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How Becoming a Mother Has Changed the Way I Eat

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This is a guest blog post by Alice Callahan, PhD 

I have a PhD in Nutrition.

Yet, spending all those years in the classroom and the lab, investigating minute mechanisms of nutrient metabolism, didn’t do any favors for my own diet. In fact, my grad school friends and I joked that our own nutrition was at an all-time low during our doctoral studies. I hate to think of the many nights that I bought dinner out of a vending machine at the library so as not to interrupt a marathon study session with something as time consuming as cooking. Hey, at least they sold trail mix!

Things didn’t improve much during my postdoctoral training either. My husband and I were both working long hours, and there were many nights when dinner was frozen pizza in front of the TV. Oh, and then there was that 24-hour burrito joint just around the corner. Carnitas, yum!
But of course, I knew how to eat well. I was raised in a family that gardened and canned and cooked from scratch. I loved healthy meals made from fresh, local produce, and my formal training in nutrition assured me that science backed up the value of eating well. I knew full well the pitfalls of processed food and eating out, but I was tired, and cooking wasn’t a priority.

Becoming pregnant changed the way I ate. Preparing food for my child, now 11-months-old, has changed it even more. Here’s how:

1. I started paying attention to my pesticide exposure.
It wasn’t just about me anymore. Numerous studies have linked pesticide exposure during pregnancy to lasting health effects on the developing fetus. We don’t know for sure that everyday exposure is a problem, but I tried to minimize it during my pregnancy and continue to be careful since I am now breastfeeding and my daughter is eating veggies, too. I don’t buy everything organic, but I pay attention to the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen list of foods with the highest pesticide residues. We also try to purchase most of our produce through a local CSA or farmer’s market. I don’t mind if these farms aren’t certified organic, but I like to be able to look a farmer in the eye while bouncing my precious offspring on my hip and ask, “what are the spraying practices on your farm?”

2. I care more about where my food comes from.
We took our baby to several u-pick farms over the summer for fresh blueberries, strawberries, apples, and peaches (check out my post Exploring and Enjoying Food with Baby). I want my daughter to know the deliciousness of fresh-picked produce, and even more important, that it comes from dirt and hard work. We also planted a small garden last summer, and we’re still enjoying one of my daughter’s favorite foods from it – broccoli!

3. I’m cooking more healthy, balanced meals.
Our entire family benefits by eating better, and my daughter is learning that this is how food should be: colorful, flavorful, fresh, and healthy. Sure, we still have frozen pizza on occasion, but we also sometimes make it from scratch! That way we can pile it high with fresh veggie toppings, and my daughter gets to play with the dough and learn that pizza sauce comes from tomatoes! Plus, the yeasty smell of bread rising in a warm kitchen is one of my favorite memories from my childhood.

4. We sit down to meals as a family whenever we can.
No TV, no phone – just us and good food and conversation. I don’t know if it makes a difference to an 11-month-old, but my hope is that my daughter will remember that dinner together was a priority in our house.
I’m doing my best to model healthy eating habits for my child. The funny thing is, I don’t think I can credit all my nutrition training for this. Instead, I think this is something that I learned from my own mother. Our eating habits are formed from those earliest experiences with food. Having a baby reminded me of this, and I’m working to give her a solid foundation for a lifetime of good eating.

Alice Callahan, PhD, is a research scientist turned stay-at-home mom. She writes about kids’ health and nutrition, as well as her adventures in mothering, at scienceofmom.com.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Lucia-del-Carmen/568695140 Lucia del Carmen

    great post! I think we all have suffered the same in our students time

  • Sam

    You have squandered a hard-won PhD in nutrition if you are now taking your marching orders from EWG. If you really did the PhD work and really understood anything of what you were doing you wouldn’t now be taken in by EWG and the “homegrown is the only real food” cult-speak. You didn’t need to waste your time in grad school just to end up frivolously categorizing foods by their appearance and packaging — heck, your little kid could probably do an equivalent job of that in just another year, or so!

    • Rararita33

      Sam, the tone of your comment makes you sound like a big-agri lobbyist of some sort, but wow, how rude and disrespectful! Obviously, Dr. Callahan’s education (and likely rearing, too) was foundational to who she is and her belief system of today.  I applaud working mom’s (and dad’s alike) who strive to make the best food choices for themselves and their families, despite opposing messaging as experienced in all of the marketing attempts, as well as confusing governmental propaganda, to keep us fat and sick.  She is spot on in that what we teach and expose our children to when they are young, will stay with them for a lifetime.

      Congrats to Alice and her strong commitment to family! 

      • http://scienceofmom.com Alice Callahan

        Thanks for your kind words Rararita.  I hope you enjoyed the post!

    • Kitty J.

      Graduate study is obsolete and unnecessry. You can learn everything you need to know right here on the internet and no student loans to repay. A PhD is a pretty good warning sign that you will overthink the problem. Don’t learn and risk thinking for yourself, just go with whatever Michael Pollan says. He’s not a a PhD in nutrition, just a PhD in journalism and he knows everything about nutrition. How difficult can it be, really?

      • http://scienceofmom.com Alice Callahan

        Ummm, I think you’re being sarcastic?  In that case, thanks!  It’s true, one thing about a doctoral program is that it will teach you to overthink things.  Sometimes I think this is helpful, sometimes not so much.  But this whole food thing – I don’t really overthink it at all.  Just trying to do what feels right and good – and that is more ingrained in me than I realized. 

    • http://scienceofmom.com Alice Callahan

      Maybe you missed my point.  I HOPE my daughter will be able to recognize good homegrown food in a year or so.  That’s what I’m going for, and that’s what my mother taught me.  I didn’t need a PhD to figure that out – and my daughter won’t either – that’s the beauty of it all.  What graduate study has taught me, however, is that everything is always more complicated than it seems.  Of course pesticide exposure is complicated (we don’t know how serious the effects really are and there is substantial variation in residue from farm to farm, season to season, etc. etc.).  I’m just trying to minimize my daughter’s risk, and I find that the EWG has simplified my decision-making on a day to day basis. 

    • CeeEhCee

      Yes, I entirely agree with you, Sam, because it’s obvious Dr. Callahan’s dedication to her family’s health and the values she was raised with had absolutely nothing to do with her choices.

      And it’s not like she actually worked for her PhD, despite the considerable preamble she gave demonstrating that, hold on a sec, she did.

      In case you can’t understand sarcasm, Sam, I’m calling you out on your rudeness. Who are YOU to judge the nutritional choices someone makes because they actually want to make a positive difference in how their family thinks about where their food comes from and what farmers do to it? Seems obvious to me that, if you’re this willing to spin a mother’s tale of concern for her family into a screed against some imaginary treehuggers, you’ve never worked ten seconds on an actual farm or vegetable garden of any size and scope.

       

      • foodista!

        Yeah, farmers keep ruining all my food, too. Bastards! I want food that hasn’t passed through the hands of farmers, only stuff grown in city window boxes and in suburban side yards by vacuous PhD food snobs – that’s the good stuff!

  • Anonymous

    Too bad Joan Dye Gussow (also a nutritionist) is retired and/or you didn’t have an opportunity to work with her.  She’s the author of “This Organic Life” that discusses how she & her family worked to eat as locally as possible (i.e., raise as much of their own food as possible) while living north of NYC & she worked full time.

    I’m surprised that no one in your family sent care packages of home canned goods.  A friend whose son just finished college routinely sent him or brought to him, dried fruit, fruit butters, salsas, spaghetti sauce, apples, applesauce & other home made goodies from the garden. 

    • http://scienceofmom.com Alice Callahan

      I will have to check out the book!  Thanks for letting me know about it.  And I wish my family had sent me canned goods when I was in school.  I’ll have to remember that when I send my daughter off to college!

  • http://twitter.com/NapsHappen Alicia

    I enjoyed cooking before my kids were born, and I think my husband and I cook even more now that we have a family. I made all of our boys’ baby food and it turned out that a tactile dysfunction in my first son conquered my best efforts – despite therapy, he mainly eats fortified cereal and cereal bars.  Since he’s growing and healthy, the specialists have advised us not to make mealtime a battlefield and to offer him options that work for him.  Our second child is a foodie kamikaze – olives, salsa…you name it!  He will eat it all.  But, to your point, I have definitely increased our consumption of organic dairy and vegetables and we recently committed to all organic meat – mainly locally raised.  I love the idea that we are contributing to local, ethical farmers, even though it represents a considerable increase in our food budget. I am not sure I would have made this leap if my concerns for food safety and antibiotic-free food for my kids had not tipped the scales (adding to my issues with the industrial production of meat, which are more of an ethical nature).  In any event, I appreciate your thoughtful post.  It’s hard to balance budget, family, and nutrition! We do the best we can and always try to improve.

    • http://scienceofmom.com Alice Callahan

      Alicia, it sounds like we have a lot in common!  We spend more on food now, too, but I’m enjoying it more as well.  Food has become much more of a pleasurable thing we DO now instead of just providing calories, and there is some value in that.  Now that I’m spending more time in the kitchen, I’ve also found ways to save – like using lots of dry beans and buying grains in bulk, plus we’ve basically eliminated eating out.  I agree that it is best to avoid food battles with our young ones, too – more important that they grow up enjoying mealtimes and have a healthy relationship with food.  We do the best we can to provide them with healthy choices, and I’m sure the tactile dysfunction has been challenging.  I’ve been feeling really great about the fact that my daughter seems to happily eat just about anything I put in front of her, but just in the last few days, she’s started chucking everything onto the floor (except for bread)!  I hope this isn’t the beginning of picky eating…

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