Stealth health
When I originally wrote about the idea of sneaking vegetables into your kids’ foods to boost the vitamin content I hadn’t yet read the book Deceptively Delicious. Honestly, I still haven’t read it, but I’m not yet in a position where I think it would be helpful. I still put extra veggies in foods that allow for it and eat a few vegetable based vegetarian meals a week. Sam is still in a pro-vegetable stage where he’ll cry for broccoli and beg for frozen peas so I don’t really think it’s necessary to slip avocado into a brownie when he’ll probably just want to eat a cracker anyway. I’m sure that someday he may go through a stage where he refuses to eat vegetables on principal and then perhaps I’ll feel the need to stick some kale into a smoothie, but until that day I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing- eating well, enjoying vegetables and encouraging my family to do the same.
In October I wrote
But when it comes down to it, how much vitamin content remains when you steam and puree vegetables then cook them all over again? When spread across six servings of macaroni and cheese how much of the nutrients from the squash remain?
The Houston Chronicle wrote about sneaking vegetables into kids in a piece called Attack of the stealth desserts. Their experts don’t seem to think you’re really getting that much of the good stuff into your kids when you slip some beets into your cake. The hidden vegetables, [Swanson- a Ph.D dietician] continued, do amp up the cakes’ nutritional profiles, offering doses of dietary fiber and vitamins A and C, “but you are kidding yourself if you think that’s a way to get your vegetable quota for the day.”
But the best part of the article was where they addressed the ethics of sneaking vegetables into treats. The ethicist they quoted for the article said,
“The issue as you briefly describe (is) in effect, a paternalism issue. In a standard paternalism issue what you have is a conflict between the desire to benefit someone and some principal respecting their liberty or autonomy to the effect that you are not allowed to interfere with (it) to promote their own good.
“The usual view would be that paternalism is more justifiable with respect to children than with respect to grown-ups. They have less ability to understand and pursue their own good, so the presumption in favor of respecting their liberty or autonomy - if there at all - is considerably less, and therefore paternalism is more likely to be justified in the form of shoving vegetables in which are good for them. Presumably, the older the kid is and the closer to adulthood, the harder the justification gets to be.”
Incidentally, Phillips has four children. They like vegetables.
Then they asked a 6-year-old what she thought about sneaking vegetables into desserts.
Peggy: How would you feel if you found out your mommy or daddy had snuck beets into something you like, say, a chocolate cake?
Isabella: I’d get really mad because I hate beets.
Peggy: But what if your mommy did it because eating beets will make you strong?
Isabella: I still would be mad at her because I don’t like it and I don’t want to eat something I don’t like.
Peggy: So you’d be mad because you hate beets or because you didn’t know?
Isabella: (emphatically) Both!!
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January 24th, 2008 at 12:17 am
[...] Stealth health Peggy: How would you feel if you found out your mommy or daddy had snuck beets into something you like, say, a chocolate cake? [...]