12 ways to eat well in the summer. Who's Stopping You?

Before you reach for the Haagen Dazs, check your fridge for the following: soft fruits (like berries, nectarines or plums) and Greek yogurt. "By blending the two together with a dash of honey, you've made a healthy ice lolly mix - just pop into moulds and freeze," says Laura. If you fancy something sweeter and more of a 'treat', try Laura's banana lolly idea. "Slice a banana in half and pop it on a lolly stick, before dipping it in melted chocolate and nuts. Then freeze on a baking tray." The benefits? "They're much lower in sugar than regular lollies and full of vitamins and healthy fats (if you add nuts). And because frozen foods take longer to eat, you'll feel more satisfied, too."

The sun is finally shining and those BBQ invites keep rolling in. But if you're wary of falling off the healthy-eating bandwagon, help is at hand. From smart snacking to DIY drinks and healthy salad dressings, dietician Laura Tilt has helped us devise some foolproof tips to stay happy - and healthy – all summer long (and they're all tasty, too).

1. Go crazy for fruit and veg

During summer it's more important than ever to stay hydrated and the good news is, fruit and vegetables count towards our daily fluid intake. "Eating more fresh fruit and veg during summer is an easy way to increase our water intake thanks to their high water percentage," explains Laura. "As well as being hydrating, orange or red fruits also contain beta-carotenes which help to protect our skin from the sun – so get plenty of those. When it comes to veg, opt for brightly or darkly-coloured leaves - like watercress or rocket - which are full of antioxidants. It's also worth checking what's in season (Love British Food have a handy list). Not only is it better for the environment, but some studies have found more nutrients in produce bought seasonally."

2. Make your own ice lollies

Who's stopping you: The Secret to Raising a Healthy Eater? Start Early!

Early life nutrition may be the key to successful eating habits later in life. Starting in the womb, infants begin to develop flavor preferences. From gestation to the first two years of life, an important “window of opportunity” is presented: shaping a newborn’s food preferences.

Although we are all born with an innate preference for sweet (candy) and rejection of bitter (vegetables), taste preferences can be learned through repeated exposure. Skillfully introducing new foods can set infants up for dietary success and better health outcomes. However, feeding babies healthy foods isn’t as simple as putting a piece of broccoli in front of them. Introducing foods takes time, patience, and a whole lot of work.

Start early to help shape your baby’s taste for nutritious foods.  Mom’s diet during pregnancy is crucial for not only helping the fetus develop optimally, but also for priming taste preferences. Research shows that mothers who consume fruits and vegetables during pregnancy and lactation had babies that were more willing to accept these foods. After birth, the current World Health Organization recommendation is to exclusively breastfeed children for the first 6 months of life. Around 6 months, breast milk is no longer able to supply all of the vitamin D and iron needed to meet the baby’s requirement, so solid foods are introduced. Check out our Starting Solids factsheet for more info on when and how to safely introduce solid foods.

For adults, eating is an experience that utilizes all of the senses. The same goes for babies. Babies enjoy exploring new foods with all their senses, which means that sometimes most of it can end up on the floor. Don’t despair–research shows that it can take anywhere from 6-35 times of serving the same fruit or vegetable for an infant to try it. This is where the patience comes in. Serving a variety of fruit and vegetables increases the chance the baby will eat the new vegetable. Also, preparing foods in different ways reveals new food textures that help transition babies from eating pureed food all the way to soft, solid foods. By age 2, children are ready to join the family dinner table, so serving family meals centered around vegetables, whole grains, lean protein sources, and fruit is key to support healthy habits.

Already mastered the basics of Starting Solids? Below are some tips to help even the pickiest eaters adapt to a variety of nutritious foods:

1.  Meal Plans: not just for grown-ups!

• Make a list of soft fruits and vegetables, such as avocado, bananas, and cooked sweet potatoes and green beans.
• Then, decide how to prepare each food (i.e. mashed sweet potatoes, small pieces of avocado, etc.).
• After, sort each food into a meal for the week (i.e. bananas as part of Monday breakfast, mashed sweet potatoes as part of Monday lunch, etc.).
• When the day arrives, record how your child responded to the food (i.e. she appeared to like the bananas and ate it all, he refused to eat the green beans, etc.). This will help track when each new healthy food was introduced and how your child accepted the food.

2. Mix it Up: Prepare healthy food in different ways to introduce new textures. Start out with pureed foods, then move to mashed, then to lumpy, and finally to small pieces of soft, solid foods by the time your child reaches age 2.

3.  Monkey See, Monkey Do: Model healthy behaviors for your child. Sit down at meal times together and if you’re feeding your child bananas, try some too. Children are more likely to eat a food when they see an adult eating it as well.

Yes, Dads Give Kids Less-Healthy Food: Here's Why

Hey, Dads!

It's a childhood memory that many people may have: When Mom isn't home for dinner, Dad takes charge … and orders pizza. Or throws some hot dogs in the microwave. Either way, it's not a choice Mom approves of.

Now, a small new study shows that dads really do make less-healthy choices when feeding the family — and this can take a toll on moms.

Study author Priya Fielding-Singh, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Stanford University in California, said she was not surprised that the fathers in the study did less housework, including both "food work" and childcare, than mothers — indeed, national data has previously shown this unequal division of labor is common. But what was surprising in the new study was that dads' lack of involvement in feeding the family can really take a toll on moms, Fielding-Singh said. [10 Ways to Promote Kids' Healthy Eating Habits]

"Many dads are less invested in some of the healthy-eating priorities that moms really hold dear," and that can lead to more work, and more stress, for moms, Fielding-Singh told Live Science. And teens take note of these family dynamics, she added.

In the study, published online in June in the journal Appetite, Fielding-Singh interviewed 42 moms, 14 dads and 53 teens from more than 40 families in the San Francisco Bay Area and asked about family responsibilities when it came to family meals. All of the families were middle class or upper-middle class.

Fielding-Singh found that in 41 of the 44 families included in the study, the family members agreed that Dad's eating habits were less healthy than Mom's. It wasn't just that the moms considered themselves healthier than their husbands, Fielding-Singh noted: The dads agreed.

Set dynamics?

Though some of the moms in the study said they were happy to do most of the work required to feed the family, other moms said they wanted the dads to do more, such as grocery shopping and cooking, Fielding-Singh said.

But there was a catch: Moms felt that if they let dads do these tasks, the food would end up being less healthy, Fielding-Singh said. So, by letting dads more to do, moms felt like they were being worse caregivers to their children. This, in turn, made moms feel guilty — so they kept doing most of the tasks themselves, instead of delegating them to dads.

"Even though some moms were unhappy with it, few saw that there could be an alternative," Fielding-Singh said. "There was definitely a resignation" on the part of moms, she added.

Some of that resignation may stem from deeply embedded gender roles.

"Feeding families is very central to motherhood," she said. "We hold mothers accountable for the foods that families eat." Mothers often judge themselves, and other moms, by how well they feed their families, she noted.

Dads, on the other hand, aren't usually seen as being responsible for feeding the family, Fielding-Singh said. Instead, fathers have typically been judged by how well they support their families financially and more recently, how involved they are in children's lives. But getting kids to eat healthy? That didn't factor in as an important part of being a father, she said. [History's 12 Most Doting Dads]

"It's not that the husbands were trying to be unfair to their wives" by not taking on the responsibilities of food work, she said. Dads weren't trying to hurt their kids diets or make the moms' lives harder, for example. "They simply didn't see it as their responsibility to be making sure that kids were eating healthy — they saw it as Mom's responsibility." And moms, she added, also saw it as Mom's responsibility.

But it's possible that this division of labor between husbands and wives wasn't always present in the couples' relationship. As a part of her interviews, Fielding-Singh said that she asked parents what changed about the way they approached food once they had kids. "What was striking," she said, was that "almost every mother" said things changed after she had kids, but the responses were more mixed among dads. In other words, many women seemed to become more concerned about the healthiness of food, rather than the men getting less concerned.

That means that it's possible things were more equal before kids came into the picture, Fielding-Singh said. But "because feeding is so gendered, it's almost as if this dynamic was created whereby mothers instantly cared more" once they had children.

Teens take note

The division of labor between Mom and Dad didn't just affect their own relationships; these differences in approaches to feeding the family also stood out to parents' teenage children, the study found. [10 Facts Every Parent Should Know About Their Teen's Brain]

The teens interviewed "very clearly understood and articulated that their parents had different priorities around healthy eating," Fielding-Singh said.

This divided approach is notable because kids could view their parents as a united front or solid unit, Fielding-Singh said. For example, teens might say, "my parents"care about my education — but this is not the case with food. Instead, teens might say, "my mom" cares about eating healthy, but "my dad" doesn't.

One of the reasons this matters, Fielding-Singh noted, is that teens observe their parents, and they learn how to behave, in part, from what they see their parents do. And in the study, many daughters watched their moms do the food work and the health work, and many sons watched their dads, and saw that their dads left the work to their moms, she said.

The fact that teens picked up on this "so clearly" means that "there's a real possibility that this one of the ways gender norms are transmitted," Fielding-Singh said.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/59868-moms-dads-feeding-families.html

Who's Stopping You: Trump made the same mistake as Obama on health care, former Reagan aide says

President Donald Trump made the same mistake as his predecessor by not being more involved in the details of health-care legislation, a former assistant Commerce secretary told CNBC on Thursday.

Trump and then-President Barack Obama should have been more engaged in the legislative process, said Mary Jo Jacobi, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan and a member of the George H.W. Bush administration.

"He just left it to the House and Senate," she said, referring to Obama. "President Trump has made a similar mistake with what may or may not be 'Trumpcare' leaving it to the House and Senate."

Referring to Congress, she said: "They've had 7½ years to come up with a replacement once they repeal. Now they haven't repealed, they haven't replaced and it doesn't look like they're going to do either."

Obama signed an overly complex bill that was likely to be unworkable in the real world, but at least he got a bill, Jacobi later added.

"The lesson is that the executive and legislative branches need to work together on big affairs of state to ensure protection of the public interest and a workable outcome," Jacobi said in an email.

The president has been trying to salvage health-care reform after the Senate bill collapsed earlier this week due to a lack of support. Trump took to Twitter, telling senators they must keep their promise to America to fix health care.

On Wednesday, he told GOP senators they should stay in Washington during their August recess to work on health care.

Sen. John McCain's diagnosis of brain cancer has created more problems for Republicans in their bid to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, according to James Pethokoukis, an economic policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

"They were already having trouble coming up with 50 votes and now that just got a lot harder," the analyst told CNBC.

"At this point, I think the most likely scenario is they don't have enough votes for either and Obamacare stays."

Pethokoukis says many Republicans want to move on from health care to tax reform, but he warns this will not be easy.

"What I think happens there is they don't get massive tax reform, they don't massive tax cuts. They'll get a tax cut, it'll be a temporary tax cut, (which is) probably not the best thing for economic growth," he said.

Unpredictable Trump?

Jacobi said Trump's short attention span was a problem for the administration.

"He'll do something really good and then step all over the message on Twitter," she told CNBC.

"My advice to him would be to keep his promises and then have miles to go before he tweets, paraphrasing an old American poem. He just can't get it together and because he can't get it together, the White House and the Cabinet agencies can't get it together either. They're always catching up."

Jacobi also criticized Trump's unpredictability, which makes it harder for businesses to plan.

"He changes his mind, he changes his position. He's changed his mind on health care three times in the last 18 hours," she said.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/trump-made-same-mistake-as-obama-on-health-care-former-reagan-aide-says.html