My Story

We are a family of 8 who loves good food!  We have lived all over over the country and currently live in a sweet little community on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

A local group asked me to give a presentation on our sugar free home, so I started this blog to post information and help assemble my thoughts, but we found it so useful on our continuing journey to define our home, that we continued it.  Here is a post I wrote  years ago to explain why we "sugar free." (The term is a verb and a noun in our house.)

When my first child was a baby, my mom gave me this book called The Family Nutrition Book. It’s by Dr. William Sears and his wife Martha—they’ve written a lot of baby and children’s health books and they seem to come up every time I google a child ailment. The book itself was good, some of it I agree with, some of it I didn’t, but there was one sidebar that changed my approach to nutrition.

“The first three years of a child’s life are a window of opportunity for forming lifelong healthy eating habits. Just as you teach proper behavior to a child, you also want to teach a child what good food is supposed to taste like. If a baby begins solid food life from the can or jar, baby concludes that this is what food is supposed to taste like. The taste of this food and the way his body feels when he eats it become the child’s norms. And, for better or worse, the child’s eating habits and desire for packaged and fast foods become the norm. He is likely to crave this taste—because that’s what his body has been used to—and shun the fresh taste of healthy foods.

“To get your child on the right track, teach him to enjoy the flavor of fresh food before he gets hooked on canned, artificial tastes. If your baby and toddler eats only homemade, freshly prepared, unsalted, unsweetened foods, this becomes the standard to which other foods are compared. The canned and packaged stuff then tasted foreign to his selective taste buds. While babies are born with a natural preference for sweets (breast milk is very sweet), the rest of their taste preferences are learned.

“Many kids ago we had a theory that if we exposed young taste buds and developing intestines only to healthy foods during the first three years, when the child was older, these healthy eating habits would be likely to continue and the child would have a greater chance of shunning junk foods. We have tested this theory with our own children, as have other parents in our pediatrics practice. For the first three years we gave our infants and toddlers only healthy foods. We made homemade baby food and used few jars, cans, or packaged foods. We shopped for farm-to-market-type produce. In essence, relative to their peers, our kids were really junk-food deprived.

“What happened when these “pure” children got out into the sugar-coated, fat-filled world of birthday parties and fast-food outlets? Yes, they tried these goods. They ate French fries and licked icing from their finger, but they did not overdose on junk food. That’s the difference. Halfway through the mound of icing-filled birthday cake, they would slow down or stop. They certainly would not ask for a second helping as they began to recognize the signs of “yuck tummy.” One day we watched them go through the line at a local salad bar restaurant. Like most kids, they bypassed the fresh greens in the adult salad bar and headed for the kiddie salad bar, filled with fatty, breaded chicken, artificially colored and heavily sugared cereal, and dye-colored gelatins. But after a few bites, much of the junk food remained on their plates and they gravitated back to the adult salad bar. Eventually, they bypassed the kiddie bar altogether” (p277).

My mom always fed us pretty well growing up, but when she went through breast cancer when I was 17, she did a lot of research on cancer-prevention through nutrition. Since the cancer runs in my family I wanted to do whatever I could to avoid it, so I jumped right in with her. As I mentioned, my mom gave me the book mentioned above after I became a mom. I was training for a marathon (which I didn’t ever run, because I was 4 months pregnant with Ellie by the time it actually came around) and trying to become faster. I tried going without sugar and it was really hard for me. Mostly, because I could eat it forever and not feel like I needed to stop. I also realized I couldn’t just do less sugar. I always gave in and had more, so I had to go cold-turkey. Then when I’d have it I’d feel rotten and run terribly. Even compared to when my body was used to sugar, I just felt better when it was out of my system. A doctor in our ward didn’t have processed sugar in his home at all, and his 6 boys were pretty impressive. I realized that if I admired that so much, why don’t I try it myself? After my 2-month-old was given licks of ring pops and tasted ice cream before she’d ever tasted real food, I realized I’d have to set the limit somewhere. With all of the “special occasions” with family and church we had, I realized no sugar till three was the only way for us. It was hard, but it made sense for us at that time and it just felt right.

So, that’s how I became crazy. But it’s been good. All three of our kids have had a no-processed-sugar-till-they’re-three rule. When they’re about two and a half, they start noticing they’re getting different foods at nursery snack time, but they’re ok with it. They usually are the ones telling me they can’t have sugar. I give them plenty of fruit and vegetables and occasionally all-fruit popsicles or lightly honey-sweetened muffins. They’ve never had processed sugar, so they don’t know what they’re missing out on! My oldest grabbed a cookie off the counter once when she was 18 months and refused to eat anything I wanted her to the rest of the day, but she eventually got hungry enough and ate healthy food again…in a day or two—just kidding. I don’t think kids will starve themselves, when I honestly believe the foods I’m giving them are better for them in the long and short run, I don’t feel like I’m being mean to them. There is this whole array of tastes in whole foods that you can’t really taste when you’re used to processed foods. I know, because I underwent the process myself! And, after how hard I worked to nurse them, and realizing that their tummies are so little, it seems like every bite should count for something. If they eat just a little “filler” food there’s sometimes no room left for anything else…although sometimes my kids eat almost as much as I do.

My oldest was the experiment (and she was given a sugary medicine twice a day for 3 months as an infant—it never occurred to me at the time), and, honestly, since she turned three she can eat ice cream with the best of them, but she eats everything I cook (except sometimes potatoes), and that means a lot to me. My second daughter will eat half a cookie and hand it to me to finish. Wahoo! Of course, she’s also the one who will not even try my stir-fry just by looking at it. She eats pretty much everything else that I cook, though, and loves greens in her oats for breakfast. They all do. I’ve tried it…it doesn’t really taste so bad, I just think it’s weird to have something green for breakfast. They don't know that yet, though, so we're still good to get some good healthy kale in first thing in the morning when they're hungriest! Typically I serve them foods in order of what I want them to eat, and it works. A typical appetizer would be raw broccoli and carrots (ok, yes, with ranch!) and fruit is usually saved for dessert. My third child is currently still deprived and is also a great eater--so far, so we’ll see how the experiment continues.

So, my three-year rule is all about educating their little taste buds by feeding them fresh, whole foods early on. Sometimes it’s hard to think of what there is left to feed them. I’m kind of stubborn, in that I’ve insisted on making all of their baby food. It’s not hard and doesn’t take much extra time, once you get used to planning ahead. I bought that nasty powdered rice cereal with my oldest, but once I bought a box that was on sale--and past its due date, I noticed after she threw it all up. The company gave me a whole bunch of free coupons, but it really was too late. I had already started reading Super Baby Food and that was my excuse to go for it. When you know it's just blended squash, it doesn't feel weird to add some "baby food" to the rest of the family's chili or whatever. You can grind up raw brown rice or other grain and it takes just a few minutes to cook, but we mostly just throw some veggies in the blender. The book I mentioned is great and has all the details. I actually bought my first can of baby food ever a month ago for our move to Utah last month, and it just seemed so expensive. I’m sure we’ve saved a ton of money by making it.

I promise I don’t think everyone should be doing this or that parents who feed their children differently from me are terrible. There are a lot of wonderful things that my friends do with their children that I wish I was doing, but we can't do them all, so I guess we have to follow the Spirit and know that there's a reason we're led to different things. Maybe this will prevent cancer in my family or maybe not, but we all have our soapboxes and here was mine on sugar. Thanks for letting me share.

I wrote this when I only had 3 kids.  I now have 5 and they've all been sugar-free until they are 3.  At home we don't eat sugar...most of the time.  :)  And it works for us.

Sugarfree since 2003!