Season 1, Episode 2: in pursuit of a healthier relationship with food

Transcript

Conner: (00:06)
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast hosted by my mom.

Malina: (00:15)
Especially when you're a parent and you're trying to feed a child, you can have all the best intentions in the world and have all the most wonderful array of nutrients for that child, and if that child doesn't want to eat what you put in front of them, you've got a big challenge ahead of you.

Stephanie: (00:32)
That's Malina Malkani, she is a registered dietician nutritionist with a master's degree in clinical nutrition. She is also a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and is the director of nutrition at Rejuven and Global Health in New York City. Malina also owns her own nutrition lifestyle company and private practice geared toward moms and kids. And, she's a single working mom of three young girls herself, so she gets it. She gets our good intentions, she gets why we're stressed, but she also gets that helping kids develop a positive relationship with food is important, and she has some thoughts on how to do that without going crazy. Spoiler alert: It involves pulling them into the kitchen.

Stephanie: (01:21)
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast about helping busy adults find the inspiration and information they need to teach the kids in their lives how to cook. I'm your host, Stephanie Conner, and today we're going to talk about how we can affect our kids' relationship with food, and how cooking with them can make a difference. Malina is slender, and, like a good nutritionist should, she's holding a bag full of vegetables in pretty much every photo you see of her. But she acknowledges, she hasn't always had a healthy relationship with food. When Malina was in her twenties, she launched her first career as a singer, actor, dancer, and model. She felt pressure to be thin, and got sucked into all sorts of diets. Atkins, juice fasting, the rice cake diet. At that time, she wasn't eating enough and her hair, skin, and mood all suffered. Fortunately, she realized she wasn't healthy. She needed stamina and energy to perform. This realization led her to experiment with her diet, and learn firsthand what her body needed. She changed her career course and went to graduate school to study nutrition, but another personal experience helped her really refine her own thoughts about food.

Malina: (02:41)
And I had three daughters within about three and a half years, they're very close together in age. And during this period of time, both of my parents were diagnosed with different stage 4 cancers, and I actually lost an aunt to lung cancer. It was quite an intense time. That juxtaposition of having three different pregnancies and births, difficult pregnancies, feeding three babies, and caring for family members while they struggled with really difficult and terminal illnesses. It was profound and it shaped my philosophy around food because I found myself thinking really deeply and strategically about food, and how it affects our lives in the long-term.

Stephanie: (03:30)
Going beyond the specific foods we're giving our kids, Malina talks about the importance of a healthy feeding dynamic. Let's pick up my conversation with Malina there. What does it mean to have a healthy feeding dynamic?

Malina: (03:45)
Well, when I think about a healthy feeding dynamic, and when I talk about a healthy feeding dynamic, what I'm really saying is that when it comes to feeding kids, the how is as important as the what. What do I mean by that? Well, as some background, in my practice what I see really often is parents who get very caught up in the concern over whether their kids are getting the right nutrients and enough of the right nutrients, and missing that equally as important piece of the puzzle, which is how they are feeding their kids, and the kind of relationship that they are teaching their kids to have with food, which will then inform their children's food choices for the rest of their lives. These habits, especially in early childhood, are formed.

Stephanie: (04:38)
So when we talk about how we're feeding our kids, are we talking about portion sizes, and how often were we're feeding, or the attitudes that we have when we put food in front of our kids? What goes into that “how”?

Malina: (04:54)
That's such a good question. There are so many things that go into the how of feeding. And every family is different. There are some strategies for implementing healthy feeding behaviors that work better for some family structures than for others. But there is a set of guidelines that tends to work really well, and they're kind of overarching guidelines, that I like to try to impart to my clients. And on a very basic level, what you just mentioned, I think you just said, what foods do we offer? That's the what, and that is essential. Offering a wide variety of nutrient-dense, minimally processed foods from different food groups. If we don't offer them, then kids won't learn to make healthy choices because they won't have experientially had the chance to try them. That's number one.

Malina: (05:56)
But number two is the how. And one way to establish a really healthy feeding dynamic is to get really clear on the division of responsibility between parents and children. And I don't know if you've ever read any of the work of Ellyn Satter. She is a registered dietician and just an absolute guru in the area of family feeding. And she describes a division of responsibility where parents decide the what, when, and where of feeding, and kids decide the whether and how much. What does that mean? Well, parents, it is our responsibility as parents to offer a wide variety of foods, to choose what those foods will be at the meal, to choose when the meal will happen, and where. And whether it's at a table, or in the home or if it's a packed lunch. The children decide whether they're going to eat the foods, and how much of each food they will eat. And this is a really simple concept to explain and a much more difficult concept to implement.

Stephanie: (07:12)
Right. Because how often are parents, we're saying, "You have to eat all of that?"

Malina: (07:20)
Yes, yes, yes. Just take one more bite of this, or finish your broccoli before you can have dessert. All of these sort of coercive, bribing ways that we try to cajole, bribe, convince our children to eat, moves away from this division of responsibility, and prevents our kids from learning to make these healthy decisions for themselves, and learning to trust their internal cues for hunger and fullness. Which is part of what we really, as a part of a healthy feeding dynamic, want to teach them.

Malina: (08:04)
The next piece of what makes this division of responsibility work is establishing a solid structure and rhythm of meals and snacks at regular, dependable, but somewhat flexible times. Because if you don't have that, then it's very difficult to feel good about leaving the table if your child has chosen not to eat anything. If the next meal is not coming for a while, it can be really hard to accept your child say, "No, I don't want to eat that." And then not knowing when and what time the next meal is going to come.

Stephanie: (08:46)
You talked about helping them trust their internal cues for hunger and fullness because that's part of that healthy relationship with food, and part of being healthy later. So sure, we want to help them learn to trust their own cues, but how do we learn to trust their cues because most of us don't trust our own anymore?

Malina: (09:17)
Yeah, yeah. It's hard. And it sometimes, especially at the beginning of the process of implementing these strategies, it can feel counterintuitive because we all have, as parents, our intentions are in the best possible place. We just want our kids to be healthy. We just want them to eat. And it's hard to step back and allow them to have choice and ownership over those food choices. But as an overarching way to think about it, one important piece that we forget is that kids are really good for the most part at upregulating and downregulating their intake depending on what their needs are, and what foods they need, what nutrients they need. When we, for the most part, leave them alone and give them a really solid structure of meals and snacks that come at dependable times, they're really good at listening to those internal cues. It's when we mess with them that we get into trouble. One of the ways that we can really help them to start to listen to their own internal cues and recognize them is to stop pressuring them to clean your plate, finish your broccoli or no dessert, take one more bite. These messages signal to kids that we don't trust them to listen to their own internal cues.

Malina: (10:56)
It's also really important to step back and look at the totality of a child's weekly intake than to micromanage them meal to meal, or to monitor them meal to meal. If you're a parent, you probably know, some kids eat a ton at one meal, and then nothing at the next, or they sit down and they eat a ton of pasta at one meal and then the next meal, it's all fruit. It can be really confusing, but trusting them to read their own needs and listen to their own needs, and eat accordingly, is a way that we can set them up to, in the future, eat intuitively, and mindfully, and in tune with what their body needs.

Stephanie: (11:44)
Yeah, so, tell me if I'm interpreting this correctly, but we often as adults, we worry about overeating, right? We worry about having too many calories, but if I'm hearing you correctly, when you talk about them being able to up- and downregulate on their own, you're saying that most kids really will not overeat. They won't get more calories than they really need as long as we are providing them with those healthy choices to begin with.

Malina: (12:22)
That's a key piece, yes, that you just mentioned. And yes, there's a reason why the division of responsibility, and the wide variety of healthy foods offered at meals and snacks, and a meal structure with meals at dependable times. These are sort of pieces of the feeding structure that make that statement that you just said for the most part, true. If there's a wide variety of ultra- processed foods that are highly palatable and sugary, if those are the types of foods that are mostly offered, then we start to get into a different kind of a territory where it's harder for children to have a balanced intake because those foods are so highly palatable that it just makes you want to eat more of them.

Stephanie: (13:15)
We as parents, obviously we want to empower and educate our children, and we want to have these conversations, and make sure that they have this healthy relationship. But how do we keep from maybe making them a bit neurotic about it? Because maybe too much conversation affects the ability to have a healthy relationship with food too, just kind of skewing it to the extreme.

Malina: (13:45)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I really couldn't agree more. I'm glad you brought it up. I post about that a lot, actually, on Instagram. Because, especially during early childhood, and then throughout as well, we as parents are the most influential role models in our children's lives, and so I would say role modeling, not only healthy eating habits, but a healthy outlook on food and feeding behaviors, is essential. Not only eating healthy foods with them and letting them see you enjoy fruits and vegetables and other nutritious foods, that's very, very important, but it's also important not to absorb messages of anxiety around food or negative self talk, not feeling good about your body. These are things that kids, they're like sponges, and they absorb very quickly, so role modeling that piece is really important.

Stephanie: (14:54)
One thing that I know we both care a lot about is helping kids get more involved in the kitchen. So they're not just passive consumers of food, but they are actively involved in preparing what it is they're going to eat. How do you find that that affects... how does getting them involved in the kitchen affect their ability to have that really healthy relationship with food, and make healthy choices in the long run?

Malina: (15:28)
I love, first of all, your mission and philosophy because in my opinion and in my experience, getting kids involved in food prep, and in grocery shopping, and meal planning, in any kind of aspect of food, is magic. It really increases the likelihood that they will eat what you serve because they become so much more invested in the outcome, and they become really interested in how it's going to taste. And then it sets them up for the ability to then throughout the rest of their lives, feed themselves in a way that they choose to do. If they don't know, I have so many clients who just don't know what to make, and feel such overwhelm at the thought of trying to prepare a meal because they just haven't ever been exposed to it. So getting kids involved in food prep is really powerful.

It also offers really natural kind of unforced opportunities to talk about the different food groups, and discuss what a balanced meal looks like, and you know, why fiber is good for you, and educate them when it doesn't feel or sound like a lecture. You're actually hands-on and touching the pepper, and the corn, and you can actually speak about food from an experiential place, and also a textural place, and tactile place, which often lands in a different way in their brains, which is so great. And this can look different at different ages. I mean it, obviously... I actually have a blog post that gives examples of kitchen jobs for kids by age because we would have to be very specific about jobs we would give toddlers as opposed to school age and teen, but there's no age where it's not appropriate to enlist them and get them involved to some extent.

The other place where I think getting kids involved is an incredibly powerful tool that works toward a healthier feeding dynamic is incorporating as many family meals as you can. Family meals, I mean, talk about a powerful tool, they not only aid in moving the needle toward a healthier diet, but also in establishing overall healthy lifestyle behaviors. Not just nutrition, but I don't know if you've seen some of the statistics recently about kids and teens. I love to repeat them because I just think they're such a great reminder of how powerful it is to sit down with your kids at meals. Kids and teens who share family dinners together just three or more times per week are less likely to be overweight, more likely to eat healthy foods, they perform better academically, they're less likely to engage in risky behaviors like drugs and alcohol and sexual activity, they have better relationships with their parents, fewer emotional and behavioral problems, less likely to engage in disordered eating. I mean it just goes on and on.

And it's nice to remember that according to this research, three times a week is the minimum number, and that's... We can talk about whether that's even possible in this day and age because it's not easy. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's good to remember that three is the minimum. Sure, more is better, but three — three, if you can do three, but family meals don't have to look the same for everyone in order for people to absorb the benefit. And that's something that I hope can take some of the pressure off some of your listeners because I think we get really caught up in family meals needing to look kind of June Cleaver-ish, like everyone has to be present, and it has to be this tablecloth, with all these different courses, and has to be dinner, and it has to be all this perfectly balanced food. No, it doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't even have to be dinner. It can just, honestly, a family meal can be a bowl of cereal with some fruit for breakfast, and still have a positive impact. The components that make the difference are you eating with your kids, everybody's offered the same foods, the screens are away, and you're seated at a table.

Stephanie: (20:14)
If you appreciated Malina's perspectives on food like I did, be sure to visit her website, MalinaMalkani.com. That's M-A-L-I-N-A M-A-L-K-A-N-I.com. There you'll find a free guide for parents with tips on how to reduce picky eating, lots of recipes, plus information on her new course, Reducing Picky Eating One Brussels Sprout At a Time. And she posts almost daily on Instagram with nutrition and feeding tips for moms. You can find her at healthy.mom.healthy.kids. All of her info is on our website, too, at kiddosinthekitchen.com. Now It's time for Kitchen Questions where I ask our guests a series of fun questions about their own kitchen and perspectives on food.

Child: (21:03)
It's time for Kitchen Questions. I have a question. What would happen if you put a little bit of the wrong ingredient inside a cookie? Why are cupcakes squishy? How often do you burn things on accident? Do you like cake? What is the difference between baking and roasting? What is your favorite recipe?

Stephanie: (21:30)
What is the one thing in your kitchen that you always have on hand?

Malina: (21:33)
Cannellini beans. I love cannellini beans, and we all love cannellini beans, and I have just so many ideas for exciting things we can do with them, and they have so much fiber, and plant-based protein, and vitamins and minerals, and I could go on and on, but I love, love, love cannellini beans.

Stephanie: (21:54)
What is your go-to, easy weeknight meal?

Malina: (21:58)
Funny you should ask: beans on toast, which does have cannellini beans. But I developed this recipe when my girls were tiny, actually. And it's the closest, it's actually, as far as they're concerned, it's comfort food. It's their comfort food, and it is a mixture of cannellini beans with spinach and tomatoes and cheese that is served over a whole-grain toast. And there's just something so satisfying about it, but it's got a ton of nutrients and it's a great way to get veggies into the kids. It's very colorful so that, and I can whip it up in about 20 minutes. So that's a favorite.

Stephanie: (22:40)
What one dish are you famous for with your girls?

Malina: (22:44)
It would definitely have to be my black bean brownies. I'm sensing a theme here. I didn't even expect for this to happen, but legumes are coming up really often. But my black bean brownies are really good. They're really good. They're really chocolaty. I bring them a lot to class parties at school, and the kids really enjoy them, and the moms love them because they do have some dairy-free chocolate chips, but they're gluten free, nut free, dairy free, great to bring into classrooms, and kids really enjoy them and they are healthy as well.

Stephanie: (23:05)
Arugula or spinach?

Malina: (23:08)
Spinach.

Stephanie: (23:09)
Coconut oil or avocado oil?

Malina: (23:10)
Oh, avocado oil in a heartbeat.

Stephanie: (23:12)
Clean up as you go or when you're done?

Malina: (23:15)
Clean up as you go. I'm a dietician. We're very type A.

Stephanie: (23:19)
Crunchy peanut butter or creamy?

Malina: (23:21)
Oh crunchy. Love the texture.

Stephanie: (23:24)
Coffee or tea?

Malina: (23:26)
Tea, tea, tea, tea, huge tea drinker. Love it.

Stephanie: (23:30)
Thank you again to Malina for joining me to discuss how we can help our kids build a healthier relationship with food. You can also find her beans on toast recipe that she mentioned in the show notes for this episode. I love talking to Malina, and you'll hear her voice on a future episode because she has some excellent tips on helping picky eaters.

In fact, picky eating is a topic I hear about from blog readers and podcast listeners. It's a constant struggle that many of us face. And one reason a lot of us start cooking with our kiddos is to solve that problem. Well, I sat down with an expert on picky eating, Melanie Potock, to pick her brain on this topic. Melanie is a certified speech language pathologist who specializes in feeding children. Her most recent book is Adventures in Veggie Land. Help Your Kids Learn to Love Vegetables with 100 Easy Activities and Recipes. You'll hear tons of amazing advice from Melanie in another Kiddos in the Kitchen episode, but today I asked her to share her top strategies to proactively tackle picky eating.

Melanie: (24:39)
Well, I'm glad that you use the word “proactively” because in raising a healthy, happy eater, we actually provide parents with seven specific parenting strategies, and one of them is parent proactively. And what that means is think ahead. Think ahead. A couple that I start off with right away when I'm working with a new family is when they're trying to practice daily mealtimes or even, gosh, three times a week trying to have dinner together. If that's their goal, and it could be breakfast or lunch, but let's say it's dinner.

One of the things I want them to do when it comes to parenting proactively is have all of the food ready before you call the rest of the family to the table. You might be cooking with one or two kids, but say there's another child and maybe a husband down in the basement playing together, before you call everyone to the table, make sure that everything is ready and that we're not just feeding our picky eater his macaroni and cheese, and then the rest of the family comes in. No, the picky eater is halfway done and he just wants to get down. That kind of negates the whole idea of being together at the family mealtime table.

And the other thing I asked my parents to do is a really simple tip, but it makes such a difference, is before you call the family to the table, just take a few deep breaths, four or five seconds to just calm yourself down so that you can really focus on what's most important at family mealtimes, and that's family. It's not always about the food, it's always, always, always about being together as a family. So those are two examples of parenting proactively.

But the other thing we talk to parents about in raising a healthy, happy eater is also parenting consistently. Parenting consistently. One of the things that is most challenging for families nowadays, especially when there are two parents in the household, is getting everybody literally on the same page with their parenting style. Hopefully those are two good ideas that I'll give your families, and your listeners some resources that'll get them on their way to having a little bit happier family mealtime.

Stephanie: (26:35)
Absolutely. And can you give us maybe one or two things that we might think about if, we already, you know, that that picky eater has really, that habit has taken hold. What can we do to bust out of that?

Melanie: (25:47)
Well, that's a great question and it's one that parents ask me all the time: Where do I start? Well, it always starts with tolerating new foods on your plate. A lot of the parents say to me, "I don't put broccoli on his plate. He won't eat it. What's the point?" Well, you’ve got to start with the child just accepting not only the sight, but the aroma, even, of the broccoli.

So I ask parents to keep a tablespoon on their counter, and that is literally the measurement for how much they're going to put on the child's plate. And if when they're pre-plating the child's plate and they pile up the macaroni and cheese like they tend to do, maybe don't put so much mac and cheese on there right away, the child can have more if he's still hungry, but let's at least set them up for success. Maybe just put a half a cup instead of a full cup to get started, and then just a tablespoon of whatever else the family is having. That goes on the child's plate.

Usually parents will say to me at that point, "But he is going to freak out. He's just going to have a major meltdown." Well, you have to ask yourself, is a big tantrum, or a meltdown, or God forbid picking up the plate and toss it across the room, because I definitely have kids like that on my caseload, is that a reasonable response to the fact that there is a tiny piece of broccoli on our plate? It's not. And so one of the things we look into is how much anxiety can be coming into play when it comes to having a very picky eater. So that's something I talk about with parents quite a bit. But where they can start is starting with just a tablespoon of new food on the child's plate.

Stephanie: (28:30)
Those are wonderful suggestions, and I love that they are things that we could all start doing right away, so thank you very much.

Stephanie: (28:40)
After speaking with Malina and Melanie, I considered my own relationship with food, as well as how I might be affecting my son's experience. I've long considered the impact of his food allergies. Do they make him more apprehensive about trying things? Have they contributed to a more narrow palate? But in what ways might I be contributing to his relationship with food? We don't force him to finish food, but we periodically offer a reward for trying something new. I don't pack juice in his lunch, regardless of how many of his friends do, and we talk about sugar intake. I try very hard to let him trust his internal cues. Some days he eats all carbs, others, all protein, and for the most part, my husband and I just roll with it.

All of these things big and small are affecting how he sees food. Is it an evil? Is a comfort? Is it love? Is it dangerous like his allergies have taught him? Is it simply nourishment? The way he views and interacts with food for his lifetime will be shaped over the next several years, and the power I have as a parent to try to make that experience a positive one, is tremendous. When we spend time in the kitchen, we can enhance our children's relationship with food in amazing ways. And I really don't think we need to be Julia Child seven nights a week to accomplish this goal. So your mission this month, should you choose to accept it, is to think about your family’s relationship with food. What does it look like? What would you like to change, if anything? Then make a plan and get your kiddos in the kitchen. After all, that nourishes their relationship with food as well as their relationship with you.

Stephanie:
Thanks for joining me for Kiddos in the Kitchen. I'm your host Stephanie Conner with a reminder from my son.

Conner:
If you like my mom's podcast as much as I do, you could subscribe on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stephanie:
That's right, Conner.

Stephanie:
You can also view the show notes, subscribe to our newsletter, and check out all of our other content at kiddosinthekitchen.com where kiddos cook on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I'll be back next month with another fresh episode. Until then, I encourage you to get your kiddos in the kitchen.