Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Yours Kids Right

After reading in The China Study about the hazards of feeding my daughter animal products — especially dairy products, I was desperate to find informed medical opinions on how best to feed my daughter. After learning more about the lack of training physicians have on nutrition and disease, and after hearing from our pediatrician that “dairy should be one of the most significant components of my daughter’s diet,” I was very relieved to discover Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Your Kids Right by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D..

“Scientific research has demonstrated that humans have a powerful immune system, even stronger than that of other animals, that makes our body a self-repairing, self-defending organism with the innate ability to defend itself against microbes and prevent chronic illness. The system operates at its best only when we give it the correct raw materials to work with. When a young body doesn’t receive its nutritional requirements, bizarre diseases occur. Of late, there has been an increase in cancers that were unheard of in prior human history. Most of these can be linked to improper nutrition.

Despite our very best intentions, today there are health risks that well-meaning parents inflict on their children without being aware of it. Every day in small ways, we may well be causing harm to their precious little bodies through the choices we make about what we decided to feed them.

There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life.  In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers. When our children eat junk food instead of fruits and vegetables, the groundwork is being laid for cancer and other diseases to occur down the road.

Additionally, many children today are very often recurrently sick with ear infections and allergies and then, later in life, may develop autoimmune illnesses such as lupus, ulcerative colitis, and rheumatoid arthritis. The major contributor to the development of these illnesses is suboptimal nutrition. Kids become ill not because they just naturally pass around germs or have bad genes, but because their diets are inadequate. Medications cannot prevent these problems — only a diet of nutritional excellence can.

The most recent scientific evidence is both overwhelming and shocking — what we feed (or don’t feed) our children as they grow from birth to early adulthood has a greater total contributory effect on the dietary contribution to cancers than dietary intake over the next fifty years. American children and most children in developed countries eat less than 2% of their diet from natural plant foods such as fruits and vegetables. American children move into adulthood eating 90% of their caloric intake from dairy products, white flour, sugar, and oil. Amazingly, about 25% of toddlers between ages one and two eat no fruits and vegetables at all. By fifteen months, french fries are the most common vegetable consumed in America.

Childhood diets are unhealthy, but the issue goes beyond simple nutrition. Recent, compelling, scientific evidence over the past two decades has shown links between precise dietary factors and autoimmune illnesses such as Crohn’s disease and lupus, as well as later-life cancers. This means that we now know what helps to create an environment in our bodies that is favorable for cancers to emerge later in life, and we understand how what they eat now can prevent cancer in our children’s future. While the scientific evidence is in, parents haven’t been informed that what their children eat during their growth years has such a profound effect on their later health and that the first ten years may be the most critical… My goal is to inform parents so that they can give their children the greatest gift of all: the opportunity for a long and healthy life.”

– Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right (2005) by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D.; page xviii – xx