GROWING UP HEALTHY, PROTECTING YOUR CHILD FROM DISEASES

Synopsis

Whether you're expecting a child, are the parent of a newborn, a toddler, a school-aged child, or an adolescent...if they're under your guidance you still have a chance to offer them the gift of a healthy, disease-free life.

We as parents have it within our power to help protect our children from disease and very possibly lengthen their lives. By paying careful attention to the foods our children are eating, by teaching them about nutrition and making some important alterations in their diets, we can become take-action parents on the front lines against future illness.

Growing Up Healthy contains the lifesaving knowledge we all need to shield our children from disease and help them grow into strong, fit adults. Based on groundbreaking research that shows the link between childhood nutrition and chronic illness in later years, this landmark book shows how feeding our children right during the years when their young bodies are growing can lessen and even prevent their risk of developing many debilitating and deadly chronic adult diseases -- obesity, heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, osteoporosis, and cancer.

In Growing Up Healthy, Joan Lunden, one of America's most trusted journalists and most visible working moms, teams up with Dr. Myron Winick, a leading expert in childhood nutrition, to produce a guide that shows how to feed our children from birth through adolescence; how to teach our children good health and eating habits; how to protect them from the ravages of so-called "adult diseases"; and how to add quality years to our children's life span.

Annotation

This book advises parents about how to raise healthy, nutrionally conscious children.

Publishers Weekly

This overreaching book assumes all "take-action," "proactive" parents will dedicate themselves to their children's nutritional needs from delivery through the teen years. In order to ensure their "cute chubby child" won't "go on to become a fat teenager and adult, at risk for obesity, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a shorter life," parents' attention to what their kids eat must be unflagging, say the authors. They prescribe researching a family medical tree, tracking children's growth and computing their body mass index. Diligent moms and dads must get young ones to love exercise, fish and vegetables and must make meals fun and snacks healthy. If Good Morning America cohost Lunden, whom pediatrician Winick calls "one of America's most famous and visible working moms," can do it, so can readers. Most of the book's real advice, however, is commonsense and can be found in any basic nutrition guide. And the authors' assertions regarding the relationship between a specific childhood nutritional regimen and adult disease have few studies to back them up. So they hedge: "We now recognize that because of the diets our children consume, some... diseases may begin in early childhood or infancy-even in the womb." But based on this uncertain hypothesis, Winick proclaims, "we now know that we can intervene on those diseases and perhaps change the course of our children's lives." Perhaps. But it's also possible that this book will merely turn mealtimes into parental guilt-trips. (May 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.