RE: nutrition-y question
Tue, 08/24/04 4:34 AM
(
permalink)
I think you have to be practical about something like this. If he is losing weight, then any calorie is a good calorie if he will eat it and won't eat the possibly healthier alternatives. If his weight is stable, then he is getting enough calories and you can focus more on things like antioxidants, vitamins and so on.
When it comes to calories (really, kilocalories), there are just 3 sources: carbohydrates (4 kcal/gram), protein (4 kcal/gram) and fat (9 kcal/gram). McDonald's burgers, pizza and the rest are made up of those same sources of calories and (unfortunately for those of us with weight problems) plenty of them. And actually, for nutritional purposes, foods containing lots of animal protein like burgers and ice cream are pretty nutritious.
Your son's problem is not the same as the problem we fat adults have. For him, I think MEAT is preferable to soy substitutes (which contain a protein of lower biologic quality) and, unless he is gaining too much weight (unlikely), there's nothing wrong with fat. Remember that people who do not eat meat (i.e vegans), have to become real experts at combining various vegetable proteins to get combinations that equal the nutritional value of meat (bean and rice are one classic) and you probably don't have the time or interest to become sufficiently expert in that--so just let him eat the meat he wants.
There's a famous story about that. It seems the French Army in WWI realized that muscle tissue is mostly protein and reasoned that healing muscle would benefit from a high protein diet (true). They also reasoned that since gelatin is nearly pure protein (made from horses hooves), feeding it to their wounded in massive quantities would provide a high protein diet, so that's what they did--and their wounded died in huge numbers. It seems that gelatin is lacking one vital amino acid, so although it is pure protein, the body cannot use it exclusively to repair muscle tissue. The moral to the story is, if you want to repair muscle and other body organs, one simple way to help is to eat something that contains everything needed for the repair--i.e. meat (which is, of course, animal muscle tissue). A second lesson is, variety in the diet is good, because few foods contain everything needed and you're more likely to get what you need by eating a variety of foods. So a diet high in meat (burgers, chicken, turkey), dairy products (ice cream, cheese on the pizza, yogurt if he'll eat it, milk) and possibly eggs (see below) isn't so bad.
And you can supplement all the high quality protein with vitamins (a therapeutic multivitamin tablet, either prescribed by your doctor or just purchased with the advice of a pharmacist) and as many fruits and veggies (tomato on the burgers--and in ketchup--and in the pizza sauce; fruits like blueberries, strawberries, oranges--and fruit juices--and so forth which contain lots of vitamins and antioxidants) as he'll eat.
One classic way to improve the nutritional value of ice cream even more is buy turning it into a milk shake with eggs and flavorings like chocoalte syrup, although the eggs are of necessity raw and that's controversial today. There do exist pasteurized eggs, though, and you could use those.
The one thing I'd probably minimize is the starch (potatoes, rice, pasta)--again, unless he's losing weight but then fat is a better source of pure calories.
Best wishes. I'm fighting a similar fight on the other side of the generation curve. My dad has cancer and, at nearly 90, won't eat much at all. My sister discovered if she made chocolate pudding (out of milk, eggs etc) he would eat some--and managed to put a few of the pounds he'd lost back on him that way. So I just suggest experimenting keeping the sorts of things above in mind.
