Making Family Meals a Priority

Thought you might enjoy reading this article about Family Meals. It has some valid points.

By Dr. Mercola

When was the last time you sat down to dinner with your family? The kind of meal that involves passing of dishes, good conversation, and genuine family bonding? For many, it may have been on Thanksgiving, but this type of important family event needn't happen only once or twice a year.

Families that make an effort to eat meals together at least three or four times a week enjoy significant benefits to their health, well-being, and relationships, all of which are explored in The Family Meal documentary above.

Family Dinners May Be a Growing Trend

The family meal hit a low point in the 1950s, the era of the TV dinner and the cultural shift that began to regard cooking dinner for the family as a major inconvenience. As foods become more readily available and storable in the freezer and in the pantry, the idea of cooking from scratch became almost passé.

Today in the US, we’re largely a nation of “heater-uppers” -- not cooks – and this means less time spent together with your family during the traditional ritual of preparing a meal. That being said, this seems to be changing, perhaps because people are beginning to miss the security and the socialization that family meals impart.

One study conducted earlier this year found that most US families eat dinner together most nights of the week, and 34 percent eat together seven nights a week. And wouldn't you know… 84 percent said that the time their family eats together is actually one of their favorite parts of the day.1

Family Meals Lead to Better Nutrition and Emotional Health

The Family Meal documentary focused in large part on the epidemic ofchildhood obesity, and the role that eating dinner with your family could play in curbing it. Research shows that children who share family meals three or more times a week are more likely to be in a healthy weight range and have healthier eating patterns. They’re less likely to eat unhealthy foods, more likely to eat healthy foods and less likely to have an eating disorder.2

But that’s far from all. Teens who eat with their families at least five times a week are 40 percent more likely to get A’s and B’s in school than their peers who don’t share family meals. They’re also 42 percent less likely to drink alcohol, 59 percent less likely to smoke cigarettes, and 66 percent less likely to try marijuana. They were also less depressed.3

The benefits are truly profound. Separate research showed, for instance, that with each additional family dinner, adolescents had:4

• Fewer emotional and behavioral problems
• Greater emotional well-being
• More trusting and helpful behaviors toward others
• Higher life satisfaction

Families Who Eat Together Build Stronger Relationships

Culturally, humans have been joining together for meals since ancient times, and we may be engrained to build relationships in this way. Even in modern times, family relationships appear to grow stronger around the dinner table, with another study concluding:5

“Our findings suggest that family meals may provide a unique opportunity for building stronger families and young people. Creating environments where frequent family meals are normative, valued and feasible for families may result in benefits for young people that extend beyond good nutrition.”

Still more benefits associated with family meals include:

• Better vocabulary development among children
• Increased self esteem
• Helps children build resilience
• Lower rates of teenage pregnancy

Making Family Meals a Priority

I have long stated that one of the keys to optimal health is having someone in your family (or someone you hire) invest some time in your kitchen, preparing meals from scratch. This doesn’t necessarily mean cooking -- personally, I try to eat about 85 percent of my food raw -- but some form of food preparation that might include fermented vegetables or milk, juicing veggies, sprouting sunflower seeds, soaking nuts, preparing raw meals, as well as some traditional cooking.

Spending the time together to eat the meal you’ve prepared is likely equally important, but both take planning to make them a reality. One of my favorite sayings with respect to your meals is if you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail.

This means not only shopping ahead of time so you have the food available to cook, but also setting aside the time to eat together. Many sports for kids are scheduled at the family dinner hour, for instance, or parents may have a hard time getting home from work at a reasonable hour.

If you value the importance of a family meal, however, you must make it a priority. This might mean your family meal takes place at lunchtime instead of dinnertime on certain days of the week, but ideally strive to eat together as often as you can, scheduling non-essential activities around your dinner, and not the other way around.

Talking to Children about Pornography (Sorry you have to but that's the world we live in)

How to teach children about (*gasp*) pornography

By April Perry, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 1:50 pm MST

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Today’s post was written by Power of Moms contributor, Melody Harrison Bergman.

Editor’s Note: Although recent studies suggest that a rising number of men and women find pornography to be acceptable, at Motherhood Matters, we wholeheartedly disagree. In fact, we believe it is the responsibility of every deliberate mother to protect her children from any content that is pornographic in nature. Many of our community members may have read an article circulating on Facebook from dailymail.co.uk about online pornography, and we are grateful to be able to offer this post  as a jumping-off point for helping us to talk with our kids about such an important issue. 

Why is it that we can tell our children things like, “Don’t hit your brother,” or “If you touch the stove, it will burn you,” or “Say no to drugs!” 5 million times, but when it comes to sex and/or pornography – eeek! – we think we can have one talk, pat ourselves on the back and go on our merry way? A colleague once asked me this, and I thought … you know, he’s right!

Maybe some of us don’t think we need to talk about it at all. OK, so porn is out there somewhere, right? But not at our house.

Pause!

First of all, don’t put too much faith in that “tried and true” Internet filter. Implanting a conscience in your child is better (and less expensive) than installing a million Internet filters. And beyond that, are you sure you want Timmy on the playground teaching your kids about porn? How about the older kids on the bus? The fact is, if we don’t take matters into our own hands, that’s what happens.

Why is it that pornography is such a daunting subject, anyway? I think it’s because we assume that if we start teaching our kids something about the subject, then we will have to teach them everything. But that’s just not the case. We don’t have to overcomplicate things. For instance, simply teaching a little girl about modesty is a great foundation against pornography in the long-run. When we are teaching kids, we’ve got to go back to the basics:

(1) Build trust. If we want our kids to clue us in when they are teenagers, we can’t wait until they are teens and then expect to be their best friend. We need to spend time learning to love them, being interested in them as individuals and being involved in their lives much earlier than that. If we establish a pattern of comfortable, open communication early in life, it will already be in place if or when our children need us, whether they are 7 or 17. When the time comes that they encounter porn — and they will — we will be there.

(2) Talk about everything. When I was growing up, my parents had an open-door policy, and I have always been grateful for that. Now that I’m older, my mother has confided in me that sometimes my siblings and I would tell them things, they’d nod nonchalantly, talk with us about it, and then after we left, their jaws would drop and they’d say, “WHOA! Can you believe that just happened?!” I’m so glad they did that behind closed doors because I always felt OK opening up about anything and everything around them.

If we treat sex as a shameful and secretive subject, then our children will not feel comfortable talking to us about it. Instead, they will go where they feel comfortable: to their friends. I’m not saying that we have to condone sexual behavior that is not accordance with our values systems. Rather, we have to decide who we want teaching them values: parents or friends. If your child asks you about porn or tells you they’ve seen something inappropriate, will you freak out? If you do, what does that teach them? If we want them to come to us, we need to create a safe place for them.

(3) Teach them to respect others. Let’s be honest. At it’s core, pornography is about disrespect. It turns men and women into two-dimensional objects to be lusted after. Simply teaching children basic principles about loving others and treating people with respect will help them build an understanding of what a normal, healthy relationship feels like.

If they grow up with this precedent, then when they come across something — a graphic and perhaps violent — they will recognize it, and hopefully it will repulse them rather than draw them in. You don’t have to tell a 5-year-old, “Pornography is graphic and violent and teaches us to disrespect each other, so we don’t look at pornography.”

Instead, try this: “Do we hurt each other for fun?” No. “Is it funny or nice to watch other people hurting each other?” No. Or if you’re really feeling bold: “What if someone tries to show you a yucky movie or pictures of people hurting each other? Is that something we should look at?” No!

We don’t have to go into the gory details to prepare our children for what’s out there. They are so pure and innocent. When they are young, it’s not complicated for them. Hurt. Disrespect. Yucky. These are strong enough words for children. We use them every day to teach them about other things. Why not use them to start building a safeguard against something as serious as porn?

(4) Instill modesty. I’ll bet you’re doing this anyway, but have you ever thought that you’re also teaching a lesson that will prevent your kids from getting into porn? We teach our little girls not to lift their skirts or show their undies. We teach our children to keep their shirts down and not to show their bellies in public. If we’re really thinking ahead, we even teach our kids not to let anyone touch the places that are covered by their underwear.

All of these things rolled into one send a clear message: Respect the body, especially those special parts. We’ve all heard that “actions speak louder than words,” but in this case, I’d argue that actions and words speak loudest together.

So when we’re teaching our children not to flash each other, why not tack on the “why” and stretch that teaching a little farther: “Gavin, please put your shirt down. We don’t show off our bodies to strangers. Your body is special,” or “Lucy, please keep your skirt down. Your skirt covers special parts that others are not supposed to see.” If these lessons are hard-wired into our kids, perhaps they will come to mind when they see “special parts” displayed in a not-so-modest pornographic manner.

Maybe you think I’m nuts, that I’m overreacting, that porn is bad stuff, but it’s not really everywhere. Perhaps you’re thinking — like I once did — that you will just keep a filter on your computer and good friends around your kids, and they’ll never bump into the stuff.

Actually, a national study recently showed that the average child is introduced to pornography by age 11. So young.

In the world we live in, it’s not a question of IF anymore, it’s a question of WHEN. So if you’re worried you are going to bring something up too early — that you will make your kids curious and drive them to seek something out they wouldn’t naturally come across — don’t. If we want to be their first contact with the subject, we need to be proactive.

So take a deep breath, Mom! We’re all behind you. When you end up being the first line of defense, you’ll be glad you did.

QUESTION: Obviously this is a personal question you’ll need to answer in your own mind, but when was the last time you encountered pornography — either intentionally or accidentally? How did you feel when that happened? What do you think is the best way to teach children about pornography?

CHALLENGE: Make a goal to talk to your children about modesty and/or respecting our bodies some time this week. Setting these kind of thought patterns can go a long way in the fight against pornography.

Infographic courtesy of Fight the New Drug.

Categories: Timely Topic

Tags: teaching children about pornography

26 c

Changing Directions

In light of our non-blogable current life, Dave (dad) and I have decided to use our blog to capture important messages we want to share with our children and grandchildren. Here is the first one:

Because health care is changing so much, we encourage each of you to do whatever it takes to have a healthy body. Exercise, eat your veggies, etc.  Here is just a portion of one article:
You can read the full article here

 How Obamacare Affects You and Your Medical Care The delay in the employer mandate is but one of dozens of negative impacts Obamacare will have on your medical services. As an independent physician, I've been discussing these issues with my patients for the past few years, helping them to prepare for what's ahead. Here the ten most

important points that I tell my patients:

1.  Your private insurance premiums will cost more and more each year.
2.  You will lose the choices and flexibility in health insurance policies

that we have had available up until now.

3.       As reimbursements continue to drop, fewer and fewer doctors will take Medicare (for those 65 and older) or Medicaid (people younger than 65).

4.       Fewer doctors accepting Medicare and Medicaid causes an increase in wait times for appointments and a decrease in the numbers and types of specialists available on these plans. Consumers would be wise to line up their doctors now.

5.    Studies from various organizations and states have consistently shown that Medicaid recipients have longer waits for medical care, fewer options for specialists, poorer medical outcomes, and die sooner after surgeries than people with no health insurance at all. Yet an increasing number of Americans will be forced into this second-class medical care.

6.            As more people enter the taxpayer-funded plans (Medicare and Medicaid) instead of paying for private insurance, the costs to provide this increased medical care and medications will escalate, leading to higher taxes.

7.            With no eligibility verifications in place, millions of people who are in the US illegally will be able to access taxpayer-funded medical services, making longer lines, longer wait times, and less money available for medical care for American citizens… unless taxes are increased even more.

8.            Higher expenditures to provide medical services lead to rationing of medical care and treatment options to reduce costs. This is the mandated function of the Independent Payment Advisory Board: to cut costs by deciding which types of medical services to allow… or disallow. If you are denied treatment, you have no appeal of IPAB decisions; you are simply out of luck, and possibly out of life. This is a radical departure from the appeals process required for all private health insurance plans. Further, the IPAB is accountable only to President Obama, and cannot be overridden by Congress or the courts. IPAB is designed to have the final word on your health.

9.            Under current regulations, if medical care is denied by Medicare, then a patient is not allowed to pay cash to a Medicare-contracted physician or hospital or other health professional. Patients who need medical care that is denied under Medicare or Medicaid will find themselves having to either: 1) look for an independent physician or hospital (quite rare these days); or 2) go outside the USA for treatment.

10.         Expect a loss of medical privacy. Beginning in 2014, if you participate in government health insurance, your health records will be sent to a centralized federal database, with or without your consent.

The bottom line is that Americans are losing more and more of their medical freedom. By 2015, so many workers will be trapped in the government-run health insurance exchanges that there will be no going back to the private plans we have today. At this rate, single-player proponents will drive private insurance companies out of business, which has been their intention all along.

Americans need to become far more proactive about taking charge of their health. The healthier you are, the less vulnerable you are to our degrading healthcare system. It's also wise to consider proactively planning for medical treatment options outside the US.

Dr. Vliet is an independent physician. Upon noticing the major push toward government-run healthcare in the US in 2009, she began studying how government healthcare systems affect the quality and availability of medical care. Her studies led her to become a critic of government healthcare in general and Obamacare in particular.

Dr. Vliet will be speaking on the topic of Obamacare at our Casey Research Summit on October 4-6 in Tucson, Arizona. She is also chair of an international health conference titled "Men's Health and Aging: Preserving Health for the NEXT Stage of Life," which will immediately follow our Casey conference in Tucson on October 6-10. Dr. Vliet's conference will feature international speakers and focus on how to protect your health in the face of increasing government control of your medical care. Click here for the conference's agenda, and click here to register for the conference.

Dr. Vliet's medical website is herplace.com.