The 21st Century Mommy

Today’s parents, despite being raised in the “convenience” paradigm, are much more aware of the hazardous eating habits of past generations. They are wanting and willing to go back to more traditional methods of child rearing including: home births, family gardens, home schooling, fewer electronics and more playgrounds and home cooked or prepared meals verses fast foods.

The current public opinion on motherhood is that it is harder to be a parent today (especially a mother) than it was in the 1970s or 1980s.

A full 70% of the public says it is more difficult to be a mother today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

For many moms it is difficult to consider the logistics of juggling multiple schedules with healthy family meals. The massive amounts of available conflicting information only adds to the uncertainty and typical stress of starting a family.

Most families now spend 90% of their food budget on fast and processed foods. In 2010 the average household spent $245 on dining out and $338 on groceries per month. Restaurants accounted for the largest slice of America’s discretionary spending in 2010 at $392 billion. Fast and processed foods are also perceived as cheaper and therefore make more economic sense for a growing family.

However, the current generation of American parents spends only 4% of their entire budget on feeding their family. Compare this to other countries that average 15% of their budget spent on food. Americans, on the other hand, spend over 15% of their budget on audio and communication equipment and television combined. When a family can’t afford a healthy food budget, they may only need to re-assess activity and purchasing priorities.

Today’s parents must contend with the $2 billion a year spent by the food and beverage industry to promote unhealthy foods to their children. In many ways society is set up against these young moms who are determined to make a difference.

The Interagency Working Group on Foods Marketed to Children (IWG) reports:

The fast-food industry spends more than $5 million every day marketing unhealthy foods to children
Kids watch an average of over 10 food-related ads every day (nearly 4,000/year)
Nearly all (98%) of food advertisements viewed by children are for products that are high in fat, sugar or sodium

In the 1990’s our food industry, wanting to limit liability, pushed for a legal definition of food to include:
“any substance or product, whether processed, partially processed or unprocessed, intended to be, or reasonably expected to be ingested by humans whether of nutritional value or not.”

Webster’s short definition of food: anything that nourishes.

Learning to eat healthy can be a daunting task especially with the enormous amount of conflicting information available to us on the World Wide Web.

Our basic nutritional philosophy is:

Find the initial stressors or deficiencies; alleviate, assist or replenish and allow the body to “heal itself.”

Food is anything that nourishes. A body that is well fed and capable of absorbing and metabolizing – will THRIVE!