Healthy Kids: Help Them Eat Smart and Stay Active--for Life!

by Marilu Henner

We all want our children to be fit and healthy, but the current invasion of fast food, sugary snacks, and oversize portions are creating an epidemic of overweight, inactive, and unhealthy kids. The powerful influences of the fast-food industry, omnipresent junk food advertising, and the vicious cycle of TV, computer games, and Internet addictions only make our children more susceptible to a sedentary lifestyle and a lifetime of bad habits and obesity. Now, health pioneer and dedicated mom Marilu Henner says it's time to say good-bye to sugarcoated cereals, artificially colored cheese puffs, oceans of sugary soft drinks, nutritionally deficient school lunches, and fastfood supermeals! As Marilu explains, parents who want the best for their children need to feed them fresh, whole foods to grow by. In Healthy Kids she shows you how to create a healthy, balanced lifestyle for your kids and how to make the transition from dairy-, fat-, sugar-, and chemical-laden foods to the vibrant, natural, nourishing foods we were all meant to eat. Healthy Kids offers a proven plan to help parents and kids alike learn to eat healthier and feel better. Inspiring and enjoyable to read, it As Marilu says, Healthy Food = Healthy Children. And Healthy Kids provides the essential information on creating a lifetime of nutritional eating habits for your growing children.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Health

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Marilu Lucy Henner is an American actress, producer and New York Times best-selling author.

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was more impressed than I thought I would be. The author mostly advocates a vegan diet. She goes into details on the dangers of sugar, white flour, meat, dairy, fat, chemicals, & caffeine and is pretty compelling. The book has charts for cooking dry beans and grains, & a chart of alternative sweeteners that I found interesting. She also discusses creating a healthy relationship between food and hunger with your kids and having fun as a family. There are chapters specific for each age group of kids from babies (the benefits of breastmilk) through college.
But then, you get to the recipes and I was wondering if I was still reading the same book! All her breakfast recipes include eggs. I'm not totally opposed to eggs, but you can make tasty pancakes and muffins without eggs so why use them? Especially in a book where she's just gotten done talking about the health dangers of animal products. She never addresses eggs one way or the other. And then in the entree section, every other recipe has turkey or chicken. And again, I'm not totally always opposed myself to some organic meat, but didn't she just get done talking about the dangers of meat and how she hasn't eaten it in 22 years??? And I think the most jaw dropping recipe of all was french fries. She repeatedly bashes fast food french fries but here on page 252 is a recipe for deep friend french fries. Not oven baked fries, but twice fried fries in "cooking oil for deep frying". Are they really healthier if you make them at home?? And once again, we do eat some chick fil a french fries around here but I just wouldn't expect to find a recipe for them in a healthy kids cookbook. The majority of the rest of the recipes were sort of standard old recipes with substitutions like "soy milk" instead of "milk", "soy cheese" instead of "cheese" and "nayonnaise" instead of "mayo". I can make those substitutions on my own, I don't need a cookbook for them. But, other than that, I really did like and enjoy the book.

[Susie · Rating 1 out of 5]

People who have heard of Marilu Henner and her THM theories might know what they are getting into when they pick up this book. I did not.
I was expecting tips on getting my toddler how to eat healthy foods, convince my kids that exercise is fun, etc. There was some of that in this book, but definitely not the bulk of the text.
She spends pages explaining why we shouldn't eat any type of meat, dairy or processed foods, with what I felt was very little evidence to back up her claims (no sources directly cited, scanty bibliography). She does not address the issue of replacing calcium needs generally met by dairy, and it appears from the recipes at the back of the book that she is replacing most dairy products with soy alternatives. American cheese slices made out of soy? How is that possibly a "live" or "unprocessed" food? How can that possibly be better for you than naturally aged dairy cheese?
She also does not discuss allergies or other problems associated with soy. I'm all for edamame snacks, but this author takes it too far for my taste.

[Lisa Topp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with another review I read about the hard sell on the elimination of meat and dairy from the diet in this book. There is other valuable content here though, so, if you have the time to browse, and want to pull some useful facts about getting your kids (and family) healthier, take what interests you, and leave the rest. However, I feel there are better resources out there.

[Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was able to take away a bevy of valuable information about chemicals and other processed foods. Great read for all
Parents even if you don't plan on going vegan. We should all probably eat less meat and dairy. It had a lot of good info on reasons to not have dairy that I hadn't heard before, like bed+wetting in children.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a total health fanatic, but I do feel very strongly about taking care of my own health, as well as the health of my family. It's important to me to start teaching my child, even right now at his young age - how to take care of his body. I found this book to be a great resource.

[Brenda]

i loved this book. this girl has done her research.