Margarine Mayhem in My House! page 3

[Goldie]

You can easily make homemade mayonnaise, and if you vary the kind of oil you use, you have different flavors. I've made mayo with avocado oil, walnut oil, MCT oil, and a combination of mostly EVOO plus a little coconut oil. Each had a distinct flavor--and you can stir in various spices for even more flavor variety. I add a little vinegar, paprika, and salt and pepper to mayo to make a good consistency for salad dressing. If you don't want it tart, add a little coconut or almond milk.

[ChocoTaco369]

I highly doubt salt or butter are causing any issues for the American palate.

Why? Because you personally like salt and butter on your food, but you have some bias against sugar so that has to be the culprit? Food - real food - is not swimming in fat, sugar or salt. These are isolated, man-made products. Butter, olive oil, coconut oil and bacon grease aren't found anywhere in nature. Milk, olives, coconuts and pork are found in nature. Oddly enough, maple syrup and honey are found in nature, so I submit to you that sugar could be less of a problem. Look at the amount of things that are breaded and fried. What do they have in common - fat and salt. None of these things are sweet.

Your body has a natural tendency to crave three things: fat, sugar and salt. The first two are both crucial energy sources for your body, and the second is mandatory to keep you hydrated and regulate your thyroid (and therefore most of your hormones). When you isolate them and coat your food in them, you make your brain signal to the rest of your body, "More, more, more!" It leads to overeating.

If you don't think fat and salt are a problem, look at the people eating ears of corn slathered in butter and salt at BBQ's, and look at the people choking down fried chicken at KFC. Do you think those people would eat the same amount of plain, boiled corn and steamed chicken?

This is a fantastic opportunity for the OP to break their children's poor eating habits and embrace real food.

[jammies]

Why? Because you personally like salt and butter on your food, but you have some bias against sugar so that has to be the culprit? Food - real food - is not swimming in fat, sugar or salt. These are isolated, man-made products. Butter, olive oil, coconut oil and bacon grease aren't found anywhere in nature. Milk, olives, coconuts and pork are found in nature. Oddly enough, maple syrup and honey are found in nature, so I submit to you that sugar could be less of a problem. Look at the amount of things that are breaded and fried. What do they have in common - fat and salt. None of these things are sweet.

Your body has a natural tendency to crave three things: fat, sugar and salt. The first two are both crucial energy sources for your body, and the second is mandatory to keep you hydrated and regulate your thyroid (and therefore most of your hormones). When you isolate them and coat your food in them, you make your brain signal to the rest of your body, "More, more, more!" It leads to overeating.

If you don't think fat and salt are a problem, look at the people eating ears of corn slathered in butter and salt at BBQ's, and look at the people choking down fried chicken at KFC. Do you think those people would eat the same amount of plain, boiled corn and steamed chicken?

This is a fantastic opportunity for the OP to break their children's poor eating habits and embrace real food.

You used to be a reasonable member of this forum. Why do you need everything to be so adversarial and controversial lately? I don't think actually think a little sugar is that big of a deal. Nor do I believe that butter and salt used in home cooking as the OP is describing are driving the obesity in this country.

You are comparing people eating KFC to people putting a little butter on their broccoli? Buttered corn at a BBQ? That's the big obesity culprit in the country? The idea is laughable.

[ChocoTaco369]

You used to be a reasonable member of this forum. Why do you need everything to be so adversarial and controversial lately? I don't think actually think a little sugar is that big of a deal. Nor do I believe that butter and salt used in home cooking as the OP is describing are driving the obesity in this country.

You are comparing people eating KFC to people putting a little butter on their broccoli? Buttered corn at a BBQ? That's the big obesity culprit in the country? The idea is laughable.

Because the entire premise of this thread is ridiculous. You don't need oil sloshed on top of your food. If you are so casein sensitive that you cannot but butter on top of your food, just leave it at that. You don't need to find something else to put on top of it. Let the kids get used to eating real food. Don't fan the flames. Why is that so "unreasonable"?

[magicmerl]

Because the entire premise of this thread is ridiculous. You don't need oil sloshed on top of your food. If you are so casein sensitive that you cannot but butter on top of your food, just leave it at that. You don't need to find something else to put on top of it. Let the kids get used to eating real food. Don't fan the flames. Why is that so "unreasonable"?

You will be a terrible parent if you are that inflexible with your kids. Is margarine *really* worth dying in a ditch over? If you decide that margarine is banished from your house (and you can't be bothered to find an alternative that is acceptable to your kids), you may find that turning what foods your children choose to put into their bodies into a 'win-lose' confrontation does not work out well in the long run.

We dived headfirst into primal, and the hardest adjustment for us as a family was breakfast. Basically we came up with scrambled eggs, bacon and eggs and (meat + vege) soup as our various breakfast permutations. Eventually our kids rebelled at this protein heavy diet (one of them *still* won't eat eggs to this day) and we now have a breakfast for us and they get to alternate between ricies and porridge (topped with raw milk, yoghurt and cream). Now our eldest partakes with my wife on 'bacon and egg day' and our youngest has regained his enthusiasm for eggs.

But we didn't get buy-in by saying 'it's my way or the highway'.

[Urban Forager]

Choco What you are saying sounds perfectly reasonable in theory but as Cori and Jammies have pointed out there are flaws with your ideas. Kids are unique individuals and some parents and non-parents make the mistake in thinking that if they simply will it to be so they can change their kid's tastes. Sounds like Crabcakes wants to respect her kid's taste preferences and give them healthy substitutes. She isn't trying to make a primal version of KFC at home. From what Crabcakes has said her kids are eating real food.

[solstice]

There is also a difference with fast foods and just debating margarine---fast foods are loaded with MSG and "artificial flavor" that act as an excitotoxin.

Also with kiddos, since I have two, it IS easier to just never start down a certain path (ex. needing margarine), but when you switch diet on the fly (after your kids have already partaken of the "bad" stuff) then you must tread lightly --- I agree!

[sbhikes]

Ignore him. He's an idiot. As a kid I couldn't stand ground beef, potato chips or refried beans. You could not get me to eat at McDonalds or Taco Bell. My mom had do do crazy inventions to get me to eat homemade hamburgers. I grew out of all my picky stuff eventually. He obviously has had no children or picky husbands to deal with (is there a difference between the two?)

Anyway, I made this today. Pistachio Pesto Recipe - Food.com - 110688 The farmers market had pistachio butter so I used that. I suppose you could leave out the cheese. I left out the cilantro and went pretty light on the olive oil. Don't know if kids would eat it. I bet they'd eat a tomato-based pesto. I'm totally going to experiment with pestos thanks to this thread.

[Urban Forager]

sbhikes, that looks so delicious! What did you serve it with?

[Crabbcakes]

I did read that, and it makes it more troubling. The fact that the kids "need" a topper is a problem in and of itself. This is exactly how bad habits develop, and they lead to all kinds of problems later in life (specifically obesity). Now's a great time to break that habit and get the kids eating real food instead of food with junk sloshed on top of it. Most Americans don't even have properly functioning taste buds because everything on their plate is coated in salt, sugar or butter.

Choco, I'm going to humor you by explaining a few things.

When Third was a toddler, she and I found ourselves at a high-powered children's hospital because she wouldn't eat - as a toddler. At this hospital, we found out she has (among other problems) a nasty sensory disorder, which is neurological, congenital, and not reversible. This hospital gave me a few strategies to use so she wouldn't start dropping even more weight, and one of them was using additions to her food that "wake up" the tongue/mouth, like lemon slices for ex. I did not screw up my kid by being a bad SAD mother - she came this way from the factory, and those additions prevented her from going on Pediasure crap or worse. She still could eat real food, which is all I have ever given her.

6 years ago, this same daughter went on the SCD, which is the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. It is designed for Crohn's disease / ulcerative colitis, but we used it to cure chronic diarrhea. The SCD is grain-free, legume-free, tuber-free, dairy-free, added-sugar free (with the exception of honey if you can tolerate it), vegetable-gum (guar, etc.)-free and artificial-chemical-free. The basis of the diet is meats, vegetables, fats and oils, nuts and seeds if you can tolerate them, eggs, fresh herbs and spices, and fruit once healing has set in. Everything must be cooked fresh. Lemme' see... this sounds like the Primal, doesn't it? And all that 5-1/2 years before I had even heard of the word Primal. The only thing missing from the SCD is the knowledge of o-6/0-3 ratios and seed oils, and this is what I am fixing with Third's diet now.

At this point in her life, she eats heartily and often - with toppers. I have a kid, at age 11, who has NEVER had regular birthday cake, candy bars, soda, pastries, pizza, goldfish crackers, fish sticks, Lunchables, KFC, fill in the blank... and she obeys her diet. I have a friggin' mentally slow kid who actually always denies herself stuff not on her diet. Typical kids wouldn't even do that.

So when I post a thread asking for BETTER replacements for margarine, from all of you who cook Primal, I think I am justified and not being "ridiculous". Special-needs kids do not and are not like everyone else. And you can very easily cause food aversions or worse if you handle stuff like this badly.

In a perfect world, peas would stand by themselves - her world isn't perfect, though. She has too damn much to deal with, and I am not going to fight her on this. She will get her toppers, just adjusted for better health results.