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Without digging into the details of this particular issue, I'll say that working through food choices with kids is an exhausting process. I have two girls - ag

by grvdrm 3y ago

Without digging into the details of this particular issue, I'll say that working through food choices with kids is an exhausting process. I have two girls - ages 5, 22 months. They both love pouches. I don't love that they love pouches. But, if it comes down to eating/consuming anything vs. not, I'm often siding with consumption vs. nothing. Of course, I can make food for them with high-quality ingredients, and do, but it is nearly impossible to force a kid to eat something you want them to eat vs. whatever it is they have in mind (like a pouch). I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. And, tough to control the situation once they are mostly not at home (school, daycare, w/nanny/friends/etc.) For what it's worth, we have these in my house: - https://lifewaykefir.com/family/probugs/ https://lifewaykefir.com/family/probugs/ - https://siggis.com/categories/pouches https://siggis.com/categories/pouches - https://plumorganics.com/ https://plumorganics.com/

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
For all the shit we give Amazon, one thing I really appreciate about whole foods is that they have automated systems that will email you if something you bought is flagged as contaminated. I got such an email for dried fruit that I bought for my toddler. I felt an indescribable amount of dread, because he ate a lot of it. We got him tested for lead levels and he came back fine, thankfully. In this case, it turned out that several samples in a batch came back elevated, and the recall was conducted out of caution. I’m grateful that we take this stuff seriously, but we need to do better. It is abhorrent that contaminated products clear our existing tests and make their way to children.
- guestbest 3y ago
  What constitutes “fine”. Our daughter’s test went up 250% from the first test a year ago. The culprit seems to be cinnamon as she didn’t like cinnamon at 1 year, but at 2 years she’s more receptive to flavors > Lead, Blood, Capillary: 2.5 MCG/DL (Range: <3.5)
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    Pretty much everyone picks food with heavy metals by taste. It's eve ("accidentally") added to e-cigarettes, to so that the people want to keep smoking.
    - guestbest 3y ago
      I’d like to hear more about this. Do you have any links?
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    His pediatrician specifically ordered the test, examined it, and let us know we had nothing to worry about, so hopefully it wasn't that bad. All I know for now is that it was below the threshold you cited. I'm sorry that that your daughter's test went up, I know that's soul crushing to see happen. When I was freaking out back when I got an email about contamination, I found a study that gave some perspective and made me feel a little better. Obviously for threshold of lead present in any food should be 0, and we should not be complacent, but look at the magnitudes for both the blood concentrations and deltas of IQ they're looking at here: "A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001). An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ points in the meta-analysis. " https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8162884/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8162884/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jeffbee 3y ago
I know every kid is different and I don't blame parents for picky eaters, but kids pick up their habits of food at home very early, before they are old enough to get them at school or from other kids. My kids, who are older, have never heard of fruit pouches, and neither have I. If a kid won't eat what you put in front of them that's their temporary problem. Eventually, they will. I know I had it easy. The first food my first child demanded was more broccoli. But I like to think that's partly because I put the broccoli on the table in the first place.
- scruple 3y ago
  Eh, it's a fine theory but I have twins. One is the pickiest eater ever and getting her to eat is like an on-call sort of situation to be handled personally by mom or me. Her twin sister, these are 4 year olds, ate like 8 pieces of plain, steamed broccoli with her dinner last night. Her 2 year old brother is a great eater, too. The only difference (in routine and exposure to others) between the twin girls is that they're in different preschool classrooms. I've long suspected that she gets a lot of this behavior from other kids in her class.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    At 4 y.o. they aren't just picking behavior from their kindergarten-mates, they're literally sharing food at every possible opportunity. In this environment, awareness of varieties of snacks and kid TV shows both spread faster than infectious diseases.
    - taylodl 3y ago
      Welcome my son Welcome to the machine What did you dream? We told you what to dream As a parent one of the worst things you get to witness is your kids being assimilated into the machine. Nobody wants it. Many try to fight it. All will lose. We've all been assimilated into the machine to some extent.
      - nameless912 3y ago
Freak_NL 3y ago
> I don't love that they love pouches. So why did you get them? If the children are so incredibly fussy that nothing else helps, sure, in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that. I'm sure my four year old gets fed things I wouldn't choose at times, but those are rare exceptions, and at school, after school childcare, and before that day-care, this type of product is just not provided, nor condoned (parents are instructed to provide the child's lunch and fruit for school; parents who give the child a 'pouch' like that do get called out on that). I don't think my kid even knows these exist. > I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. How? Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > So why did you get them? Most likely, they didn't know what would happen. Sure, "everyone knows" this stuff is not the best choice, but also every parent knows that at least half of what "everyone knows" is pure, unadulterated, value-negative bullshit. Or, perhaps their well-meaning friends or relatives got the first pouch. > in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that Sure, until the first time they taste the stuff. We held off with sweets until our older one was ~3 y.o., but this is a feat you can't repeat with a younger sibling, unless you run some kind of ridiculously efficient home prison. Our younger one got up to speed with everything in terms of food and entertainment with her older sister, by then 4 y.o., simply because the latter was always happy to share. I mean, we probably could've stopped it if we really tried. But this stuff isn't even particularly dangerous, unless someone leaks lead in the production, which is a failure mode you can't avoid even with homegrown vegetables. Otherwise, there's only so much effort we'd want to expend over bullshit fear-mongering. Oh, also, a funny thing: we tried early on to substitute the shop-bought pouches with DIY ones - making various forms of smoothies and sludges and putting them in reusable pouches. Guess what, neither of our kids would take more than one sip of anything we made like this. Not that I blame them - obviously anything home-made tastes like shit compared to commercial equivalent, and even a 1.5 y.o. is able to tell when you're trying to substitute something they want with a fake. > Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries. I wanted to say, "tell me you don't have kids without telling..." but I see you do, so let's use this as a reminder that parenting is high-variability occupation. We both have kids at the same age, and where for you this is a perfectly reasonable remark, it made me burst out laughing. I mean, 4 y.o. is the age where whenever two kids meet for more than 5 seconds, chances are they're sharing whatever food they have on hand...
theNJR 3y ago
Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches. We bought a few when we started to transition to solids but never used them. Our one year old eats the protein we are eating (and has since about six months) and then has her own vegetables, cheese, chickpea pasta, etc. Pouches aren’t a reality for her and thus she won’t ask for one. Same with gold fish, fruit juice and a ton of other metabolic disasters. Granted this is easy right now and, to your point, is going to get harder when she enters the school system. I’ll need a strategy for that next.
- taylodl 3y ago
  There is no strategy. You're up against the best devils Madison Avenue has to offer and peer pressure. Even if you win on this front you're going to lose on others. That's the fact of raising a kid in the 21st century in an advertising-saturated culture.
- grvdrm 3y ago
  I wish you the best of luck - not cynically. Especially when your kid can buy their own lunch at school (even if you packed one). In my school district, they will NOT stop a kid from eating what they want to eat. Personally, I don't argue with that. They need to consume something so better it be something that they'll actually eat than nothing (which happens, trust me)
  - theNJR 3y ago
    The best we can do is model good habits and provide a solid foundation. I remember in high school I had a stint of having crouton salads for lunch. That’s exactly as it sounds.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  It's pretty easy until school, or daycare, or television enters the picture.
  - theNJR 3y ago
    My plan for tv is to start with Season 1 of Sesame Street from the 1970s which is on HBO Max. Work up from there. But yah it’s going to be hard.
prismatix 3y ago
FYI you can make your own pouches at home! Buy reusable squeeze pouches online (fun styles and colors to entice the kid) and fill with whatever ingredients you'd like. My kid ate a mixture of store-bought and homemade throughout the pouch years. Everyone who's saying "just don't introduce pouches..." either has the luxury of always being the child's caregiver or just hasn't gotten that far down the road. It's like frozen or fast food. At some point your kid will find out about it. Don't act like it doesn't exist, just offer a better alternative.
- grvdrm 3y ago
  did you ever have an issue with them literally noticing the difference between your homegrown solution vs. store-bought?

by grvdrm 3y ago

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

For all the shit we give Amazon, one thing I really appreciate about whole foods is that they have automated systems that will email you if something you bought is flagged as contaminated. I got such an email for dried fruit that I bought for my toddler. I felt an indescribable amount of dread, because he ate a lot of it. We got him tested for lead levels and he came back fine, thankfully. In this case, it turned out that several samples in a batch came back elevated, and the recall was conducted out of caution. I’m grateful that we take this stuff seriously, but we need to do better. It is abhorrent that contaminated products clear our existing tests and make their way to children.

guestbest 3y ago
What constitutes “fine”. Our daughter’s test went up 250% from the first test a year ago. The culprit seems to be cinnamon as she didn’t like cinnamon at 1 year, but at 2 years she’s more receptive to flavors > Lead, Blood, Capillary: 2.5 MCG/DL (Range: <3.5)
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  Pretty much everyone picks food with heavy metals by taste. It's eve ("accidentally") added to e-cigarettes, to so that the people want to keep smoking.
  - guestbest 3y ago
    I’d like to hear more about this. Do you have any links?
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  His pediatrician specifically ordered the test, examined it, and let us know we had nothing to worry about, so hopefully it wasn't that bad. All I know for now is that it was below the threshold you cited. I'm sorry that that your daughter's test went up, I know that's soul crushing to see happen. When I was freaking out back when I got an email about contamination, I found a study that gave some perspective and made me feel a little better. Obviously for threshold of lead present in any food should be 0, and we should not be complacent, but look at the magnitudes for both the blood concentrations and deltas of IQ they're looking at here: "A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001). An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ points in the meta-analysis. " https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8162884/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8162884/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jeffbee 3y ago

I know every kid is different and I don't blame parents for picky eaters, but kids pick up their habits of food at home very early, before they are old enough to get them at school or from other kids. My kids, who are older, have never heard of fruit pouches, and neither have I. If a kid won't eat what you put in front of them that's their temporary problem. Eventually, they will. I know I had it easy. The first food my first child demanded was more broccoli. But I like to think that's partly because I put the broccoli on the table in the first place.

scruple 3y ago
Eh, it's a fine theory but I have twins. One is the pickiest eater ever and getting her to eat is like an on-call sort of situation to be handled personally by mom or me. Her twin sister, these are 4 year olds, ate like 8 pieces of plain, steamed broccoli with her dinner last night. Her 2 year old brother is a great eater, too. The only difference (in routine and exposure to others) between the twin girls is that they're in different preschool classrooms. I've long suspected that she gets a lot of this behavior from other kids in her class.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  At 4 y.o. they aren't just picking behavior from their kindergarten-mates, they're literally sharing food at every possible opportunity. In this environment, awareness of varieties of snacks and kid TV shows both spread faster than infectious diseases.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Welcome my son Welcome to the machine What did you dream? We told you what to dream As a parent one of the worst things you get to witness is your kids being assimilated into the machine. Nobody wants it. Many try to fight it. All will lose. We've all been assimilated into the machine to some extent.
    - nameless912 3y ago

Freak_NL 3y ago

> I don't love that they love pouches. So why did you get them? If the children are so incredibly fussy that nothing else helps, sure, in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that. I'm sure my four year old gets fed things I wouldn't choose at times, but those are rare exceptions, and at school, after school childcare, and before that day-care, this type of product is just not provided, nor condoned (parents are instructed to provide the child's lunch and fruit for school; parents who give the child a 'pouch' like that do get called out on that). I don't think my kid even knows these exist. > I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. How? Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> So why did you get them? Most likely, they didn't know what would happen. Sure, "everyone knows" this stuff is not the best choice, but also every parent knows that at least half of what "everyone knows" is pure, unadulterated, value-negative bullshit. Or, perhaps their well-meaning friends or relatives got the first pouch. > in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that Sure, until the first time they taste the stuff. We held off with sweets until our older one was ~3 y.o., but this is a feat you can't repeat with a younger sibling, unless you run some kind of ridiculously efficient home prison. Our younger one got up to speed with everything in terms of food and entertainment with her older sister, by then 4 y.o., simply because the latter was always happy to share. I mean, we probably could've stopped it if we really tried. But this stuff isn't even particularly dangerous, unless someone leaks lead in the production, which is a failure mode you can't avoid even with homegrown vegetables. Otherwise, there's only so much effort we'd want to expend over bullshit fear-mongering. Oh, also, a funny thing: we tried early on to substitute the shop-bought pouches with DIY ones - making various forms of smoothies and sludges and putting them in reusable pouches. Guess what, neither of our kids would take more than one sip of anything we made like this. Not that I blame them - obviously anything home-made tastes like shit compared to commercial equivalent, and even a 1.5 y.o. is able to tell when you're trying to substitute something they want with a fake. > Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries. I wanted to say, "tell me you don't have kids without telling..." but I see you do, so let's use this as a reminder that parenting is high-variability occupation. We both have kids at the same age, and where for you this is a perfectly reasonable remark, it made me burst out laughing. I mean, 4 y.o. is the age where whenever two kids meet for more than 5 seconds, chances are they're sharing whatever food they have on hand...

theNJR 3y ago

Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches. We bought a few when we started to transition to solids but never used them. Our one year old eats the protein we are eating (and has since about six months) and then has her own vegetables, cheese, chickpea pasta, etc. Pouches aren’t a reality for her and thus she won’t ask for one. Same with gold fish, fruit juice and a ton of other metabolic disasters. Granted this is easy right now and, to your point, is going to get harder when she enters the school system. I’ll need a strategy for that next.

taylodl 3y ago
There is no strategy. You're up against the best devils Madison Avenue has to offer and peer pressure. Even if you win on this front you're going to lose on others. That's the fact of raising a kid in the 21st century in an advertising-saturated culture.
grvdrm 3y ago
I wish you the best of luck - not cynically. Especially when your kid can buy their own lunch at school (even if you packed one). In my school district, they will NOT stop a kid from eating what they want to eat. Personally, I don't argue with that. They need to consume something so better it be something that they'll actually eat than nothing (which happens, trust me)
- theNJR 3y ago
  The best we can do is model good habits and provide a solid foundation. I remember in high school I had a stint of having crouton salads for lunch. That’s exactly as it sounds.
NoGravitas 3y ago
It's pretty easy until school, or daycare, or television enters the picture.
- theNJR 3y ago
  My plan for tv is to start with Season 1 of Sesame Street from the 1970s which is on HBO Max. Work up from there. But yah it’s going to be hard.

prismatix 3y ago

FYI you can make your own pouches at home! Buy reusable squeeze pouches online (fun styles and colors to entice the kid) and fill with whatever ingredients you'd like. My kid ate a mixture of store-bought and homemade throughout the pouch years. Everyone who's saying "just don't introduce pouches..." either has the luxury of always being the child's caregiver or just hasn't gotten that far down the road. It's like frozen or fast food. At some point your kid will find out about it. Don't act like it doesn't exist, just offer a better alternative.

grvdrm 3y ago
did you ever have an issue with them literally noticing the difference between your homegrown solution vs. store-bought?