From Your Health Journal….”Dr. David Katz is one of my favorite reads on the net regarding health and fitness, and I suggest you search him online to sneak a peak at his work, and of course, you can read this full story on the Yahoo page (link below). Dr. Katz discusses snacking in the article, as it has a bad rep contributing to the obesity epidemic – as snacking is many times known as ‘junk food.’ Nowadays, many snacks are fat filled with high calories and processed. The main lesson is to try and make snacks a healthier choice for not only our kids, but for ourselves. Please, visit the Yahoo site to read the entire story, and I am sure you will agree, Dr. Katz makes some excellent points.”

From the article…..

Snacking is much vilified in an age of epidemic obesity, and to some extent rightly so. The appellation “junk food” has come to be all but synonymous with “snack foods.” With regard to many of the popular options, it is clear they are both snacks and junk–and rather less clear that they are food. I am pretty sure I have seen some of them glow in the dark.

Of course, it was never reasonable to allow “junk” to evolve into a food group in the first place, nor to habituate to use of the term as something cute and fun and harmless. It was that much less reasonable to watch the category of junk become a major portion of our diets and a leading source of calories, particularly for our children.

As I have noted on prior occasions, food is the one and only construction material for the growing body of a child. Nutrients, extracted from foods, are used to build cells and tissues, hormones and enzymes. As with a house, or car, or coat, or shoe, the quality, durability, and tolerances of the final product are ultimately determined by the quality of the construction materials. Bad building material produces bad buildings–weak, and prone to untimely failures.

Is the application of such considerations to the growing body of a child you love in any way cute, or fun, or defensibly harmless?

Clearly not, and the costs of the blind eye we have collectively turned to this matter are all around us. Dollars, though numerous, are the least compelling measure of these costs. The more compelling measures are the life being sapped from our children’s years, and the years possibly being siphoned from our children’s lives. The measures include weight and body-mass index far above healthy thresholds.

Which brings us back to snacking. A voluminous scientific literature impugns the snack as part of the problem of epidemic obesity in adults, and particularly in children. None has contributed more decisively to this evidence base than Barry Popkin, Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Now, it matters that snacking has been indicted by no less an authority than Prof. Popkin; he is on everybody’s short list of preeminent nutrition and obesity experts in the world, certainly including mine. In fact, when I grow up, I want to be Barry Popkin.

But, there is a perhaps comparably august opposing voice. My mother. And probably yours, too.

When we were growing up, our mothers told us routinely not to snack. But, if your recollection of those exchanges is at all like mine, you will note that Mom did not say: “Don’t snack or you’ll get fat, acquire adult-onset diabetes in childhood, and possibly shorten your life expectancy.”

To read the full article…..Click here