Question
May I ask about fat & brain development in children? Is it true that children need foods labeled in this way to grow? It seems to be the main argument used when people want to refute natural diets for growing children. My son isn’t a fan of avocados so I may need to get this into a smoothie
Answer
The need for isolated fats is greatly overblown by the media and medical marketing due to the unfortunate error of developing a commercial baby “food” that led to poor brain development in children due to it being so far from what the child needs. Originally if a mother could not feed her child due to illness, weakness, deformity, or the death of the mother, a wet nurse was substituted and the child was fed on the breast of another mother. But as industrialization and then feminism took hold and the value of woman/motherhood was repeatedly denigrated and women were pushed into the workforce to become more like men the need for an artificial food to substitute for natural milk was created.
As a result, the drop in available wet nurses forced mother’s into what was referred to as dry feeding, where a concoction of some variety was made for the child, varying by region and economic status. “The Wabanaki and other Native American tribal nations of North America made an infant formula from nuts and cornmeal.” In the same time period, a growing acceptance for using cow, horse, sheep, camel, pig, or goat’s milk was growing while society was beginning to reject the concept of the wet nurse. “In 1865, chemist Justus von Liebig developed, patented, and marketed an infant food, first in a liquid form and then in a powdered form for better preservation. Liebig’s formula—consisting of cow’s milk, wheat and malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate—was considered the perfect infant food.”
Today we know that wheat is highly inflammatory, leading to bowel and brain inflammation, cows milk is not at all adequate containing a completely different nutritional profile than human milk and the processing of both creates chemicals which are known carcinogens.
The progression of commercial baby foods eventually led to chronic development disorders which eventually where blamed on missing DHA and ARA which are essential fatty acids and so began the fear of children missing out on fat. Over the years this fear has spread and grown and now has infected the minds of mothers around the world.
The reality is, what is fed to the child after birth is far less important ( but still very important) than what is fed during pregnancy to the mother. “The time of the greatest growth and development of the brain and nerves is during the prenatal period and the first two years after birth. This is the best time to lay the foundation of a good brain and nervous system. It is asserted that the whole future of an individual is determined by the time he is four years old, just as the whole future of a calf is determined by the time it is six months old. How very important that the mother supply her unborn child with the very best nutrition!” – Dr Shelton
“Human milk, on an average, contains about 7 per cent milk sugar, 3 to 4 per cent fat, 1.50 per cent protein, and 0.20 per cent of salts.” – Dr Shelton While human milk varies from birth to weaning its percentage of fat remains low and its percentage of carbohydrates high.
All fruits and lettuces contain essential fatty acids in the appropriate proportions for our bodies. Nuts and seeds also contain appropriate essential fatty acids in the right formulation for human physiology. Avocados can be fed as well, but they are concentrated fat and should only be fed in small quantities. Children’s senses if fed properly from a young age tend to be very in tune with their needs. If your son rejects avocado then trust in his senses. Most mothers find that overfeeding on avocados, nuts, and seeds leads to irritability in the child. ¼ of a small avocado a few times per week would be the maximum if a mother wanted to include this fatty fruit. Otherwise, a variety of fruits, and then as they age adding in tender vegetables, and greens would provide all that is needed. We do not have to overfeed on fats at any stage.
Keeping in mind that the child must be fed on breastmilk for the first 2- 3 years and fruits should not be introduced until the child has adequate teeth to support the eating of that fruit. The digestive tract does not develop the ability to digest solid foods until the teeth have developed. The solid food starting at 6 months as recommended by the medical business is very poor advice since the child has no ability to digest said food until their teeth have come in, which typically occurs around 18 months. Some fresh pressed juices can be used at younger ages in extreme conditions where the mother’s diet is severely inadequate, but otherwise, the child should remain exclusively on the mother’s milk until the teeth have sufficiently developed to handle each food without tools or processing.
Our brains are initially built in the womb out of cholesterol and require some fatty acids for development, but the brain itself runs on glucose, a sugar. The idea that the brain requires a lot of fat is another one of those bits of misinformation pushed by marketing. Sugar is the predominant need of the brain. It is typically those that wish to defend their addiction to their toxic diet that pushes the fat requirement and will, even though all of these needs are easily met by fruit, demand that the child must be poisoned with putrefying animal tissues or secretions, rather than getting the EFAs directly from the plant source that the animal is getting them from. Nature provides everything we need, even the things which science has not yet isolated. The further we stray from the perfection of God’s creation and into the hubris of men’s minds and alterations the more disease conditions we create.