Do you worry about feeding your kids meals that other people have provided?

This week I started reading "Real Food: What to Eat and Why" by Nina Planck. A couple things were so encouraging to me early in the book that I just had to share them :)

The first one especially- as I learn more about real food, and at the same time, the disasters of industrial food, I worry about my kid's diet. ("worry" is not the right word, we are SO in the Lord's hands!) I can feed them nourishing foods at home, but what about when we go to other people's houses for dinner? What about eating out? I am just as concerned about my heart as my kid's diet. I want to have (and to foster in them!) a heart of graciousness, thankfulness, and hospitality. To shun others because their food choices are not the same as ours is sin. Plain and simple. So this first excerpt gives me peace because these kids were having only SIX nourishing meals per WEEK, and saw vast improvements. Read on:

"...in one experiment, Price fed malnourished kids one meal daily, six days a week, while they ate as usual at home. The therapeutic meals included liver, fish chowder, or a meat stew made of broth and carrtots; a buttered whole wheat roll made with freshly ground flour; tomato juice with cod-liver oil; and two glasses of whole milk. The meat, dairy, and eggs came from animals raised on grass, which Price had found containted more vitamin A than animals raised on grain. It was the American version of the traditional diets: rich in protein, vitamins A, B, and D, omega-3 fats, and minerals. The children's health- and their performance in school- improved sharply. "A properly balanced diet," Price wrote, "is good for the entire body."" p28 "Real Food" Nina Planck

With a husband with borderline high cholesterol, this one also interested me greatly!

"The study of blood cholesterol and its various subcategories is getting more spphistiated by the hour, but the conventional wisdom holds that it's better for high-density lipoprotein (HDL) to be high and low-density liboprotein (LDL) to be low. Casually known a the "good" and "bad" cholesterol hypothesis, this idea emerged with it became clear that the number they call "total cholestrol" was a poor-very poor- predictor of heart disease. Today, most experts believe that low HDL and high LDL are "risk factors" for heart disease, which means the two conditions are statistically correlated.

"But I'm not so sure. There are two important caveats to the rule that high LDL, in particular, is dangerous. The first is a lesson from Statistics 101: correlation does not necessarily imply cause. In other words, high LDL does not necessarily cause heart disease. Instead, it could be a symptom (or marker, as experts say) of heart trouble. The second caveat is equally serious: many studies show that high LDL and heart disease are not linked. In 2005, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reported that as many as half of the people who have heart disease have normal or "desirable" LDL. Also in 2005, researchers found that older men and women with high LDL live longer. When the rule- high LDL is dangerous- doesn't apply in the elderly or in half of the heart disease cases, the honest scientist can only conclude one thing: the rule eeds a second look. Some cholesterol experts believe the rule needs more than just tweaking. "There is nothing bad about LDL." says Joel Kauffman, Professor of Chemisty Emeritus at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. "There never was.""