A Healthy Summer Treat

There are a few times each year when we’re more apt than usual to indulge in delicious but not always healthy foods. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And summertime? You bet!

Think of burgers, hot dogs and corn dogs at a theme park, ballpark or beach boardwalk. Think of the deep-fried everything that’s fair food. Fourth of July barbecue. Ice cream and popsicles. Casseroles and other comfort foods at family gatherings. Rich entrees or desserts in restaurants while traveling, just as a “special treat.” Sodas, lemonade and other sugar-dense drinks.

Perhaps the one saving grace is that we also tend to be more active in the summer, so we burn off some of the excess intake.

But summer treats don’t need to be unhealthy. Instead of just saying, “No,” why not provide healthier alternatives? And by making the effort to provide better ones, we can be good role models for the children in our lives, showing how making healthy choices can be enjoyable.


Here’s a recipe for one such summer treat: a gluten-  and dairy-free pineapple upside down cake, by Jim’s sister, Mary Hendrick, who’s currently writing a recipe book and launching a website on gluten-free cooking.

Mary’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Ingredients

• 11 tbs butter (1 stick plus 3 tbs) or coconut oil
  I use unsalted butter, as it is cleaner than salted and doesn’t add so much sodium.
• 1 cup coconut palm sugar (or less, to taste)
  This can be found in most natural or health food stores or ordered online. It may be a bit chunky. If so, just smooth it out with a rolling pin.
• Pineapple slices – enough to cover bottom of pan
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups of Pamela’s Pancake Mix
  This can be found in most natural or health food stores or ordered online.
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk
  This can be found in the refrigerated section of most natural or health food stores or ordered online.

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. Melt 3 tbs of butter OR take 3 tbs of melted coconut oil, and spread it evenly over the bottom of an 8″ square pan.
3. Sprinkle 1/3 cup of coconut palm sugar evenly over the greased pan.
4. Arrange pineapple slices on the bottom of the greased and sugared pan.
5. In a medium bowl, cream together 1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter or coconut oil and the remaining coconut palm sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla until light and fluffy.
6. Combine pancake mix and salt, and add to creamed mixture alternately with the coconut milk.
7. Spread the batter over the pineapple in the pan, making sure to cover the fruit completely.
8. Bake 40 – 50 minutes, until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
9. Serve warm out of pan or, if desired, allow the cake to cool, then invert it onto a serving dish.

This dish works well with other fruits, too, such as apples, peaches or even a mixture.

Enjoy!

And for more ideas on improving children’s nutrition, be sure to join us for our upcoming Children’s Wellness Conference, where Dr. Michelle Ratcliffe – Manager of the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Farm to School Program – will be one of our featured speakers. Changing school food can improve children’s health and learning, develop healthy lifelong habits and connect schools with their local communities. Learn how to make a difference in your school and community with one of the key issues of our age – food!

Learn more about the inaugural Children’s Wellness Conference. The full program of speakers and sessions is available here.

Helping Kids Eat Better & Make Healthy Choices

If there’s any silver lining to the ongoing obesity epidemic, it’s that we’re finally coming to understand that what we eat matters – not just how much we eat but the quality of our food. Over the past decade, the conversation about this has been getting louder and more faceted as books like Fast Food Nation, Food Politics and The Omnivore’s Dilemma – not to mention films like Super Size Me and Food, Inc. – have captured the public’s imagination. As a society, we’ve debated ideal diets, sustainability issues, food safety and food security. We’ve come to know about food deserts and the damage that highly processed, industrial food does not just to our bodies but to the earth itself.

Lately, there’s been an increasing amount of talk about improving school lunches to improve student health, as well as help instill healthier eating habits outside of school. This comes on the heels of various legislation to get sodas and other sugary drinks out of the schools (or voluntary withdrawals such as that being done by PepsiCo) and in anticipation of revisions to the Child Nutrition Act. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative includes improvement of school lunches as a key component in combating childhood obesity. Individual teachers are also bringing attention to the subject, such as “Mrs. Q,” who’s eating school lunch each day for a year, “just like the kids,” and blogging about it at Fed Up with Lunch: The School Lunch Project.

 

SpecialKRB/Flickr

 

Most prominent of the efforts to improve the quality of school lunches – some might say notorious – is, of course, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which began airing on ABC TV a few weeks ago. This reality show documents Oliver’s attempt to help residents of Huntington, West Virginia – rated the “most unhealthy city in the United States” – commit themselves to better nutrition, starting with improving school lunches, replacing the ubiquitous chicken fingers, fries, pizza and sweetened, flavored milk with more nutritious, whole food-based meals. Many have lauded his efforts, glad for the attention he brings to the subject, while others have lambasted him for arrogance, short-sightedness and an inability to appreciate the vast number of forces that combine to make school lunches less than healthy but better than nothing.

It’s clear that, as with any highly complex problem, there’s no silver bullet here. Change will have to come from many fronts and address many diverse issues. Likewise, each of us who cares about kids will have to take individual action to help bring positive change into being. That said, considering how teachers and school staff are the adults who kids spend the most time with other than their parents or guardians, we are in a unique position to help spur that change not just in the cafeteria but in the classroom and at home.

Any number of Yoga Calm activities can be integrated with a health curriculum. Even just nurturing awareness about the body and how it works can help children become more sensitive to how what they eat affects them physically. But one activity can be especially helpful in guiding children to consider what they eat, and that’s the “Mindful Snack,” included in our book Yoga Calm for Children. For it, children help prepare a fancy way of eating a small snack and then reflect on the food before eating – what it’s like, where it comes from, how it got to be here and so on. Through this simple activity, we can nurture consciousness about eating, as well as community, the connections among us and the need for each other.

With all the attention being given to the food kids eat and the need to teach them how to make wise choices, we encourage you to try this activity with your own students or kids – and if you do, to share the results in the comments.

 

Late-breaking news: Just as we were getting ready to publish the above post, we got confirmation that Michelle Markesteyn Ratcliffe, PhD, Farm to School Program Manager for the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Food Innovation Center, will be a featured speaker at our upcoming Children’s Wellness Conference.

In her work at the ODA, Dr. Ratcliffe directs a wide-range of initiatives that promote farm to school programs and enables schools to feature healthy, locally sourced products in their cafeterias, and provide students with food and garden-based learning opportunities. She has worked on a variety of agricultural operations, direct marketed agricultural products to individuals and institutions, taught youth and adults about agriculture, and advocated for farm to school policies. Dr Ratcliffe’s research areas include the influence of farm to school and school gardens on students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to fruit and vegetable consumption.

The Children’s Wellness Conference will be held at Still Meadow Retreat Center on June 23-24 and features presentations, discussion panels and expert guest speakers on a variety of children’s health topics including Yoga Calm applications for ADHD, preschool, counseling, family work, physical/health education, occupational therapy, working with adults and therapeutics. A unique gathering of creative professionals, the Children’s Wellness Conference also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback and guidance in charting Yoga Calm’s development.

Registration is now open. Learn more.

The Art of Living: Mindfulness

 

Italy and food: two words that are synonymous for anyone who has been here. The Italians love their food – not just the act of eating but food as a metaphor for life. We see it everywhere here in Casperia, where we are conducting our first international Yoga Calm workshop. We see it in the connection with growing their food, the markets, the time spent preparing meals, and hours (yes, hours!) spent eating casually with friends and family.

The first time I recognized this was thirty years ago in Venice, visiting a friend who had married an Italian goldsmith. Our long, leisurely meal, eating course after course of delicious food with ten friends in a beautiful setting – and in the middle of the day, no less! – struck me profoundly as a testament to community and the importance of appreciating life. It was timeless and seemingly indulgent departure from my usual “productive” American life.

Now here I am again in Italy. It’s kind of a time warp, really, sitting here now in a 500 year old village high in the Sabine mountains, once again enjoying leisurely and carefully prepared meals. Even two hours away, there amidst rush and madness of Rome, people still relax and thoroughly enjoy their food. It feels as though nothing has changed.

And yet, as I just discovered from our Italian host, things are changing, particularly for children. They, too are under the same pressures as American kids, with modern media, video games, fast food and the like. The Italians are trying to hang on to humane and mindful ways of living, just as we are.

This is one of the reasons why we created activities such as “Mindful Snack” in our book, Yoga Calm for Children. This one centers on conscious eating: enjoying and appreciating our food, the people who grow and bring it to us, and the art of polite conversation. It is about community, the connections among us, our need for each other.

And in this way, it’s also about hope for the next generation, as Lynea recently saw after using the activity with a group of 7th graders. At the end, they spoke at length about how much they “liked having a quiet party with their friends.” For all the distractions rivaling for kids’ attention today, they still appreciate the experience of being appreciative, of being mindful, of feeling connected.

- Jim Gillen