Children:Nutrition, Behavior and Health-Part Two
Children: Nutrition, Behavior and Health-Part Two
In Part One, we stressed the importance of adequate hydration, and the damaging effects of soda drinking—two simple things that can make a huge difference in a person’s health. In Part Two, our focus will be on the importance of fats for proper brain function, specifically cholesterol.
Cholesterol is one of the most unfairly maligned nutrients that are actually essential to our health, right along with saturated fats. Consider the following: Saturated fats comprise at least 50% of the cell membrane, along with cholesterol, providing the cell membrane with stiffness and integrity. That means every single one of your trillions of cells! Together, they are made out to be the bad guys, reputedly causing heart disease, when in actuality, they are not—but that’s another story and another article. Cholesterol is also a precursor for Vitamin D, the steroid hormones—allowing you to handle stress better—the sex hormones. How can that be a bad thing?! It is known to be vitally important for the proper development of the brain and nervous system in children; in fact, mother’s milk contains a special enzyme to help infants absorb, assimilate and utilize cholesterol better. Cholesterol plays a vital role in the proper functioning of serotonin receptors —the “feel good” neurotransmitter—in the brain. Again, consider all of the children with ADD or ADHD, and all others with serotonin deficient brains—such as obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, etc. Think of all the children (and adults) on SSRI’s (serotonin specific re-uptake inhibitors), who might simply have a deficiency of cholesterol! It is truly amazing—and almost criminal—that these essential nutrients have been made out to be bad for our health.
While we’re on the topic of fats, I’d like to talk about milk. One of the most amazing feats of marketing has been the selling of low- and non-fat milk as health foods. Even in natural food markets, health-conscious people are buying low- and non-fat milk, because it has been brain-washed into us to believe that fats are flat out bad for us. This is so ridiculous, when fats play a part in so many essential roles and functions in our bodies. By the way, the very oils and fats promoted as “heart healthy oils”—the polyunsaturated oils, or “vegetable oils—are actually the ones responsible for producing atherosclerotic plaques. But I digress—let’s get back to low- and non-fat milk. It’s the fat in the milk that contains most of the nutrient value in milk—the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Additionally, these fat-soluble vitamins (especially vitamin D) help the body absorb, assimilate, and utilize the minerals present in milk (in abundance). So here’s the amazing feat of marketing: They take out the fat (cream), sell it (low- and non-fat milk) as “health food”, and then sell the cream. The dairy industry has got some marketing and capitalistic geniuses working for them. But the good news is, if people weren’t buying low- and non-fat milk, cream would probably cost twice as much. There’s a purposeful good to everything.
One more thing about milk: Pasteurized milk kills nearly all of the vitamins, minerals and enzymes—all the good stuff—present in milk. The media wants you to believe that raw milk is dangerous to your health because it can cause salmonella poisoning. But over a twenty year span where there was a fair amount of salmonella poisoning, not a single case came from raw milk. Rather, they all came from pasteurized milk. The reason is that raw milk contains enzymes that protect against salmonella. Raw milk can be found in most natural food stores.
