Protein and Children.

Hello again,

I found this in an old book without copyright so I wrote to the only contact information supplied but have received no answer. If it breaches © please let me know. It’s by Dorothy Law Nolte.

If a child lives with criticism

He learns to condemn.

If a child lives with austerity

He learns to fight.

If a child lives with ridicule

He learns to be shy.

If a child lives with shame

He learns to feel guilty.

If a child lives with tolerance

He learns to be patient.

If a child lives with encouragement

He learns to appreciate.

If a child lives with fairness

He learns justice.

If a child lives with security

He learns to have faith.

If a child lives with approval

He learns to like himself.

If a child lives with acceptance and friendship

He learns to find love in the world.

We breed all these attitudes and outlooks into our children by the way we treat them and others. What they see us doing is what they will copy as usual behavior. Do you yell at the neighbors or spouse? Do you ‘pinch’ a couple of items at the shop? Do you take care of your body and appearance? They see all this.

What we tell them about themselves becomes their belief system. This has been stated before on IQChildren and it’s worth the reminder because of its importance.

You have to be a good parent if you want good kids. It really is a two way process. While the little one grows, you mature. Rather wonderful when you think about it.

Protein is one of the fundamental building blocks of life and we get the majority of our protein from animal meat.

Vegetarians live to ripe old ages by getting their protein from the plant world but what about children? When should they be fed animal products? We have already mentioned cow’s milk and breast milk and found that breast milk is far better. This is what you would expect.

But you wouldn’t expect your child to rip into a steak instead of cereal.

There is only one real preventive to disease and that is starting out at pregnancy with the right natural foods and continuing with raising your child this way. By ‘natural foods’ is meant to get closer to nature and further away from processed or ‘supplemented’ foods.

White bread for instance is wheat in an unrecognizable state. It’s been processed so much that it is worthless as food. They reduce it to nothing and then make a selling point of making it “Enriched” with some vitamin they took out.

That’s like chopping off your leg then offering you a discount on their prosthetic leg. Aren’t you happy you got a discount? Never mind the leg.

Beside protein, babies and the growing child need calcium, iron, vitamins, niacin etc. All of the essentials are available in a vegetarian diet. The controversy seems to be with how much of each. So far there is no consensus on this. That’s because any recommendation has to be general, given that every child is different.

Wheat (that has protein) is fed to cattle to give us meat that has less protein than contained in the vast amount of wheat. It’s only that we would have to eat an ‘unnatural amount’ of wheat to get the same fill of protein. Meat is more concentrated protein. But it takes about ten times the protein given to cows to produce this protein. It takes 8 times the area of land to feed cows than it does to feed grain and fruit eaters.

Because of the concentration, a lot of doctors and nutritionists recommend children not be given meat until their fifth or sixth year. On this basis a vegetarian diet is right.

We get protein from nuts, (crush them and put them in deserts and salads or roast them),

Beans, raw or cooked, in salads, soups or with vegetables, or mashed into burger or potato patties,

Chickpeas can be treated the same as the many varieties of beans.

Tofu can be used in so many ways. Just click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu

Tempeh is also high in B12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempeh

Seeds like sesame you’ve seen on buns and can easily be incorporated into foods in small amounts. I found telling the story of “Open Sesame” with the treasure of the forty thieves helped with acceptance of seeds as a valuable food source to snack on.

Once I was on to that I introduced sunflower and pumpkin stories. What took Cinderella to the ball? What did Jack climb to get to the giant’s castle?

All it takes is a bit of identification with others like advertisers use when they try to sell products by celebrity endorsement. Johnny Weissmuller (the first movie Tarzan) was vegetarian. So are or were Bob Dylan, Da Vinci, George Harrison, Paul and Linda McCartney, Hayley Mills, Michael Jackson, k.d.lang, Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Gere, Julie Christie, Dave Scott (6 times Ironman Triathlon winner), Killer Kowalski (wrestler), Kim Bassinger. The list goes on.

Breast milk contains very little protein so why do we think babies need it? Maybe adult protein requirements have been falsely forced on children.

What do you think?

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Iqteens.blogspot.com has opened so if you have teenagers or are one drop in for a while. As usual, your comments are welcome.

Jay Ross.

© For permission to use any material in IQChildren, email iqchildren@gmail.com I’ll be happy to swap articles.