Before we get into June's nutrition news, here's what you may have missed this month at CIHAS...
We launched a new series! All about kids' growth, appetite and changing bodies. We've covered babies and little kids, and tweens and teens - next week we're looking at supporting teens' changing bodies, protecting embodiment and preventing eating disorders:
Earlier this week I stumbled across this article from The Guardian's Intensive Kid Feeding Standards Desk. At first glance, I was like, huh maybe they’re taking my feedback on board. But then I read closer and live streamed a conniptions in the Snackcord.
LT: The Guardian: Cooking for kids doesn’t have to be a chore: these three meals are quick, full of flavour and, crucially, fun both to make and to eat.
Also The Guardian: first ingredient - barberries
Thank you for your service Claudine Boulstridge 🫡
Homemade chicken nuggets with celeriac fries I'M DEAD
Oh it's from a book, ofc
*Link to Guardian Bookshop*
These guys read CIHAS:
despite heroic bourgeois efforts
🤣
c.c. @Jennifer Nash I found the antidote to all the GLP-1 chat in this month's NITN
the nuggs don't even have any kind of breading? I'm a fucking vegan and even I know that's not right
Ok, enough fun for now, taking myself back to the Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment
Snacker 1: Homemade chicken nuggets? Fml
LT: She's the recipe tester for Ottolenghi, I'm so far down this rabbit hole
Snacker 2: checks out re: barberries
Snacker 1: Also your bog standard chicken nugget would constitute adventurous eating for my kid. Currently trying to decide on a picnic dinner menu that works around her current approved food groups of crackers and haribo
LT: I’m a nutritionist and I approve this meal plan
Snacker 2: yes my son only eats chicken nuggets from "Old McDonalds"
LT: legitimately just lolled in the library
Snacker 2: I'm never going to correct him, he'll have to figure it out when he learns how to read
**… lots of chat about the funny things our kids say and how we’ll never correct them**
LT: No but seriously, if there's no breading, is it even a nugget??? 🫠
Snacker 2: absolutely not
LT: It looks like a meaty ice hockey puck
Snacker 3: I checked out at the first ingredient - what the heck is a barberry? And which kid is going anywhere near a pickled cucumber?!
**More Snackers enter the chat with cute and funny things their kids have said**
Catharsis complete.
So yeah, if you’re not in the Snackcord, you’re missing out on lots of unfiltered hot takes, Very Hungry Caterpillar character assassinations (he was a VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR not a peckish caterpillar, Rosemary!!), and why my kid might be too bougie for Hackney. But also lots of great advice, support for navigating food and bodies in this hellscape, and a great group of lovely, smart, and very funny people. It’s the only group chat I don’t have on mute!
(For the uninitiated, the Snackcord is a Discord server – basically like an old school chat room – that is completely private and only accessible to CIHAS paid subscribers. It means we can keep the trolls and the fatphobes out and can discuss recent posts, news topics, get advice for dealing with friends who are judgy about bodies or what you or your kids eat, get relief from the constant noise about GLP-1s – basically it’s just a great place to hang out with people who get it).
The British Nutrition Foundation is a strategic alliance between industry, nutrition science, healthcare, and government. Chris van Tulleken hates them. I think the feeling might be mutual because the title reads like my six-year-old when I try to talk to him about anything that isn’t Zelda or Pokemon: ‘can we stop talking about this nowwwww?’. The report is advocating for moving the conversation away from such a myopic focus on UPFs. And yeah, fair, I’m sick of hearing about UPFs too. But the thing is – as with a lot of these kinds of reports – the proposed alternative solutions are a whole bunch of meaningless fluff. ‘Menu architecture’, ‘signposting and multi-component nudges’, ‘multiple traffic lights’ (on the fronts of packaging). The report could have alternatively been titled: All The Empty Buzzwords We Can Think of With Very Little Evidence to Support Efficacy. Anyway, I kind of agree with my boy Tully here; industry is anathema to public health. But here’s where we diverge. He’s not anti-capitalist. I am. In practice that means there’s very little difference between what van Tulleken has proposed and what the BNF have proposed: taxation, reformulation, front-of-packaging labelling. They’re singing off the same hymn sheet. And despite heroic bourgeois efforts, they’re getting nowhere. This is why we need people leading the charge who aren’t afraid to sacrifice their position as the BBC’s darling or upset politician’s funders; otherwise we’re just going to get the same old tepid policies. Next.
There’s a lot in this that’s depressing and alarming but altogether unsurprising considering the widespread marketing and availability of GLP-1s in the US. Those with historical eating disorders finding themselves drawn to using GLP-1s (tablets or injections) and discovering their ED rear its ugly head. Those taking GLP-1s developing new eating disorders. Easy access online to GLP-1s meaning they’re being abused by those ‘obsessed with being thin’ (as if it’s their fault and they don’t live in, well, this society?), or by under 18s. Pharmaceutical companies dodging responsibility, claiming practitioners/providers are responsible for assessing risk of EDs in patients (when EDs are not even listed as a side effect of GLP-1s). A class of 8th-graders singing the Ozempic advertising jingle during a body image class. One individual suffering with an ED describes GLP-1s as ‘anorexic heroin’, and another in recovery references the addictive nature of weight loss.
Ok, onto Ozempic butt, social media spew and circadian fasting...
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