials, art materials or art material products, or sensory stimulation materials or sensory tools.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is also considering regulation of water bead safety. Major U.S. retailers have stopped selling water bead toys in stores and online.

“Many parents are not aware that water beads can be harmful to children,” said Marcel Casavant, MD, co-author of this study and physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “If children younger than six years or with developmental delays live in or visit your home, keep water beads out of your home and talk with your childcare directors, preschool teachers, therapists, and others who may be using water beads with young children.”

The post The dangers of water beads: experts call for a ban on the toxic product appeared first on Green Prophet.

Diet sodas and other snack foods can contain artificial sweeteners linked to health issues, believe researchers who have written about the ongoing concerns and health impacts of non-sugar sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and stevia. Food companies like Cargill sell stevia as a safe and natural alternative to sugar but no one knows the health effects on children and this worries nutritionists in the US.

These sweeteners are increasingly found in a variety of foods and beverages, including those aimed at children, the researchers report.

“Given the continued uncertainty about their role in the diet and accumulating evidence suggesting the potential for unfavorable health effects, a cautious approach to non-sugar sweeteners is warranted–especially when it comes to children,” said lead author of the viewpoint, Allison Sylvetsky, an associate professor of exercise and nutrition sciences at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

Sylvetsky and her team propose that the US Food and Drug Administration restrict use of non-sugar sweeteners in food and beverage products marketed to children until there is more definitive evidence of benefit or harm.

A viewpoint published in JAMA Pediatrics by three experts on the topic emphasizes that research on the health effects of non-sugar sweeteners in children is urgently needed.

Studies in adults demonstrate links between consumption of  non-sugar sweeteners and type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. However, few researchers have examined health impacts of non-sugar sweeteners when used by children.

At the same time,  more and more foods and beverages with non-sugar sweeteners are consumed by children.

Parents often do not realize that products contain non-sugar sweeteners, Sylvetsky says. Parents may choose foods and beverages with non-sugar sweeteners thinking they are healthier, she adds.

Instead of choosing such products, Sylvetsky suggests parents focus on the healthfulness of the overall diet and choose fresh fruit and veggies, whole grains and limit provision of foods and beverages high in added sugars. Instead of buying  fruit drinks sweetened with non-sugar sweeteners, stick to water or other unsweetened alternatives, she says.

Other options for parents: buy real food, cook at home and help children enjoy healthy snack habits from food that arrives in nature’s packaging.

The post Is stevia sweetener bad for children? appeared first on Green Prophet.

When faced with the challenges of raising a child with disabilities, families often navigate a complex web of treatments, interventions, and therapies. Amidst this array of options, physiotherapy stands out as a powerful tool that can profoundly impact a child’s quality of life. It goes beyond just physical improvements; physiotherapy offers a transformative touch that can shape brighter futures for children with disabilities.

The Essence of Physiotherapy

At its core, physiotherapy focuses on enhancing and restoring functional movement. For children with disabilities, this can mean various things: developing the strength to sit independently, improving balance for confident walking, or refining motor skills to engage in play and daily activities. Through targeted exercises, techniques, and tools, physiotherapists work diligently to help children overcome physical barriers.

The Age of Adaptability

Children, with their innate adaptability, often respond remarkably well to physiotherapeutic interventions. Their young bodies and brains are highly plastic, allowing for significant improvements and adaptations. This plasticity, when combined with physiotherapy, creates a window of opportunity to mold and shape optimal physical outcomes.

Beyond Physical Milestones

While the tangible milestones achieved through physiotherapy—like taking a first step or climbing a playground ladder—are cause for celebration, the intangible benefits can be even more significant. Children who can move more freely often experience boosts in confidence and self-esteem. Their world becomes less restrictive, opening doors to social interactions, academic opportunities, and a richer tapestry of life experiences.

Physiotherapy can also act as a foundation for other forms of therapy. For instance, a child who gains better control over their limbs might find it easier to engage in occupational or speech therapy. The synergy between different therapies amplifies the benefits for the child.

Building a Supportive Environment

Physiotherapists do not work in isolation. They often function as part of a larger team of caregivers, teachers, and other therapists. By understanding a child’s physical capabilities and limitations, they can guide families and educational institutions in creating supportive environments. This can include anything from recommending adaptive equipment to suggesting classroom setups that accommodate a child’s unique needs.

Furthermore, the bond between a physiotherapist and a child can be truly special. Through regular sessions, they become trusted figures in the child’s life, cheering on every achievement and offering support through every challenge.

Staying Updated and Informed

When planning and managing therapy, understanding NDIS pricing arrangements is essential. Familiarizing yourself with these arrangements ensures you can effectively budget and access the services your child needs without unexpected financial constraints.

The realm of physiotherapy is dynamic, with constant research unveiling better techniques, tools, and strategies. For parents, staying updated can make a significant difference. Joining support groups, attending workshops, and staying in touch with the child’s physiotherapist can provide insights into the latest advancements that might benefit the child.

For families residing in Australia, it’s paramount to ensure that the physiotherapist working with your child is registered with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Choosing an NDIS registered physiotherapist guarantees that the professional understands the intricacies of treating children with disabilities, offering a consistent standard of care and expertise.

Physiotherapy’s transformative touch is a beacon of hope for many families. Through the hands of skilled professionals, children with disabilities are offered a chance to unlock their full potential, paving the way for brighter, more fulfilling futures. Whether it’s the joy of a child taking confident strides or the subtle growth in their social interactions, the profound impact of physiotherapy resonates in every aspect of their lives.

Want to learn more about holistic approaches to disability? Be inspired by this man who travelled 100 miles in his wheelchair.

The post Physiotherapy’s Transformative Touch for Children with Disabilities appeared first on Green Prophet.

UNICEF estimates that 300 million children live in places polluted by toxic air. Exposing developing bodies to harmful particulant matter can result in permanent lung damage. It’s hard enough to convince kids to wash their hands and brush their teeth. How do you persuade them to wear constricting and scary-looking filtration masks? Working with Danish industrial design studio Kilo, Airmotion Laboratories took a page from the folks looking to increase young people’s use of bike helmets by mixing protection with a sense of play.

“It’s not a toy, but it borrows elements from a child’s universe,” Kilo founder Lars Larsen told Co.Design. “It has an organic, soft character and strikes a balance between play and protection.”

Airmotion took 3D scans of more than 1,000 children aged six to 14 before settling on the shape of the translucent mask. Its asymmetrical form minimizes the amount of the child’s face the mask covers, increasing comfort and wearability.

Woobi Play requires assembly, much like LEGO blocks. Its modular system allows children and parents to put the colorful parts together, piece by piece, supported by an educational how-to guide. While building their masks, children also learn about product’s functionality, inviting dialogue with grown-ups about air pollution and health. The modular makeup of the mask allows for further customization and upgrades as future filtration technology evolves. Hover here for more.

See more in this video:

The mask is aimed at a middle-class Chinese market, where parental concern about the health risks of pollution is on the rise. Last year China’s Ministry Of Environmental Protection measured air quality in 70 different cities, finding that only 8 met the proper standards.

According to recent WHO data, several cities in the Middle East showed increasingly high levels of air pollution. Based on the new report’s average particulate matter (PM) 2.5 readings, the city with the worst air pollution levels is Zabol in Iran, but Riyadh and Al Jubail in Saudi Arabia also make the top 10.

This product reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story All Summer in a Day, a sci-fi tale about a class of schoolchildren on Venus, described as a world of constant rainstorms, where the Sun is only visible for a few hours every seven years. Here on Earth, how much longer until fresh air is equally elusive?

Airmotion has plans for an adult version of the mask, which should be available by the end of this year. The Woobi Play retails for about $38 USD, with a portion of all proceeds supporting the Respiratory Health Fund.

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