Group Promotes Healthy Eating at Home

A group of parents and a coalition of mission-driven food companies have launched a campaign, Eat Smart Grow Strong, "to promote healthy eating at home."

What’s different about this anti-obesity effort is that it shifts the focus from the schools — where many anti-obesity initiatives take place — and places lots of responsibility on the parents.

In fact, this program encourages and urges parents to take an active role in training their kids to eat better to help prevent childhood obesity, juvenile diabetes and other diet-related health problems.

Hurrah! It’s about time parents band together to take a more active role in make their kids nutrition smart and savvy.

"Kids learn their eating habits at home, and those habits influence the choices they make at school, the mall, and everywhere else they eat for the restof their lives," said parent Susan Lamontagne, one of the campaign’s creators and founder/principal of the Public Interest Media Group.

Eat Smart Grow Strong urges parents to:

• Share strategies with other parents to promote healthy eating on Parent Message Boards.
• Join healthy snack and supper clubs. (We’ve developed all kinds of healthy snack ideas we could offer.)
• Find quick, easy and healthy recipes for family meals.
• Play games to teach kids about nutrition.

Check out campaign’s cute little creature — a Super Market Spy — scoping out the food labels. (I recommend that people become a Savvy Sugar Sleuth(TM).)

Kudos to the parents and food companies doing their part to make kids nutrition-savvy in the home first. Supporters include Annie’s Homegrown, Applegate Farms, Horizon Organic, Newman’s Own, Newman’s Own Organics and Whole Foods Market.

Gratitude goes to DiseaseProof.com, the blog from nutrition-oriented physician Joel Fuhrman, M.D. — author of Disease-Proof Your Child — for the tip about this campaign. And special thanks to DiseaseProof.com writer Henry Abbott for recently mentioning this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog, too.