Maddux turns four this summer. He’s been our pickiest eater, by far. He would live on a diet of chocolate alone, if we were to let him. And we give in more then we should: chocolate chip pancakes, seemingly healthy chocolate-flavored “nutrition” bars geared towards kids, chocolate soy milk, or an “all natural” chocolate cereal from Trader Joes. Seems like chocolate is a frequently used to get him to compromise and eat something good for him.

What are we doing wrong?

Fussiness seems to be natural part of a child’s development. They distrust anything new. And it is a daily challenge to find something kids will eat. There’s a balance of concerns. On the one hand, obesity is a growing national epidemic, especially among kids. But most parents have an instinctual concern that kids will eat too little and end up with nutritional deficits. Most of us (parents) come from the “Clean Your Plate Before You Get Up From the Table” generation. We feel like it is our job to get the kids to eat, when really it is our job to offer the right foods for mealtime, exposing them to a healthy variety of foods.

According to Harriet Worobey, the director of the Rutgers University Nutritional Sciences Preschool, these are five mistakes that we as parents often make feeding the little ones.

Sending children out of the kitchen. We usually do not involve kids in preparing meals. With hot stoves, sharp knives, and boiling water, the kitchen doesn’t seem like the right place for them. It’s quicker and easier to cook when they’re in the next room and Spongebob is babysitting them. But studies suggest that getting kids involved can make them more interested in trying new foods.

Researchers at Teachers College at Columbia University studied how cooking with a child affects the child’s eating habits. In one study, nearly 600 children from kindergarten to sixth grade took part in a nutrition curriculum intended to get them to eat more vegetables and whole grains. Some children, in addition to having lessons about healthful eating, took part in cooking workshops. The researchers found that children who had cooked their own foods were more likely to eat those foods in the cafeteria, and even ask for seconds, than children who had not had the cooking class.

When children are involved in meal preparation, “they come to at least try the food,” said Isobel Contento, professor of nutrition education at Teachers College and a co-author of the study. “Kids don’t usually like radishes, but we found that if kids cut up radishes and put them in the salad, they love the radishes.”

Pressuring them to take a bite. I am often guilty of this. As an example, last night I made a healthy pizza of whole wheat dough, fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. It was excellent. Maddux likes pizza, but he saw a “piece of salad” (basil) on his slice and refused to eat anything. We have ice cream in the freezer and I, strategically, announced that whomever ate their pizza could have ice cream for dessert. Did it work? Well, it did for the other kids! Not Maddux.

Demanding that a child eat at least one bite, tasting something new, seems reasonable, but it is likely to backfire. Studies show that children react negatively when parents pressure them to eat foods, even if the pressure offers a reward. In one study at Pennsylvania State University, researchers asked children to eat vegetables and drink milk, offering them stickers and television time if they did. Later in the study, the children expressed dislike for the foods they had been rewarded for eating.

“Parents say things like ‘eat your vegetables and you can watch TV,’ but we know that kind of thing doesn’t work either,” said Leann L. Birch, director of Penn State’s childhood obesity research center and a co-author of the study. “In the short run, you might be able to coerce a child to eat, but in the long run, they will be less likely to eat those foods.”

What we should do is put the food on the table and encourage them to try it, but don’t complain if they refuse, and don’t offer praise if they taste it. Just try to frame the event as a normal, daily ritual. Have a “It’s just what we do” kind of attitude and just ask if they want some more and try to stay neutral.

Keep the junk food out of reach. If we buy chips or cookies or a questionable food item like fruit roll-ups, we try to hide them on the top pantry shelf in order to keep the kids from binging on this stuff, or filling up before dinner. This probably leads to two unwanted consequences: the kids longing for these items, and unnecessary head injuries as Maddux climbs from stool, to dog food bin, to lower shelves and falls trying to reach the Oreos.

In another Penn State study, researchers experimented to determine whether forbidden foods were more desirable. Children were seated at tables and given unlimited access to plates of apple or peach cookie bars — two foods the youngsters had rated as “just O.K.” in earlier taste tests. With another group, some bars were served on plates, while some were placed in a clear cookie jar in the middle of the table. The children were told that after 10 minutes, they could snack on cookies from the jar. The researchers found that restricting the cookies had a profound effect: consumption more than tripled compared with when the cookies were served on plates. Other studies show that children whose food is highly restricted at home are far more likely to binge when they have access to forbidden foods.

The lesson is to not buy the foods that we feel like we need to restrict and instead offer healthy snack alternatives and free access to the pantry.

Serving boring food. Trying to eat right myself, I’m likely to prepare some fresh, steamed asparagus, with just a little seasoning only. Tastes great to me, and is obviously very healthy. But when I was a kid? No way. There’s nothing wrong with dressing up fresh vegetables with a little butter, ranch dressing (Jack will eat his shoe laces if we were to serve them with “ranch”) or cheese sauce. The added calories are worth the tradeoff of introducing the new vegetable.

Giving up too soon. Eating preferences change, and often a child’s refusal to eat something at one meal may not be due to taste anyway. It might just be an attitude thing or a power struggle. So we should keep preparing a variety of healthful foods and putting them on the table, even if a child refuses to take a bite. In young children, it may take 10 or more attempts over several months to introduce a food.

Susan B. Roberts, a Tufts University nutritionist and co-author of the book “Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health,” suggested a “rule of 15” — putting a food on the table at least 15 times to see if a child will accept it. Once a food is accepted, parents should use “food bridges,” finding similarly colored or flavored foods to expand the variety of foods a child will eat. If a child likes pumpkin pie, for instance, try mashed sweet potatoes and then mashed carrots. If a child loves corn, try mixing in a few peas or carrots. Even if a child picks them out, the exposure to the new food is what counts.

“As parents, you’re going to make decisions as to what you want to serve,” Ms. Worobey said. “But then you just have to relax and realize children are different from day to day.”

Just a few scenes from the festive day…

Is there enough yellow on the screen now?

It feels like the first day of Spring. The weather is glorious. The annual tourist migration has started. And the Old Salts have rolled boulders in front of their caves in the fashionable mid-island district.

So it’s time to celebrate, and share a recipe for pancakes. There is nothing fancy about this recipe, and yet it makes perfect pancakes, and is so simple it completely removes the temptation to buy pancake mixes. I found the recipe online several years ago and have made it many times.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 cup well-shaken buttermilk

You mix this up and make eight 3-inch pancakes in a big, medium-hot cast iron skillet with canola oil and/or butter. The secret to the recipe is the buttermilk which, if you’re like us, you never have on hand. But that is still an easy remedy. If you take a cup of regular milk (whatever fat content you have in the frig) and add a tablespoon of white vinegar or sour cream to it, stir it well, and let it sit for 5-10 minutes, you have buttermilk.

This morning I’ve seen the Bluejays and the Orioles are in town. I’m waiting for a bird wearing Red Sox to show up at the feeders!

The Bush Administration apparently looked at Slim Fast and Jenny Craig diet plans to justify the calorie-restricted diets it fed prisoners who were being interrogated.

From the Huffington Post:

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1,000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1,000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” the footnote reads. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Rachel at the F-Word blog wonders what that means for those looking at such diets:

The fact that the same calorie restriction employed by commercial diet mongers is also used alongside such torture techniques as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual and physical abuse is, in my view, even more telling.

Can you tell I am on vacation this week? It would be great if life was made up of bike rides and zooming in on the birds at the feeder.

We now have both a male and female downy woodpecker visiting the suet feeders and I was able to get a couple of better pictures of the male.

Also noticed at the feeders today, pine siskins, which I had to look up in the books. They look like boring finches until they fly, and then you see the patch of yellow on their backs, between their wings. They also don’t go for the thistle seed like the goldfinches, and prefer the suet. Only, they seem to have trouble landing on the cages, so they flutter like overgrown, clumsy hummingbirds and pick off pieces of the suet.

And later I was startled by a brief flash of color. When I looked out, I thought I just saw a crow, until the sun hit it just right and I recognized a male common grackle, with its iridescent blues, purples, and bronzes, and its stark yellow eye. This was as close as it got.

Now I’m not really much of a birder. So someone correct me if I have ID’ed these birds incorrectly.

During this past year I have made a lot of lifestyle changes. I am eating better. Eating less. And exercising more. Fortunately, this has resulted in significant weight loss, that a lot of people have noticed. Given that obesity is quickly becoming the epidemic of our age, many people are asking “How’d you do it?”

There is not one particular secret…no special new medicine, for example. I have found several online sites that help, however. I want to feature one in this post.

Using this site, you can track what you’re eating in amazing detail. Sure, you can look at a label and see how many calories a food has, and you can see how much is from protein and fat. But look up the same food at this site and you can see so much more depth.

For example, take a simple boneless, skinless chicken breast half grilled with 1/4 teaspoon canola oil. After selecting the ingredients and clicking to create a “recipe,” you will learn your entree contains 5 grams fat and 27 grams protein. But Nutrition Data (ND) goes much deeper. Glance at ND’s nutritional target map to learn that your chicken recipe has a fullness factor of 3.1 and it gets 2 1/2 stars out of five as a weight-loss choice based on the recipe’s total profile for how many nutrients per calorie it contains. You’ll also get other observations, such as the chicken is low in sodium, and exactly which nutrients it has (vitamin B-6 with 1/2 milligram, protein, niacin and selenium). Scroll down a bit further and you can see its glycemic load (0) and its caloric ratio. You can get an amino acid score (136) and learn what that means. And fat? You’ll get 5.3 grams total, including 1 gram saturated and 266 milligrams of healthier omega-3 fatty acids.

In all, a very useful site for anyone with specific nutritional needs, as well as for someone who simply wants to better understand what they’re eating.

At sunrise this morning the island was, as usual, cloaked in a thick fog. I decided to take the camera and go out for a bike. I have very few pictures of the fog. I find it incredibly tough to capture and everything usually just comes out looking like a grey mess.

But as I rode east on the dirt trails, it gradually changed from no sun, to a sun blocked just enough by the clouds that you could stare at it, to a bright morning sun that you had to look away from. This was when I reached Altar Rock. Stopping, and looking back to the west, back in to the fog, I noticed what I could only think to call a “fogbow.”

I did not realize that this is an actual phenomenon until I got home and found an entry in Wikipedia:

A fogbow is similar to a rainbow, but because of the very small size of water droplets that cause fog, smaller than 0.05 mm, the fog bow has no colors and appears white. Fogbows are sometimes called “white rainbows” or “cloudbows”. Mariners sometimes call them “sea-dogs.”

Unlike a Glory, which has multiple pale colored rings caused by diffraction, the fogbow is entirely white. The fogbow’s relative lack of colors are caused by the relatively smaller water drops… so small that the quantum mechanical wavelength of light becomes important and smears out colors that would be created by larger rainbow water drops.

In anticipation of Ackboater’s comment of “Photoshop” I will tell you that this photo was “doctored” a little bit in post-processing. I applied a Polarization filter which highlighted the blueness of the southern sky, creating a little more contrast with the foggy area.

According to the Nantucket Historical Association…

In the summer of 1937, Tony Sarg and several others promoted a hoax in Nantucket.

Sightings of a sea serpent were advertised… footprints were found… stories published…

Then, the serpent appeared on South Beach (now Washington Extension – not where it was intended to land!): it was one of Sarg’s Macy’s Day Parade balloons.

Tony Sarg (1880-1942) was an American puppeteer, illustrator, designer and painter. He is famous for creating balloons for the Macy department store parades and many illustrations for magazines. He owned a store in Nantucket, the Tony Sarg’s Curiosity Shop.

All of Nantucket must have visited. There are photos of this “sea-serpent” from many scrapbooks of the era.

NHA Flickr Set

I put up suet cages this past weekend and my best customer since has been this Downy Woodpecker. Hard to get a photo of her so far though…