I too am super keen on raising our consciousness around the food we stock, the dishes we prepare and share, the items we grab on the go.

I would love to see our society value quality, nutritious produce, the stuff that contributes to our growth and vitality.  I would love more and more people to make those connections between food and health, and for fresh, sensitively cooked food to be more widespread.

I SO want to see my wishes realized, and therefore I am running a VERY special healthy new year offer right now because I want to give YOU the opportunity to train in the next cohort of Pure Cook’s beginning this coming Monday.  

The online Pure Cook’s Training gives you the wisdom, application and expertise to use natural food cookery to enhance your life, the lives of your loved ones, your community and the wider world.

Graduates have gone on to lose weight, exclude sugar, heal imbalances, anxiety and chronic conditions, transform nourishment for children and families, set up natural food restaurants and enterprises, land dream jobs in pure food cookery, and grow nutrition and health coaching practices.

What is it that you really want to grow and focus on right now?  

When we give this thing the focus and attention and support, then we grow ourselves and our growth manifests as gifts to the world.  We can activate and own our own nourishment, we can propel others to do so and we can play bigger from our authentic selves.

My online Pure Cook’s Training is beginning this Monday 28^thJanuary.

The very special healthy new year offer is a saving of £250, taking the course from £345 to just £95.

Seven modules of video demonstrations and materials take students on a journey of wellbeing.

In each module I present ingredient selection and health benefits, food preparation tips and delicious recipe videos that support vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic and natural diets and lifestyles.

Modules are released every 2 weeks and there is no need to be in at a certain time – you can look at the material and video demos all in your own time and at your own pace.

You will receive:

• Over 40 fantastic video recipes which you can recreate with ease and enjoy with family, friends and clients
• Shopping lists and essential toolkits
• 7 Cookbooks
• Over 150 pages of learning resources
• Free copies of my two books
• Pure Cook’s private forum access
• Bonus and live Q&A sessions
• Further bonus gifts

I would be thrilled to welcome and train you on Monday.

Enrollment is at  http://www.wholefoodharmony.com/pure-cooks-training

Please be in touch with any questions and I very much hope to be sending you the shopping list and preparatory material to get you stocked up with right ingredients ready to thrive as a pure foodie.

Yours,
Anna

Ps. Have you seen my new venture and new book bridging food, health and positive parenting?  Check out www.annafreedman.com and the Gaia Gang and Gaia Retreats.

We can teach them about foods of the earth, allow their assistance in preparing meals, strive to nourish our own selves optimally by example.

All children delight in witnessing natures’ life cycle in the seasons, collecting trophies from the land, growing seeds and plucking the harvest.  They can join us in cutting fruit and vegetables (beginning with a safe salad knife!) and make their own meals.

If we seek to understand the connection between food and health, to stock and offer healthy food alternatives, surely this core value will infiltrate to our next generation.

We must secure health full meals our children will go for that we can prepare with ease, snacks and treats too that will be kind to our childrens’ health.

She is sucking on an ice lolly.  I see the remnants of the forage.  Packaged jelly pots, candie wrappers, sausages, chips and fried food.  Fresh fruit is present and broccoli, I am told was offered earlier.

She is three and a half and this is a first gathering without me.  A first great letting go of healthy food control for me.

I am aghast and immediately plan our exit.  I guess it’s not just the sugar intake that shocked me.  It was the weariness of the children, who otherwise are thoughtful, good natured souls.  The sugar coupled with high voltage activity in a small space created an energy that jarred and scarred me.

Over the return journey, my throat is tightening and I feel physically sick and teary.  That my child had indulged in sugar of so many forms felt akin to some sort of adult binge.  Now she is acting all loud and becoming violent with her sister.

The letting go was so much harder than I had imagined.  The after party display I had witnessed was etched in my mind.  I felt repulsed by the sugar intake and despair for my loaded Jemima, who I had sheltered from sugar for so long.

I knew I would have to repair my little one after her sugar high and regain my presence with her.  Once home, immediately I put her in the bath, and the demanding behaviour miraculously softens.  She becomes easier to be around again, save for the large, distant eyes yearning for sleep now.

I fill her with all things yang and good quality salty to neutralize the sugar affects.  She downs an alkalizing umeboshi drink of the pickled plum, tamari and kuzu to thicken.  Then I prepare fish poached with seaweed, miso and more tamari and kuzu.  I do feel a relief that she devours all this!

All the while I am feeling a huge despair and sadness not just for my Jemima but for all children, since sugar consumption is completely the norm.  How can we raise our children on regular overdoses of this toxic substance, and consider this a party?

What are we teaching at such a tender age, and which will be hard wired for life?  That fun times must be accompanied by sugar.  That crazy mood altering food binges are acceptable.  That caring for our health is of no concern.

These are some of the thoughts that trouble me for all our children.  And of course, I wonder how will I let go, again, of the sugar grip at the next party.

What do I want to speak today? To speak of love for these little people. The beauties who break my back from the physical logistics of moving them through the day, or the endless requests that erupt my composure, or the tiresome non cooperation that halts the next moment.

Yet within all this hardship of raising children, are the precious moments when a new word is uttered, the children begin playing together, love is spread around the table.

To choose love without raising my voice, without inflaming my insides is a daily work in sharpening my awareness. I keep striving for this, because I know it works.

Just yesterday, returning from the playground, I am so focused on her sister, that nothing was right for my toddler. The tears well up and I stop, attend to her right in the eyes, feel her lack of recognition and offer gentle words. In the next moment, she continues scooting, a free spirit, now her discomfort dissolved.

When she snatches the baby’s cup and the baby yells, she knows she has done wrong. She will not relinquish the cup. I try many of my approaches. “I will help you wait”, I offer.   “We have a big problem here, how are we going to solve this one?” And the rash unconscious, rhetorical demand of a parent, “Just give her the cup back now!”

Sometimes nothing works. The effort of parenting subsides. She still holds the cup. Well I can’t snatch it back, can I?

I see her play out this power struggle with her sister and with friends. I watch uncomfortably, then get involved in a futile attempt to bring about peace. Whatever the other wants or has, she wants to have, and then the friend wants this.   The cycle continues.

It is as if she needs to feel powerful, feel how it is be the wielder of the toys. Or is she copying the antics of others she has observed. Perhaps she needs to experience all this, she needs to ‘win’ in some way. She knows this isn’t friendly or kind and afterwards I ask “what could you do next time?”

Infact next time, a miraculous change happens. They play beautifully and perform a sharing dance from one toy to the next.

When I witness such positive blossoming for my todder, I try to catch this inside. To grow my faith in her, trust that she will thrive.

Harder to catch this love, are during the trying times of misbehavior. Times when the trigger of impatience and irritation swell and I react quickly, without awareness and compassion.

This must make her feel bad inside and results in one of two reactions in her; either further trying dominance or reluctant passive release.

There is a third way possibility and that is of love. This comes from the quick moment I acknowledge I could get triggered here, and I proactively choose to meet her with love.

Here, I feel her suffering. I don’t care what it is all about. I stop all else and stand with her, connected to my daughter and her upset is let out by love.

In celebration of this epic moment, we hold a gathering complete with musical fun, party food, little people and large parents alike.

I know the prerequisites for my party food prove challenging.  Pleasing both children and adults, being scrumptious and sweet yet sugar free, and surpassing any expectations.  Above all,  the collection of dishes had to be swift to prepare.  I only had the evening prior and morning of the party day in which to assemble the bulk of the spread.

I go for a buffet of dishes to delight all ages.  I take time to deliberate my menu choices.  I want sweet and savoury items that people recognise, yet are prepared with a healthy edge.

What follows is my menu of home-made dishes which did indeed excite, delight and nourish all members of our party.  I am thrilled to add that I received plenty of exclamations of wow and no post tea hyperactivity was exhibited at all!

Sugar Free Toddler Tea Party Menu

Savoury dishes:

• Open sandwiches with toppings of humous, guacamole and more
• Spring rolls of avocado, cucumber, carrot and brown rice vermicelli noodles, complete with dipping sauce (these disappeared first)
• Kale crisps
• Crudites of rainbow coloured carrots, cucumber, celery and more served with humous dips

Sweet things:

• Fruit kebabs and fruit platters
• Apple rings with peanut butter, dessicated coconut and raisins
• Peanut chocolate sauce (made in minutes by whizzing oat cream, peanut butter and cocoa)
• Coconut oat cookies
• Raw chocolate brownies (another fast blend of ground almond, raisin, coconut and cocoa)
• Salted caramel popcorn (I coated the popcorn with an assembly of coconut butter, maple syrup and pinch of salt, and this went down a treat!)
• Sugar and dairy free cakes of banana, carrot and date.
• Ginger Birthday Cake with a delicious icing (all sugar and dairy free!)

Juno Magazine, Winter 2013

An Exploration of Food and Changes

Anna Freedman reflects on precious moments from each month of her baby’s first year.

The article is an edited extract from Anna’s book Pure Baby, which charts the wonder of baby development from a natural approach and applies her pure food wisdom.

Buy the latest Juno natural parenting magazine for a beautiful double page read, plus see articles from Michel Odent; the man who introduced birthing pools, and other fantastic stories.

Read a sample from the first page of the article here

_______________________

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-09/store-bought-baby-food-offers-little-benefit-to-milk-diet.html

Commercial baby foods offer little nutritional benefit over breast milk and infants would get more from homemade purees than from a jar when transitioning to a solid food diet, a study found.

Researchers looked at more than 450 products for infants being weaned off breast milk made by Danone SA’s, Cow & Gate, H.J. Heinz Co., Boots, Hipp Organic, Ella’s Kitchen and Organix Brands Ltd. Fifty grams of homemade baby food would probably have the same energy and protein as 100 grams of the commercial food, they wrote in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, which is published by the British Medical Association.

The main purpose of weaning food is to increase the energy children consume and provide richer sources of nutrients such as iron, the researchers said. Commercial foods with meat had the highest iron content though no higher than formula milk and not much higher than vegetarian-based commercial food, they said. Commercial rusks and biscuits had more energy and higher amounts of calcium and iron than homemade foods as well as more sugar, the study found.

“People buy processed food because of convenience, but people should understand what’s in it,” Charlotte Wright, a paediatrician who worked on the study, said in an interview.

Two-thirds of the commercial foods studied were classified as sweet and 44 percent were advertised for infants 4 months and older even though the recommendation from the World Health Organization, the U.K.’s National Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics is 6 months.

First Year

Health professionals should advise families to progress to homemade weaning foods prepared without salt and sugar, particularly later in the first year of life, the researchers said.

“Just as you wouldn’t live on McDonald’s every day, that’s how baby jars should be viewed,” said Wright, who is also a professor of community child health at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Some parents want to wean their infants before six months and Organix makes clear which foods are suitable for that age, Anna Rosier, managing director at the Bournemouth, England-based company, said in an e-mailed statement.

“All of our foods are complementary to breastfeeding, and we adhere to the regulations for complementary foods for babies,” she said. “We do not make foods with the purpose to replace breast milk as the primary source of nutrition before 6 months.”

Nutritional Needs

Organix products aren’t fortified with vitamins or minerals because it isn’t permitted with organic food, she said.

The European Union and the American Academy of Pediatrics say complementary food can be added to a milk diet as early as four months if the child is developmentally ready, Meike Schmidt, a spokeswoman with Vevey, Switzerland-based Nestle SA, the world’s biggest food company, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Nestle products for infants and young children are carefully prepared to ensure they provide the right balance of nutrients in appropriate amounts for infants and young children, they are safe and meet all regulatory requirements where they are sold, including labeling,” Schmidt said. “Levels of protein, carbohydrate including sugars, fat, vitamins and minerals in baby foods are strictly regulated by legislation which is based on advice from scientific experts.”

Danone doesn’t market complementary food for infants younger than six months in most countries where it operates, Charlotte Pasternak, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mailed statement. The exception is Europe, where the European Food Safety Authority opinion says introducing complimentary food between four and six months is safe, she said.

Ella’s Kitchen supports breastfeeding for six months, “however, it may not always be possible or appropriate,” Emma Sykes, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mailed statement. “As the study acknowledges, commercial weaning food is created to complement the nutrition gained from baby’s milk.”

Heinz products are prepared to meet babies’ nutritional needs with recipes that provide the right tastes and textures, the Pittsburgh-based company said in an e-mailed statement.

“Generations of parents have trusted Heinz baby foods as safe and nourishing,” Heinz said.

Vegetarian Living  July 2013

When health coach Anna Freedman fell pregnant, good nutrition for herself and her growing baby was her top priority.  Hardly surprising, given she runs Wholefood Harmony, the catering and cookery workshop company.

During her pregnancy and since giving birth to daughter Jemima, Anna kept a blog and was contacted by a number of expectant women who found her tips for a vegan macrobiotic diet during pregnancy inspiring. 

Read the full article and Anna’s suggestions for vegan mums-to-be here