Influences Over Our Kids
Posted by Paige
I read an interesting article this morning that showed findings that parents food behaviors didn’t translate to healthy eating habits in their children.
"Factors other than parental eating behaviors such as community and school, food environment, peer influence, television viewing, as well as individual factors such as self-image and self-esteem seem to play an important role in young people’s dietary intake," said May A. Beydoun, PhD, co-author of the study and a former postdoctoral research fellow at the Bloomberg School. (Read Full Article Here)
It is interesting to think about. As grown children, my husband and I eat a vegetarian diet. Neither of us were raised this way. Although my parents aren’t vegetarians, I still feel they raised me to eat healthy and omit greasy or sugary foods. I thought it unfair at the time, but we didn’t eat fast food, soda, never had candy in the house and my mom never bought sugar kids cereals. My husband on the other hand was raised to eat healthy, but he was allowed the items I didn’t have in the house.
I feel my husband and my eating habits as adults really connect with some of the reasons we opened the Blue Ridge Eco Shop in the first place. The environmental and health impacts of a vegetarian diet are immense. We also grow our own food and buy locally grown foods. We are very fortunate to live in a place that makes buying locally grown foods very easy. Yes we spend a little more money on our monthly grocery bill, (and it’s not that we have extra money, owning your own business is not lucrative) but we value the health effects, environmental effects and societal effects this has.
All this leads me to think about how my future children as adults will eat?
I feel like your parents are your food source when you are young, but life experiences can change that when you enter life on your own. I only hope I am giving my girls the tools to make good choices when I’m not around and later in life.