Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [150]
If your family is vegan and your teen wants to eat meat or dairy products, you can accommodate everyone. Be aware that consuming occasional animal foods can cause stomach problems, gas or indigestion. Providing only healthy foods at home, as well as one or two high-quality, organic nonvegan items may be a good alternative to forcing your kid to leave the house and get the less nutritious foods that she desires. (Flip to Chapter 8 for more information on coexisting with nonvegans.)
Cooking in the kitchen with the kids
Start cooking with your kids at a young age to ensure that they’re comfortable preparing meals. It’s one of the most important life skills any human can develop. Kids as young as about 2 years old can start helping with meals by picking out fruit at the grocery store, pouring premeasured ingredients into a bowl, or stirring and whisking recipes with adult supervision.
Every person in the house can help plan a menu and participate in some way in its creation. By looking through recipe books, writing a shopping list, going to the grocery store and farmer’s market, and preparing the meal with you, your young person will have a vested interest in each healthy, vegan meal he eats.
As kids get older, they can take more responsibility in the kitchen and help more with cooking meals. Tween-aged kids can even get involved with food on a more intimate level by helping to grow a few herbs or vegetables in the garden. Even a potted tomato plant can be a wonderful source of pride for a young person.
Media Watch: Teaching Your Kids to Decode the Messages
Our kids may as well have big bull’s-eyes on their backs when it comes to advertisers. Tweens and teenagers are two of the most desirable target markets, leading most global brands to have a “tween strategy.” The average American kid is exposed to more than 100 media messages and commercials a day from television, radio, billboards, magazines, and the Internet. We live in a consumer culture, and the effects on children are maddening.
In this section, I help you deal with this advertising. I show you how to develop a healthy media strategy for your home by linking the vegan ethics of cruelty-free living with the commercial messages that children are inundated with. Uncovering the hidden costs of all those advertised foods and products can help everyone in your family be mentally and physically healthier.
Decoding eating disorders
Dieting to lose weight has become an epidemic in our modern culture — and with good reason. We’re one of the fattest, most unhealthy countries on earth. However, pre-teens and teenagers are especially vulnerable to the family and media messages about the benefits of being thin, and their behavior can have dangerous consequences. For example, anorexia, which affects mostly young girls and women, is an eating disorder where the person stops eating and loses an excessive amount of weight. They do this because they’re overly concerned about their body shape and “getting fat.”
Teenagers may choose to adopt a vegan diet for many reasons. Animal rights are one of the top concerns of these young people, and health may be another issue. The American Dietetic Association (ADA) has expressed the opinion that vegan and vegetarian diets could be more prevalent among anorexic teens because they offer a way to hide eating disorders. However, the ADA states that being vegan (or vegetarian) doesn’t cause people to become anorexic.
While eating a vegan diet doesn’t in itself lead to eating disorders, a tween or teen who’s constantly dieting and decides to go vegan may be using this new diet as a way to further restrict her calories. Keep an eye on the child’s health and appearance. If you feel that she’s developing an eating disorder, seek the advice of a trained professional.
For the health of your entire family, it’s wise to avoid overt media images from magazines, television, and movies that push the idea that being thin is the only way to be beautiful and loved. Find healthy images of women, including athletes,