Iva Young, mom and health coach, has written a nutritional handbook for feeding the family, called Healthy Mom [Yorkshire, 2010]. Mothers generally purchase food for the household and are role models for how children eat and think about food. If moms eat well and train their families to understand proper nutrition, their children will grow into adults with healthy habits.
Nutrition Handbook, Cookbook, and Organizational Tool
Healthy Mom packs a lot under one cover. It is a basic nutrition textbook, dietary prescription, meal planning tool, and cookbook rolled into 470 pages of quick reading. The first eighteen chapters of the book explain the ins and outs of digestion, vitamins, fiber, sugar, calories, antioxidants, and many other nutrition topics. The latter sections of the book offer detailed meal plans, shopping lists, and recipes to help readers apply their new nutritional knowledge to change their families’ eating habits.
The book’s many charts and tables make it accessible to nutrition newbies. Each chapter is prefaced by an apple icon containing a one or two sentence summary of the information to come. For example, the chapter on milk products begins with an apple stating, “If you eat yogurts try to pick plain and add your own fruits to it.” Taken together, the apple icons offer healthy changes that can be easily implemented.
American Diabetic Association Offers Healthy Plan
Ms. Young believes that everyone could benefit from the balanced diet promoted by the American Diabetic Association. She bases her weekly meal plans, shopping lists, and recipes on the diabetic exchange list, an adaptation of which is reproduced in the book. All food fits into one of six groups – starches, meats, vegetables, fruits, milk, and fats. The list provides serving sizes for foods within each category, making it easy to “exchange” one food for an equivalent amount of a food with similar nutritional properties.
Ms. Young outlines the number of daily servings needed from each of the six groups according to how many calories one consumes daily. Because optimum calorie intake depends on body weight, level of physical activity, and weight loss goals, each member of the family may have different recommendations. The book includes a chapter explaining how to calculate the number of calories each family member needs per day and a series of checklists individuals can use to keep track of their exchange servings.
Healthy Recipes in Healthy Mom
Mothers who have had gestational diabetes will be familiar with the exchange list, and with the resulting confusion when food items are combined across the categories, as they are in almost every recipe. How many vegetable servings does penne primavera have? How large is a serving size? Each recipe shared in Healthy Mom includes the number of servings, serving size, and the exchange categories per serving, helpfully removing the nutritional guesswork.
Ms. Young reminds readers to use the exchange list to modify her recipes by, for example, swapping shrimp for another meat or in-season pears for out-or-season berries. Unfortunately, many of the recipes require modification. Some recipes, like the “Pear in Orange Sauce,” require equipment not universally available in home kitchens, like a double boiler. Other recipes, like the “Omelette Breakfast” have unrealistic ingredient ratios. Two egg whites will never fold over “5 asparagus spears, chopped, 4 Tbsp red onion, 1 tomato (presumably chopped), and 2 Tbsp cheddar cheese.”
Informal Writing Style Detracts from Healthy Message
The biggest problem with the book lies with its style. Ms. Young distracts readers from the information with asides like, “spread the word,” “think about it,” “how sad is that?” and “yup, you guessed it.” At times the reader ends up on the defensive end of passages like, “I have had a couple of moms who felt negative about a couple of healthy options that I gave them and that is their problem.” Or “I’m sure that many of you moms have already felt that you were really good label readers, but I have found that most of you don’t really know what to look for.”
Presumably, Ms. Young’s liberal use of first and second person is meant to create a personal rapport with readers. Unfortunately, the effect is more like listening to some know-it-all drone on about how “I have read case after case from studies done …” However, just as sometimes the know-it-all does know something, Ms. Young’s nutritional information is sound and she backs many of her claims with trusted sources, such as the USDA, the American Diabetic Association, and college-level nutrition textbooks.
Moms trying to break their families of a junk food habit may find Healthy Mom a good starting point. Readers able to ignore the inconsistencies (none bigger than the chapter on quackery which states “Be cautious of money-back guarantees, for a guarantee is only as good as the company that backs it.” followed only two pages later by an endorsement of the P90X exercise program with the rationalization that “There was a 90 day money-back guarantee, so we figured we had nothing to lose.”) may gain new healthy eating tips.
Sources:
- Healthy Mom Iva Young, Yorkshire, 2010
Nicole Fravel - Ms. Fravel is an educator, curriculum developer, and parent with over 15 years of experience in elementary and early childhood ...
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