Bad Foods or Bad Behaviors?

This past month I have been bombarded with the notion of 'bad foods' and I don't mean 'past the expiration date kind of bad.' My daughter is in dance and at competitions they are banned from bringing 'junk food' with them and can only bring 'healthy' foods. While in theory this looks like a good idea, in practice it falls apart and here's why:

The world will always be full of Twinkies, Ho-Hoes, Ding Dongs, candy bars, pop, and even spam. Unless a nuclear holocaust occurs, we are stuck with some of these ultra tasty and not-so-great food choices. Children growing up today are faced with a plethora of choices that we never had and decisions we were never confronted with. Some of those choices are going to involve food. Rather than banning 'bad foods' entirely, it's our responsibility to teach our children how and when to make which food choices.

A healthy diet is a BALANCED diet, one that will invariably include fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, grains, and yes, the inevitable and discretionary, Twinkie. A balanced diet also includes exercise--hence the new look to the Food Pyramid today. I encourage everyone to take a look at the MyPyramid website at www.mypyramid.gov and utilize the activities and information there in teaching what a balanced diet really is.

Is it the end of the world if you eat a Twinkie? I've yet to see anyone struck by lightning simply by opening the Twinkie package. Is it wrong to eat a Twinkie 4 times a day? I'm gonna go with yes on that one. So in reality, the food itself isn't 'bad' but rather they way we live with this food can lead to some bad behaviors with food.

If we don't teach our children self-control with the junk food, they won't learn how to live as an adult with it. Because you can restrict every junk food in the world while they are children, but once they hit that independent, college or adult bound life--suddenly the supermarket is filled with temptation. It's like Girls Gone Wild but with food instead of instead of alcohol and flashers.

The task for adults is not to label foods bad or good but rather teach our children how to live with food and teach better behaviors related to food. Learning to balance and control impulsivity for anything in life is a monumental and developmental task for children and young adults. All that good 'frontal lobe' executive functioning activity and decision making ability takes time to develop--and really isn't fully developed till around the age 25. Learning to live a life with food takes time to develop and our job is to guide children and young adults toward independent choices.

I would hope Dance teams and others in the world would learn to say 'Balanced Snacks or Foods' rather than healthy or junk food decisions. Because in reality, we have to learn to live with both. In reality, there are no bad foods, only bad behaviors.