It’s Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.
In this episode — the first of a two-part series — Bri and Annie are joined by Diana Rice, registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, and certified parent educator on a mission to help families ditch diet culture and enjoy healthy relationships with food.
She’s the voice behind the online platform Anti Diet Kids, and owns Tiny Seed Family Nutrition, a weight-inclusive nutrition counseling practice. Her first book, Food Positivity: How to Ditch Diet Culture and Talk to Kids About Food, was published by Wiley earlier this year.
Episode Highlights:
- Go to 2:17 for Diana’s thoughts on what “healthy eating” really means
- Go to 12:54 for a discussion of some jarring statistics on disordered eating from Diana’s book
- Go to 17:00 for Diana’s advice to parents on changing their own relationships with food in order to help their kids
- Go 22:03 to for a conversation about the role of weight and body size in health
- Go 29:37 to for our discussion about the impact of ACEs, trauma, neurodivergence, and social determinants of health on kids’ relationship with food and eating
Related Links:
- Staying Food Positive in a Body Negative World
- How to Raise Kids with Positive Body Image
- Eating Disorders and Family Meals
- Episode 4: Picky or Problematic?
- Episode 6: Table Trauma
- The Welcoming Table
Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa. Joining me today, as always, is Dr. Anne Fishel.
Great to be with you, Bri, as always.
Bri DeRosa: We also have a special guest with us today. Diana Rice is a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, and certified parent educator on a mission to help families ditch diet culture and enjoy healthy relationships with food.
She’s the voice behind the online platform Anti Diet Kids, and owns Tiny Seed Family Nutrition, a weight-inclusive nutrition counseling practice. Her first book, Food Positivity: How to Ditch Diet Culture and Talk to Kids About Food, was published by Wiley earlier this year. So Diana, welcome to the podcast.
Diana Rice: Hi, thanks so much for having me. This is really fun.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, it’s so great to have you. We are huge fans, and can’t wait to talk to you about Food Positivity. And I, I feel like this is the moment. Like, I, I mean, it, it has felt for a long time like, “Oh, this is the moment. No, this is the moment.”
But really right now, all summer long, I feel like I’ve been watching the internet meltdown over food and bodies and Ozempic and celebrities.. And I just, I wanna start, can you help us take a big picture step back? Because I think things are getting really tangled out there, and I’d love to just set some levels right from the top.
What are our ground rules for this conversation? What do we mean when we say things like, you know, we’re gonna talk about healthy eating, or we’re gonna talk about the role of body size and health. Can you just, like, orient us?
Diana Rice: Yeah. That’s a great question, because I feel like something that I really help parents do is unlearn a lot of what culture says is the definition of something that really isn’t serving us, and learn to define it, either define it for themselves or, you know, operate in a way based on how science and research defines things.
Um, and so, you know, when you hear, you know, if you just saw #healthyeating on the internet, it would probably be a salad and not anything fried and no soda and, you know, all whole foods, nothing from a package. We might talk about how, you know, I, I and a lot of other dietitians don’t recommend calling food healthy or unhealthy to kids, and the reason for that is that healthy is, is a state of being for yourself.
An item, whether it’s a salad or a hamburger, can’t actually make that state of being happen for you. For someone who, you know, maybe hasn’t eaten all day, a hamburger might be a really great choice because it’s got a lot of calories and protein, carb, and fat, and that’s a very healthy thing for them to choose in that moment.
Um, for somebody else who is working on lowering their cholesterol with added fiber, you know, a salad might be a very healthy choice. I run into this a lot in my counseling practice where parents are so, so concerned that their kid, that, that their overall intake of food is too low, they’re not growing, and they won’t eat healthy food.
And the first thing that I counsel them to do is like, “Hey, what do they like? Do they like Cheez-Its? Do they like ice cream?” For that kid, increasing their caloric intake of Cheez-Its and ice cream is going to be a very healthy move. It might not be what that kid eats long-term, but, you know, it’s a stepping stone to get them to that picture of health that’s so individual for everyone.
And so I, I like to use the phrase, like, putting a healthy dinner on the table, but I don’t mean putting a salad and nothing processed on the table. I mean putting something that is gonna support your family in thriving on the table. And there’s just so much nuance to that because you can’t, you can’t identify one stock image that’s gonna be what that meal is.
It’s gonna be different for everyone. Uh, but that’s kind of the bigger cultural problem is that we define health in a very specific way, of a certain body size, a certain way of eating. And when we’re trying to achieve that, you know, somebody else’s standard of health, we lose sight of what’s really right for us and our families.
Bri DeRosa: I think that’s so– I, I love what you just said about what supports your family in thriving. Because I, I feel like that’s something that, you know, and Annie, you can weigh in here with me as well, like this is something that we try to steer families towards, that family dinner is not just about the food, right?
We talk about that all the time. And part of the whole culture of a family table is this thriving piece. And Annie, I wonder if you maybe wanna say a few words about the, your view of the relationship between the food on the table and the thriving piece, and how do you encapsulate that for people?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. I mean, I think there are at least two ways that come to mind.
One is that the food is, is the vehicle. I mean, you can’t have family dinner without the food, so it’s what brings everybody to the table. But then it’s what happens around the table that, where all the benefits come to emotional health and mental health and connection between kids and, and their parents.
So I think that’s mainly why we say the food is kind of the least important part. The secret sauce is what happens once the food arrives. So that’s one thing. And, but then I was also thinking, Diana, as you were talking about what’s healthy, food is not just about caloric intake or even fueling the body.
It’s also, uh, a source of sensual joy, of shared meaning. You know, it’s different for a family to eat a lot of the same foods, to share family style, to… You know, there’s studies that show when people who aren’t related do that, they solve conflict more easily. So food has other…It can be about celebration, um, it can be about joy, it can be about connection. So to focus so tightly on, is this healthy or not, leaves out all the other meanings of food for us as human beings. And I think that we get really tripped up with that because we’re focusing only on one thing.
Diana Rice: Yeah … you know, our, our kids, they– I’m a dietitian, I want them to have the calories and protein, carbs, and fat they need to thrive, but they need a lot of other things to thrive. Right. And, and you know, I, I think, I feel like it’s almost too easy for parents to focus, you know, because food is tangible. What the kid is eating is tangible.
But whether you’re supporting your kid’s emotional needs and their self-regulating, that, that stuff’s not tangible.
Bri DeRosa: It’s not. Yeah. That’s the hard stuff. And, and, and I would say parents, like right off the bat, if you’re so focused and worried about what the food is and how much of it is being eaten, and like what is going into people’s bodies, you’re not able to focus on those other intangible things that are so much harder, and so much less quantifiable, right?
Because then everybody’s tense and it’s all about like, the dinner gets reduced to actually the mechanics of the eating. And that’s like the opposite of what you need for a family dinner practice that actually makes everybody feel safe and supported and happy and ready to eat, right?
Like being ready to eat in and of itself is even a skill set. And we kind of overlook that, and then we drag kids to the table and we’re like, “Eat your broccoli.” And it’s, you know, there’s a lot there.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. We make a– We can make dinner, the dinner table kind of a feeding station, rather than a place for connection and nurture and fun and conversation.
Diana Rice: And when they see that you have an objective of eating however many pieces of broccoli, they’re not gonna wanna be there, and then they’re not gonna get the benefits of connection and sharing.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: Right. Exactly.
So I, I wonder, this feels like actually a really good moment to just jump straight into one of the firestorms of the moment. Oreogate. I’m sorry. Yeah. It happened this week. We have to talk about Oreogate, because I feel like Oreogate is sort of a– My heart went out to the parent who initiated that contact.
Because it feels like this is such an encapsulation of the type of pressure that people are feeling. And where is that coming from? What is influencing people to feel that they have to be so concerned about their child’s exposure to food that they’re asking other parents to not allow their own children to eat Oreos in a social setting?
Like there’s, there’s a huge, huge cultural thing happening here, and I would love to hear you speak a little bit about this, ’cause I was like, “Ouch, this hurts.”
Diana Rice: I, I am just really blown away by, you know, how, how much it resonated with just ev- like all the parents. I mean, maybe it didn’t resonate with like, you know, men in their first year of college or something like that, but like definitely all the parents.
And, you know, I think one, one thing I was reading said, you know, whether or not it’s a true story, it probably isn’t, that’s kind of irrelevant. The fact that we’re all sucked into this and we all had something in there that we could relate to is what’s important. And kinda like you were just saying, Bri, like, you know, this whole summer, you know, bodies and talking about, you know, just processed food and, you know, all that stuff is, is really coming to a head.
And what’s so interesting about this particular drama is that almost everyone was on Team Oreo, right? Everyone was on the side of, parents should be able to pack what they want and what they know is best for their kid. You know, we don’t know, it sounds to me like the little girl who was getting the Oreos really just, like, like my kids, like, you know, likes to have some Oreos sometimes.
But it could’ve been a kid who, you know, has a feeding disorder, and that’s one of her safe foods, and she’s not going to get calories in if she doesn’t eat it. Or maybe she had some previous disordered eating and was, you know, thought sugar was poison and, and now the family has done some work on that and, you know, it’s actually a real win that she’s able to enjoy dessert.
So I, I love that culturally we all landed on the side of, parents should be able to pack what they know is right for their kids, ’cause that’s something I strongly believe in. But something else I thought that was very interesting of the conversation is, like you’re saying, you know, this mom who initiated the conversation, there are so many parents out there who are struggling with that, who are hearing, you know, like I was talking, these cultural- culturally defined, you know, what is healthy eating, processed food is bad, sugar is bad, certain additives are no good, you should be cooking everything from scratch.
And, you know, a lot of us fall into that because it feels like the right way to support our families. We all wanna be doing what’s good, um, for our kids and their development. And when we are hearing, and it’s hard to avoid, that, um, processed food or sugar is, you know, terrible for children, it, again, it becomes a very tangible thing that we can do to do a good job of raising our kids.
And, you know, like, like we’ve been talking about so far, we- we’re ignoring their social development. What’s it like to be that little girl who’s the only one at the table who doesn’t have Oreos? You know, for me as a dietitian, I’m big on kids practicing self-regulation in terms of, um, we don’t want them to go off to college and eat an entire box of Oreos, um, because they never were allowed to have them. We want them to have some, some days, not have some other days, and just be like, “Yeah, Oreos are there.”
My takeaway was that the conversation really focused on, you know, parents’ rights and autonomy to pack what you want, and I do support that. But not so much focus on why does this mom feel the need to do this in the first place? What’s gonna happen to this little girl if she’s the only one who’s ever not allowed to have Oreos?
You know, the…disordered eating is so common even with kids that young. These kids are supposedly in, in kindergarten, and this is how it starts. I see it in my clinical practice. And unfortunately, I’ve seen very little commentary on, on that. So, hopefully if it continues to go on, I hope that that part of the conversation gets picked up.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I, I noticed something very, to me, very jarring in your book, and you said at one point in your book that as many as 22% of children and up to 85% of adult women show signs of disordered eating.
Diana Rice: Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: Hi. I, I– it’s me. Like, right? I don’t, I don’t know how to– so I need to know more about that. And I think our listeners need to know more about that because hearing you say, like, you know, this starts in kindergarten. This starts, and, and it does. It starts so early. What do you mean by that?
Yeah. 85% of us? What do you mean, Diana? Help us. Like, what’s happening?
Diana Rice:Yes. So-
Dr. Anne Fishel: And where, where is that data from?
Diana Rice: Yeah. So the first thing, and we’re talking about disordered eating, not eating disorders. So eating disorders are a clinical diagnosis, still far, far, far too prevalent, but not to the point of 22% of kids, 85% of adult women.
Um, the 22% of kids statistic comes from a meta-analysis by the Journal of the American Medical Association, so very, very, very good data. Basically, they gathered, you know, I don’t know how many studies, but it was in the thousands, that used a particular clinical measurement of disordered eating and looked at, you know, the results of all those studies and collectively found that 22% of kids, according to this, you know, clinical tool, showed disordered eating, and it was even higher in girls. So that’s really, really good data.
The data on adults with, uh, specifically women with disordered eating is not necessarily from a meta-analysis in JAMA, but in my book, I believe the statistic is from a survey from Good Housekeeping magazine. So, um, you know, they, they did a, a deep dive on anti-diet and, you know, weight inclusive health and all that a couple years ago, and they did a survey and it, you know, asked various questions, but, you know, one of them is do you have a list of good foods and bad foods in your, in your mind?
Or if you, if you eat something you feel like was a bad thing to eat, do you try to compensate by exercising it off, and things like that. Mm-hmm. And that’s where that 85% number comes from. And, you know, something that… ‘Cause it’s, like I was saying, it just, this is what our culture is. Like, it’s very normal.
You know, I, I don’t necessarily pick up and flip through a women’s magazine anymore because, like, who has a physical magazine anymore? But when, when I was, you know, in my 20s, it would just be weight loss tips, healthy swaps. Like, all of that was programmed into us specifically as women.
Of course, it’s normal to want to be smaller. Of course, it’s normal to try to control what you eat. And, you know, when I give talks And I, I, you know, sometimes I put that statistic up on the screen, sometimes I just kind of say it and I say… Sometimes it’s, I’ll be giving a talk on Zoom, I can’t even see the people I’m talking to, and I’ll be like, “I don’t even know who I’m talking to right now. I know that the majority of you people listening are experiencing disordered eating because that is just what the data shows.”
And you know what, what the result is, is, you know, however, you know, old you are, but if you’re a parent still having this good food, bad food mentality, wanting to control your food intake so that you can change your body, feeling guilty when you do eat something that wasn’t on the diet plan, all of that is disordered eating and it, it influences our, our own health and happiness and satisfaction.
Um, it actually, it really does, there’s data that shows that it influences our long-term health. We see better health outcomes when people have a positive relationship with food. But even worse, it influences the decisions we make on behalf of feeding our kids, and this is how the cycle perpetuates.
And you know, so many of my clients were sent to Weight Watchers when they were 12 years old and, you know, they, they don’t want the same for their kids, but they haven’t shaken their own body dissatisfaction and disordered eating of their own and they just don’t know… I mean, that’s why the, the subtitle of the book is How to Talk to Kids About Food. They just don’t know which words should come out of their mouths when they’re trying to instill a positive relationship with food in their kids.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Can you say a little bit more about that, what kinds of advice you give to parents, particularly those who’ve had disordered eating growing up and they wanna do things differently with their own children?
Diana Rice: I run a clinical practice and, you know, I can, I can sit for an hour every two weeks with some people for a year and they’re still working through a lot of this. You know, in, in my opinion, as a certified intuitive eating counselor where I help people, um, you know, leave disordered eating behind and switch to more positive intuitive eating where you’re making the decisions that are right for your body, what I, what I generally find is that the parent, if they haven’t done that work on themselves, it, it doesn’t matter how many scripts I fill my book with.
You’re just gonna be reading words off a page, but you’re not necessarily, there’s not gonna be heart behind it or when your kid has a follow-up question, you’re not gonna know what to say. So the best thing that you can do is work on your own relationship with food because that, I, I describe it as learning another language. That kind of programs a new language into your mind of always eating for your own satisfaction, for, you know, how your body is gonna feel, how to get the nutrients that you need, how to get enough food throughout the day.
And when you have learned that language for yourself, you don’t actually need scripts to talk to a kid, because you’re fluent in that language, right? But I don’t have a magic wand to make everybody fluent in that language overnight, so I wrote a book with the scripts in there. And the first thing that I recommend is taking a hard look at your values. We kind of, we just, we like, “Oh, we value togetherness and we value, you know, athleticism and education.” And that, that’s all great, but, like, not a lot of people take a hard look at the values that they grew up with. And for a lot of people, not everyone, but for the people who face the most challenges, usually, ’cause, ’cause the parents would never have named these things outright, but it’s gonna be things like control, conformity, achievement, uh, you know, things that…
I, I call them, like, extrinsic values. Obedience, you’re obeying, whether it’s, you know, your parent or your pastor or whoever. Um, conformity, that has a lot to do with how you look, body size. Achievement, not only getting straight As in school, but also did you achieve this smaller body size? Um, did you show that you’re able to resist, you know, the food temptations?
A lot of people don’t know they’re operating with these values because they’re not things that, like, we name. Like, “Oh, we value education.” Nobody names that we value obedience and conformity, right? But a lot of my clients and a lot of my social media audience kind of end up seeing the light about this as they have their own kids and they want to raise their kids differently, but they don’t, they just don’t know how to shift.
And so the, the first step is shifting to more positively oriented values like individuality, joyfulness, wonder, autonomy, agency. There’s a whole chapter on that, and so, before you even dive into the scripts, I really recommend that parents take a good look at that and maybe even, um, you know, write down on a piece of paper, “Here’s where I came from. Here’s where I wanna be going.”
Because, this is the tricky part, what happens is if we want to tell a kid, um, you know, “Sugar isn’t bad,” but we haven’t changed our values, then the phrasing that we’re gonna use is, you know, “It, it’s okay to have sugar, but not too much.” You know, something like that, and that’s still control. That’s still, “I am terrified my kid is gonna eat nothing but sugar.” We also know that we’re not supposed to say, “Don’t eat sugar, it’s, it’s unhealthy,” because, you know, that’s, like, a little too obvious. We try to do it in a more subtle and controlling way.
Whereas if you’re coming from joy and autonomy and individuality, you could say something like, “Oh my gosh, yes, sugar is so delicious. So many foods are delicious. It’s amazing that our family gets to eat so many different kinds of food. That’s why I pack multiple kinds of food in your lunchbox. Hey, why don’t you tell me what your favorite cookie is, and I will pack that in your lunchbox?”
Um, you know, with the– You can say that with the confidence of believing that the kid is not going to eat nothing but cookies. Whereas if you’re coming from those control-oriented values, you’re gonna say something that you’re, like, trying to really teach your kid that they gotta be careful not to only eat the cookies.
And the action might be the same, but what it teaches the kid is very, very different. Um, and so the rest of the scripts in the book all draw on those kinds of values, so that we can always bring it back to that when we’re trying to think of what should we say in the moment. And it’s not just about sugar. It could be about eating enough, what, you know, what’s the value of fruits and vegetables, you know, how do we express when we don’t like a certain food, you know, without saying, without insulting the chef or, you know, things like that.
All these things, but I really recommend that when parents are struggling, like, when they, like, can’t find the words, take a good look at your values.
Bri DeRosa: Probably the whole values piece is, I think, actually a game changer that I think people really don’t think about. What am I modeling with this type of concern?
But I also have to say I feel like there’s a gigantic elephant in the room right now, that parents are gonna be listening to this, and they’re gonna be asking this question, and so I have to ask you this question.
Okay, Diana, but what about weight? What about body size? Because we have been told, and many of us are getting this from our own physicians. They’re– We’re getting it from pediatric visits with kids who are a little above a growth curve, right? Like, we are getting this, yes, okay, but if you’re bigger than fill in the blank, then that’s not okay, and that it’s a parental obligation to control for body size.
And so I need you to talk about this. Like, desperately need you to talk about this, ’cause none of this episode will make any sense to anyone if we don’t tackle why weight and body size are a conversation that has to change.
Diana Rice: Yes. Yeah, I’m so glad you asked. There is a whole chapter in the book about navigating, you know, uh, sort of switching to a more weight-inclusive model for your own family and navigating conversations with your child’s medical team about that.
But, you know, going back to we’ve all been taught one thing, and then science kinda shows something else, and, you know, even, honestly, even if we didn’t have stacks and stacks of sh- studies showing that intentional weight loss is rarely sustainable, it, it, uh, you know, creates yo-yo dieting. It creates a disordered relationship with food.
It creates eating disorders. Even if we didn’t have that, I think we, we, we can tell that, like, trying to get a kid to eat less never goes well. Right. Like I, I, if I had a single client who was like, “You know, I, I told my kid that, um, that being heavy was bad and that they should eat less, and then so they did, and we have no problems.”
I mean, maybe those wouldn’t be the people finding me as a client, but, like, I’ve ne- I’ve literally never heard of a case like that. Um, you know, even if the kid does eat less in the moment, they become an adult who is just, you know, so, uh, feels so guilty whenever they have a piece of cake or a donut or, and they’re always watching their weight.
And so the weight inclusive model of health has quite a lot of research behind it. I find that it’s, it’s picking up steam even in the conventional medical community in that we recognize that intentional dieting by caloric restriction is unsustainable and, and has negative outcomes. The broader medical community still thinks that we should take more serious interventions to shrink bodies and, you know, that’s a personal decision if that’s something somebody wants to pursue.
But basically, there is quite a lot of data that shows that we all have some genetically pre-programmed weight that we’re gonna be, like our height, like our eye color. And whenever we mess with it through either, you know, intentionally restricting food intake, sometimes with a small kid, pressuring them to overeat, it never works out well. It has, it generally has the opposite effect, and it disrupts the kid’s relationship with food.
Where I practice from is that children and adults all possess the ability to self-regulate their intake. Now, half the adults that I tell this to go like, “Yeah, duh.” The other half go, “Are you kidding? That’s insane.”
Okay, and so what self-regulating is, is you’ve got a plate of food in front of you, and you go, “Yeah, I’m just kind of full. I’m, I don’t, I don’t really want to take any more bites. I’m kind of full.” Half of people are like, “Yeah, don’t you?” And the other half of people are like, “Oh my gosh, I could eat anything you put in front of me. If I didn’t count calories and macros and, like, strictly limit my intake, then I would just eat the whole thing.”
Usually what’s going on with the person in that case is that they are, they’re truly not getting enough calories to sustain themselves, and their body is crying for help. But we interpret that as, humans can’t self-regulate, especially not in an environment of food that’s been engineered to be so delicious. You know, we, we hear these… There’s some truth to it, like, you know, there’s scientists figuring out which potato chip is the most crunchy and satisfying. But a person who can self-regulate, and we could call this an intuitive eater, um, the person who’s an intuitive eater will be eating potato chips and then just stop when, when their body doesn’t want to have any more, and then their weight is gonna fall where it may.
And for some kids, it might be bigger than what we conventionally think of as healthy. But a lot of the data on the ill effects of being in a large body doesn’t account for the long-term health impacts of yo-yo dieting. It’s actually very stressful on our bodies to, to basically experience a famine and then famine, harvest, famine, harvest.
It teaches our bodies to store more fat because it, that, that keeps us safe. And then also, even if you’ve never yo-yo dieted, and you just exist in a larger body, you are lacking privilege now. We, we don’t assign as much privilege to people in larger bodies as smaller ones. And you might get a mean comment on an airplane.You know, your doctor might ignore, you know, a real health concern of yours in favor of just telling you to lose weight, and all of those things build up to make us avoid medical care and feel bad about ourselves.
And, you know, there, there isn’t a long-term clinical study looking at this, but I wanna see if we just raise kids to be self-regulators. Some are gonna be skinny, some are, some will be larger, some will be right in the middle. What are the health effects 30 years from now when they know they can always eat the right amount of food for their body and stop when they are full, and even if they’re just, just like they have brown eyes, they have a larger body, everyone loves and accepts them and celebrates them for who they are?
And, you know, and I don’t wanna ignore, you know, physical activity and fiber and all this good stuff. That, like, all that stuff should be there, too, like all the, you know, things that we actually have good data on that supports long-term health. But then that child never has to go through being sent to Weight Watchers when they’re 12, or always being told that they, they, their portions are too big when they’re really just…You know, a larger body needs more calories to support itself than a smaller body. They’re just trying to eat the amount that they need, and then that restriction in and of itself makes the kid compulsively sneak more food, overeat portions. They don’t know when they’re gonna get it next. And all of that distorts their relationship with food.
Almost always when we see a kid who’s either, like, if they’ve jumped off their growth curve, if they’re too high or too, too low, there is some social element that is, that when we correct that social element, it could be the family moved cross-country and the kid can’t be around their friends anymore, and so they, they’re taking, they’re emotionally eating or they’re eating less. It could be that they were told they were fat, and now they’re, you know, trying to, um, you know, restrict their intake and go on a diet. But if we can correct those social elements, like everything we’re talking about, the benefits of connecting with your kids over a family dinner, and then we can just keep the kid growing on, um, whatever, whatever growth curve they’re supposed to be on, big or small, those are gonna be healthier kids.
Bri DeRosa: I, I feel like, uh, it’s like therapy, right? This, this is– No, but this is sad. This is sad. I wanna name that, because what you just said about we don’t have a longitudinal study on that, because we can’t. Right. Because culturally speaking, there is no way to remove the external pressure and the understanding that we have, the erroneous understanding that we have of the, the role of your body size. Right? We can’t correct for that.
And without that controlled, you can’t understand what the actual long-term impact of just being able to live and eat and exist in your body is, and that’s– that to me is upsetting. And it also, you know, talking about this whole social picture also puts me in mind of something we haven’t even touched on, which is in your book, and which is relevant to this conversation, I think, which is, there are social determinants of health.
There are issues like neurodivergence. Like, I know, just to be transparent, I have two kids, you know, teenagers, young adults. One of them has always been a self-regulator. He was the kid who would toddle around with a cookie in his hand for two hours because he would take a bite when he felt like it, and eventually he’d put it down and forget about it. Right?
My other child is neurodivergent. He has difficulty with interoceptive cues. He has difficulty with being able to read his body’s signals, and he had sensory-based food aversions and all kinds of things that played into his ability to self-regulate. And he also is a genetically, a genetically larger person. And so that is something that has always been a part of his food story.
And so I’m really mindful of all of the factors that impact the way that kids are able to access that self-regulation. And the way that families are asked to support, or judged, you know, passively, in how they’re maybe not supporting their child’s journey. And so I don’t even know if there’s a question in here.
Can you… Your book talks about adverse childhood experiences. And, and so there’s so much here. Can you talk a little bit about those factors? Because that’s something we haven’t even accounted for.
Diana Rice: Yeah. I, I could talk about this all day. Just to address the adverse childhood experiences, first off, that’s ACEs, that’s a, a term in the research about when kids experience some kind of trauma, um, whether it’s food insecurity or domestic violence or, you know, there, there’s a whole list of things that kids might experience in, during childhood. And, you know, those are the things that I’m talking about that are gonna send them off their growth curve one way or the other, right?
And so, and no researcher disagrees with this. Like, we gotta do something about that. If we want healthy kids, and by healthy, I mean thriving and growing the way they’re, they’re supposed to be growing. We forget about whether they’re eating apples or not, right? Like, they need, you know, long-term food security. They need safe homes, safe schools, all that stuff. That is going to do so much more for our kids’ health than whether or not they like broccoli, right?
Now, that’s a macro policy question. I can’t really fix that overnight, sadly. But it is something to keep in mind because I do think that when we wanna control whether our kids are eating Oreos, it’s because we’re hearing, you know, childhood disease is increasing, and, you know, body size is increasing and, and we’re like, “I gotta do something about this,” when really it’s more of, uh, the cultural landscape and the services we’re providing to people and, um, you know, whether parents have the emotional support to, you know, not have anger outbursts or, you know, or get into toxic relationships and all those things that are gonna support kids.
And so forget about the vegetables. Like, that’s gonna do way more for kids’ health long term.
Bri DeRosa: Hey, everyone. We had such a great time talking with Diana that we decided to turn this important episode into a two-part special. So next time when we come back to our talk with Diana, we’re going to be digging more into what parents can do to instill food positivity at the table, and we’re gonna share some of our favorite food, fun, and conversation ideas that you can use to try to play with this concept at your family dinner tonight.
So, see you next time on the Family Dinner Project podcast.