French Kids Eat Everything!

This is an introduction to a book by Karen Le Billon to help cure your children from being picky eaters.  It might even help an adult or two.

As I sat reading the Sunday paper and eating my oatmeal with bananas and coconut yogurt I came across an article in the books section.  It was titled, "Picky eaters? Mais non!  Working at a dual track immersion school and being the Teacher Wellness Champion I was curious as to what the article had to say.

Karen Le Billon is an American author married to a Frenchman from Northern France and a self confessed picky eater.  Like some dual cultural families they returned to her husband's home town to live for a year and found that her children's and her own eating habits stood out like a sore thumb.  Karen's French in laws took no time in passing on their traditional skill of training children to be "bien eduque."
That is to be well spoken, well mannered, and well behaved.  Part of the training involves the education of preparing and eating healthy food.  Listen to her book trailer from Amazon.com:

French Kids Eat Everything book trailer.

Le Billon's children learned to try new foods and enjoy them.  Many of the foods they learned to love came right off their school's cafeteria menu like, endive salad and blue cheese, mussels and muesli.  It doesn't sound much like the offerings at a North American school does it?  This article helped me believe that Monsignor William Irwin parents and staff are on the right path.  I was curious then to see where Canadians ranked versus Americans and the French in our fight on obesity.  I found some encouraging and astonishing information.

I found some stats from some 2005 research that ranked countries by the percentage of obese people.  The definition of obese are those individuals with a body mass index of 30 or greater.  The country with the highest number of obese people was, you guessed it...United States at 30.6%.  I looked for Canada who was ranked number 11 out of the 28 countries surveyed and found that we had substantially fewer obese people at 14.3%.  France came in at 9.1%, while Japan had the lowest number of obese individuals at 3.2%.  So the conclusion is... we are right in the middle.  Still time to help ourselves and our children.

I was also curious as to where Edmonton in particular stood on the health scene, especially since the BMI stats were from 2005.  I found a Health Canada site that gave specific statistics for not only provinces but cities.  Here is what I learned;
The number of overweight or obese males in Edmonton as of October 2011 was as staggering 60.8 percent of our population while 43.8 percent of women are found to be overweight.  The same information told that 27.8% men in our city were smokers and 19.5% of women still light up regularly.  The statistics even included information about heavy drinkers.  27.8% of male Edmontonians drank heavily while 11.1 % of women imbibed more than usual.  I also learned we still have a way to go to encourage  the consumption of fruits and vegetables of 5X or more each day.  36.2% men were able to consume adequate quantities of fruits and veg., while more women at 45% were able to meet the criteria of the Canada Food Guide.  The last interesting information regarding the health of people living in Edmonton to startle us into activity, was that 26.4% of male residents participated in limited physical activity while 31.7% women engaged in exercise on a regular basis.

If you or your children are picky eaters, there is a cure.  Karen Le Billon ends her story by saying, "In North America, many parents will simply shrug if their child refuses to eat well.  The French, meanwhile are thinking:  show me how your kids eat, and I'll now what kind of parent you are."